About Us

Vine House Farm Bird Foods is a bird food business with a difference.  Here at Vine House Farm we offer you the chance to purchase many of our mixes and straight seeds that are grown on our conservation award winning farm in Lincolnshire.

Vine House Farm is what it suggests. It is a working farm and it so happens that the owner, Nicholas Watts is very interested in wildlife. It was back in 1982 that he wanted to know what birds were breeding on his farm and so he walked down the farm and recorded all the birds he saw and heard. He has done this every year since. By 1992 he realised there had been a big drop in numbers so he started to implement ideas to stop their decline. One of his actions was to feed birds on a large scale in his farm yards. The results were spectacular so he had an open day for people to come and see the birds that were feeding. Two or three asked him if he could sell them some bird seed, he duly obliged. The same happened the next year and again he gave all the proceeds of the day to the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust. More people asked him to sell bird food and so purely by accident he was selling bird food. Momentum has grown over the years and Vine House Farm now grows over 400 acres of bird food including black sunflowers, red millet, white millet, canary seed, naked oats, wheat and oil seed rape.

For many years Nicholas has been carrying out research into farmland birds, he continues to do bird surveys and through those surveys he is able to assess what is needed to enhance his farm, the activities of the local drainage board and other farms in the area. He is always willing to give advice to people interested in birds and through his work on farmland birds and conservation was awarded the MBE in 2006.

Nicholas has been joined on the family farm now by, Robert, his son in law and Lucy one of his three daughters to help manage the growing bird food business and farm. Vine House Farm is a traditional arable farm passed down from one generation to the next situated in the Lincolnshire Fenlands. We grow a wide variety of crops including potatoes and sugar beet, some of our farm is also farmed organically. Because of our interest in wildlife and wild birds in particular we farm in a way that is sympathetic to the wildlife that shares our environment with us.

What better foundation do you want for a business that sells bird food?

Click here to find out more about the conservation measures that have been implemented at Vine House Farm and the awards that Nicholas has won.