When a Farm Becomes a Zoo: Introducing Sitlington Animal Park

The entrance to Sitlington Animal Park (work in progress)

In the UK and elsewhere, more and more farms are looking at new ways of earning money. Many of them open up their own farmshops or restaurants to sell their own produce and many also open up petting zoos. Some of these petting zoos expand to include exotic animals, like meerkats or lemurs, to bring in even more visitors. These exotic animals can be a catalyst for the formation of a conventional zoo.

There's many examples of this happening: Jimmy's Farm & Wildlife Park had very modest beginnings, before evolving into a fully-fledged zoo with one of the largest largest polar bear reserves in Europe. There's also Noah's Ark Zoo Farm, which boasts the largest African elephant facility in the UK. Of course, not all of them "go big" and most are actually smaller in size, like Johnsons of Old Hurst and Ponderosa Zoo.

I've always wanted to build one of these zoos in Planet Zoo and, with the release of the Barnyard Animal Pack, I finally had the perfect opportunity!

Sitlington Animal Park

The idea behind my fictitious zoo is that it was opened as an extra source of revenue for a farm, which is located in a rural part of West Yorkshire. It's one of several businesses on the same site, which also includes a farmshop, an ice cream shop, a maze and a boating lake. The zoo started out small, with some rare breeds, meerkats, flamingos, lemurs and otters, but then expanded to house 30 more species.

The greater flamingo aviary was one of the first exhibits I built.

As the farm is meant to be the main business, I've had to limit the size of the zoo to avoid overshadowing it. I've never built a farm before so I'm having to do a lot of research to understand what's needed. YouTube is a great source of information (a lot of farmers vlog, who knew?), as is the book Tales From Jimmy's Farm and the TV series Clarkson's Farm. The farm produces its own fruit and veg, eggs, honey and goat milk (the alpine goat in the Barnyard Animal Park is apparently renowned for its milk). The farm doesn't slaughter any of its animals and any retired livestock spends the rest of its days in the zoo.

The farm grows tomatoes in a greenhouse.

This is your typical, low-budget, rural British zoo with lots of simple paddocks and wooden cages. For realism, it doesn't have any fancy exhibitry or any rare or unusual species. The crowd pleasers would probably be the meerkats, lemurs, otters, red pandas, zebras, capybaras, gibbons and lynx. The zoo would have been built on farmland, so it's mostly flat, but there's also a wooded side that I've used to house woodland animals.

The Eurasian lynx enclosure in the wooded area of the zoo. I made a modular netted roof set for this which I'll probably release on the Steam Workshop.

One of the largest buildings is the Petting Barn where (implied) guest petting and feeding can take place with chickens, goats, sheep, cattle, alpacas and donkeys. The only other indoor enclosures can be found in the Reptile House.

The Petting Barn where implied petting and feeding takes place.

Interiors have never been my strong point but I persevered and created interiors for my farmshop and gift shop. I made the farmshop quite modest since the farm isn't huge but it's one of the laggiest parts of the zoo due to how many small pieces I used. One of the things I learnt from Clarkson's Farm was that farmshops can't sell produce from outside their local area, so everything in my farmshop would have to be produced on the farm or sourced locally. I had to delete bananas and grapes as they're not grown in the UK by regular farms like mine. 

I was really happy with how muddy I got the pig enclosure to look.

If you've read my zoo reviews or seen my zoo photos, you'll probably know how often I visit these types of zoos. It's the ones I'm most familiar with so I've tried to tap into that experience to create original designs instead of relying on references. Somehow, it's the only zoo I've ever built where it matches my vision and the zoo has the exact feel I wanted it to have.

Looking into the flamingo aviary.

There's only a few things that I've copied from real life, but even then I put my own slant on them. The main house and entrance buildings are based on something in real life, but I put my own spin on them by making them a zoo entrance with an ice cream shop and a terraced garden. The only other thing I copied from real life was the tortoise house which I got from Wolds Wildlife Park, but my version is a lot smaller. Other than that, everything else is completely original.

The capybara enclosure, complete with a mud wallow.

I've been working on this zoo since the Barnyard Animal Pack came out in April 2024. As usual, it was only meant to be a small project but it grew into something bigger. I've been working on it solidly ever since, rarely breaking off to work on my other zoos, which probably shows how much I'm enjoying it. It's around 70% complete and I can't wait to show you it all!