Why the lord of the manor wants to start growing cannabis

Fred Fellowes, the heir to the title Baron de Ramsey, had an inauspicious start to his farming career. In fact he lasted just two weeks as a student in agriculture at Newcastle University before quitting in horror at the antics of its Agriculture Society.

Fellowes never actually attended the club’s initiation, which in October came to national prominence following an inquest into the death of a 20-year-old student who collapsed after one of their typically raucous nights out. But he soon became aware of the custom that new recruits who lost their forfeits were required to have their heads shaved, and then drink the hair in a pint.

“On Monday morning the slightly overweight ginger kid in our year walked into the lecture with no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes and presumably no hair anywhere else,” the now 40-year-old recalls. “I looked at him and thought, ‘I’m out of here’.”

He switched to a fine art course but his interest in agriculture remained – so much so that he now hopes to become Britain’s first producer of CBD oil for domestic sale. It’s something of a change from his last role heading up the annual Secret Garden Party festival which, founded in 2003, became a huge money spinner, renowned for its hedonism and inventive bacchanalia. Attracting close to 30,000 revellers a year – of which Prince Harry was one, in 2014 – it closed its glittery doors for good last year.

“We’re not talking about drugs and farming them,” Fellowes explains of his new venture over a cup of tea in the office of the de Ramsey estate, a 7,000 acre stretch surrounding Abbots Ripton Hall in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. “We’re talking about a plant that has been demonised by a drugs policy.”

CBD oil – or to give its proper name, cannabidiol – is the latest much hyped health-giving elixir of the wellness industry and has soared in popularity in Britain over the past year since being permitted for sale on the high street in 2017. Holland & Barrett stock the capsules while in October Lloyds Pharmacy became the first national UK pharmacy to offer CBD products. 

Even in the face of scant medical research – which thus far only supports its efficacy against epilepsy, though it is a known antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and antispasmodic agent – most users swear by CBD oil. The actor Morgan Freeman takes it for his fibromyalgia, while Jennifer Aniston insists it alleviates “pain, stress and anxiety.”

What lies in the path of Fellowes and his father, the fourth Lord de Ramsey, is Government licencing rules prohibiting the production of so-called CBD oil using the flowers of industrial hemp (which is classified as containing less than 0.2 per cent Tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis).

At the Country Land Association’s Rural Business Conference in Westminster last month Fellowes lobbied environment secretary Michael Gove about the “inequity” of CBD oil being sold on British streets – even though strict licencing guidelines prohibit its production.

Hemp growers need a Home Office licence, which applies to the stalk and seeds and does not allow for use of ‘green’ material – including the flowers of the plant. According to Guy Coxall, compliance director of the Cannabis Trades Association, the current stringent regulation around the production of CBD oil for domestic use means nobody is yet to move into the industry. “There are a lot of farmers who would like to,” he adds.

With the UK already the world’s biggest producer and exporter of medicinal cannabis, Fellowes hopes that the rules surrounding CBD oil will soon be changed, opening up a lucrative sideline in the process.

“There is massive interest and nascent excitement among the other landowners in East Anglia I have spoken to,” he says.

Fellowes looks the typical gentleman landowner in wellies and moth-eaten merino jumper; a notable departure from the rakish figure of his festival days – though he still boasts a sheepskin replica Second World War bomber jacket bought for the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert.

That life seems long gone now, though, since Fellowes has relocated from London to the family estate with his wife, Joanna, and two children Alfred six, and Prudence, two, where he works alongside his 76-year-old father, a former chairman of the Environment Agency.

As his father’s first son Fellowes is set to inherit the title, although it is no longer linked to a hereditary peerage: “I’m not sure it even gets you a decent table reservation in America any more,” he says.

Lord de Ramsey is backing the new venture into hemp and stresses the importance of diversification for landowners across the country to keep rural communities viable.

“It’s early days,” he says. “I’m not evangelical. As far as I’m concerned it’s another crop widening our arable spread.”

He proved similarly supportive of his son’s efforts to establish the Secret Garden Party. “I said to him that you only get one chance in life. On the whole I was brought up in a family where you didn’t break ranks. You stuck with whatever the home business was.”

Now the festival has gone, he admits to feeling a pang of sadness. “I thought it was wonderfully inventive”.

Aside from the industrial production of the cannabis plant, Fellowes also believes the laws in this country around the recreational use of cannabis (as well as other drugs) are outdated.

Festivals are often seen as a hotbed of drug activity: in 2016, Secret Garden Party pioneered testing facilities for attendees which led to a dramatic reduction in hospital admissions that year, while a quarter of those who tested substances on site ended up disposing of them.

“Informed control of potentially harmful or risk inducing drugs is the way to approach it,” he says, arguing that the strict laws around cannabis have fuelled the production of high-strength skunk varieties which now dominate the market and are linked to a string of mental health concerns.

“Nobody ever smuggled beer during prohibition in America,” he says. “You smuggled the highest percentage alcohol you possibly could because that’s where you get the money – it’s no different in this industry. I think that is one of the strongest cases for regulating this in one form or another.

All this wading through reams of Government regulation is a far cry from his festival days – photographs of which show Fellowes DJing to adoring crowds of thousands. 

Yet in spite of the adulation his favourite memory, he says, is going over the balance sheets with his father in its early days and realising he had made a success of something. “We actually made good on what we thought and you could see the real potential going forward,” he recalls. “My father turned round and said to me: ‘I’m really proud of you, son’.”

Even without a change in policy from the Home Office, Fellowes says the plan is to plant up around seven acres of his land with hemp in the spring to see how the crop fares. He is careful to say this is just a trial run, and they will destroy the subsequent harvest in the agreed manner under current guidelines.

But the gentleman farmer admits he is excited about the prospect of spiky rows of cannabis leaves wafting about in the Fens.

After all, he says,  “you can reinvigorate a community by thinking outside of the box.”