From the very early days, Farmer Roger’s sons Richard, Robert and David always had an eye for retail. Scruffy kids with dirty knees, in homemade shorts, selling bantam eggs to passers-by as they wandered around the country park next door to the farm.

When they’d sold out, they searched the barns for more. Any egg would do…some were covered in dust and looked as if they’d been there for a very long time, but there was no complaints department back in those days. Luckily standards are much higher now.

Another entrepreneurial project was the “would you like to stroke a chicken for 2p” scheme, Robert shoving David forward with fluffy bundle in hand. On another occasion Richard did some digging on the muck heap, and carefully crafted a WORMS 2p sign which he placed next to an old margarine tub filled with soil, and worms, at the farm gate. He added FOR FISHING, after being asked several times by quizzical grown ups, why on earth anyone would want worms. In fairness, the retail awards were always bound to follow in time.

We’re proud of our farming roots, and our traditional approach to both farming and butchery. Our family have been involved in agriculture for a very long time. Hundreds of years of knowledge, and know-how has been passed on from generation to generation and distilled in the modern day, at Cannon Hall Farm in the beautiful Yorkshire countryside.

A time honoured approach to animal husbandry, stockmanship skills that go back hundreds of years, together with an imaginative take on modern retailing and marketing have come together, and created a little bit of old fashioned alchemy in Cannon Hall Farm Shop. We’ve passed on the best from the past, and added in some modern twists to deliver a great shopping experience at one of the UK’s biggest and best farm attractions.

We opened our farm up to the public in 1989 and from the beginning we were delighted with the way the public embraced our family story. While visitors through the door kept our business afloat, market prices for our cattle, pigs and lambs were never good, and sometimes Farmer Roger would take lambs to market and come home with just £5 each, for all the hard work of rearing them. Richard vividly remembers him stood in the pen, with his three lambs, shaking his head, a look of sad disbelief on his face, saying “they must be worth more than that!”

After trying for decades to make the farming side of the business profitable it became obvious that the only way forward was to market our produce direct to the customer here on the farm. In 1998 we opened the doors of Cannon Hall Farm Shop.

From the very beginning we set out on a mission deliver quality food, direct from our family farm, onto your family’s forks. In the way that things happen here at Cannon Hall Farm, word spread about the amazing produce on offer, and people began to come through the door. Now they travel from far and wide to visit, and when they arrive, they find a counter filled with home produced beef, pork and lamb, reared here on the farm or on local farms in Cawthorne village. Our chicken comes from Yorkshire farms too, so you can be sure nothing has travelled far before it ends up on your family’s dinner table.

We work with the whole animal so we can offer a variety of cuts that others just can’t. If you love cooking great food, you’ll delight in the choice of ingredients. You’ll find fresh fruit and vegetables, groceries, herbs, spices, and great food related gifts, on shelves that groan with culinary inspiration. We make a wide range of tasty, wholesome ready meals in our farm shop kitchen. We do what a real farm shop should, we market our own produce, and add value and taste on site.

Our in store bakery, underneath the farm shop, produces sourdough bread, award winning pies, cakes and desserts.

Our mission is to create a thriving business that provides real jobs for local people. You won’t find self-service checkouts, taking jobs away from people, in our shop. We’re an unashamedly old fashioned business that is all about people, community, service, quality and above all, great Yorkshire food.

Cannon Hall Farm Shop has been a winner of the UK’s best farm shop in two different awards, and was Retailer of the Year in the Farm Shop and Deli Awards 2019.