We’ll get a crack on and get them tied up
and then we’ll get a cup of tea, yeah?
Yeah.
I’m nowhere near as hard a man as Dad is.
I’ve got nowhere near his work ethic.
When it’s as intense as running a dairy, an old-fashioned dairy,
it’s too much, it’s too much for a 72-year-old.
I think if he doesn’t stop at some point, some injury will befall him, or some illness
which will force him to stop, one way or another.
People do hang on until they’re in their old age
because maybe their retirement options aren’t that good,
and they would actually rather keep on farming and keel over in the yard.
And does that happen?
Yeah, I know of two neighbours of my dad's who kept on farming and keeled over in the yard, yeah.
Literally.
I knew from a very young age that I wanted to farm.
Came here in 1972, 55 upwards years.
It is a long time.
But you wonder where it’s gone, where all that time has gone, looking back.
Yeah.
You don’t get excited about thinking you’re going to make money anymore because
I think you realise that by about 12 months after you started farming or something
but nevertheless, you keep trying.
Most farmers are younger than me now and so they aren’t quite like me
in as much as I’m probably one of the last generation
who has come and farmed without another job
and without me wife going out to work to a job and brought me family up and survived off
what this farm and what subsidy payments has brought in through that door.
And I’ve managed.
Retiring off the amount of money that you accumulate in stock and machinery
certainly isn’t enough to buy a house and retire off.
I think you should be entitled to something like that.
The hours that people put in are really long.
The animals are there all the time, and you have to be there all the time, or
someone has to be.
And so yeah, I would say, pretty much across the board,
people aren’t rewarded with the adequate amount of money for the amount of labour that they put in.
I think it goes beyond fiscal poverty and into sort of cultural and social poverty to
a certain extent.
I mean, there’s quite a high suicide rate among farmers
and there’s probably quite an uncharted mental health problem among farmers
because they tend to be from more conservative backgrounds
and aren’t so keen to talk about problems.
This is where the problems start to come in.
Everybody gets old, everybody leaves home bar the youngest one and suddenly he’s on
his blinking own,
looking round, peeping round, doing all the work that all these other people used to be
there to help with
and the money just isn’t there to get help from anywhere, if there is any help to get.
And it’s just work, work, work, work work.
There’s no interest if, shall we say England are playing Brazil in World Cup,
there’s no interest.
Brexit, piss off.
Everything in the red is what’s around them.
The cows, the sheep, the dog and work, and this has got to be done and work, work, work
and that’s an angle that’s wrong.
There should be some way of stopping that happening.
The trouble with working on your own, like you don’t have enough hands.
If Adam wanted to farm and, as you know he’s more wanted to do it organically
and do it Adam’s way, with conservation grazing,
what he is trying to achieve now,
I think there’s a niche there for someone to do it,
and he could be the one.
Anybody looking at me and Helen with 20 sheep
and a few lambs and kind of pottering about isn’t going to take us seriously.
But then you know, we’re not really expecting them to,
like I say, it’s a first step.
We’re experimenting with ourselves apart from anything else,
kind of see whether we make the grade.
I’m questioning my own actions all the time because actually it turns out
it’s quite difficult to be a sustainable farmer.
It’s not the easy road.
What happened?
I think I can put my hand on my heart that it probably would have gone better without you.
We’re definitely still learning.
We’re one year on with the sheep.
There is so much to know about the land and looking after it and how the sheep will work on it
and ultimately be able to produce something that we’re proud of.
I wanted to be a farmer when I was nine.
Then I wanted to be a florist.
So I guess I’m farming flowers.
In my teens what I wanted to do was read books and play the drums, so no, I didn’t see myself
being a farmer, I couldn’t wait to get away.
Life’s not linear.
A lot of my personal happiness is from working outside.
I’ve always gone back to the farm.
It’s just always felt like home.
I’m trying to get myself into a position where I have a farm and that’s the basis
for my life.
What we’re doing with the sheep is enhancing or trying to enhance the diversity
of wildlife.
If people want wildlife and diverse countryside then
supporting your nature-friendly farmers, that’s what people need to be doing.
You don’t really switch off.
I wake up at night thinking about what’s happening, what we could be doing.
It’s really really hard work but you’re just out in it, connected to it.
It’s really easy to write it off as an idealistic life
but it’s hard but you realise
that you’re working on something so it feels worthwhile.
Why wouldn’t you want to do it?
It bothers me that if you want to produce food to high kind of environmental standards,
you have to sell it for a price that reflects its quality
and therefore you’re immediately cutting out people
who can’t afford, or don’t think they can afford quality stuff.
And, I mean, that’s institutional.
That’s an attitude that people have, is that quality stuff is for somebody else,
so you know, it just, I hate having to have to put a message behind food,
because at the end of the day, food is just food and you should really value it
but surely we should do that inherently without having to dress it up in nice packaging
and say, oh, it’s organic and vegan and visit us at fake fucking Instagram.
Can you hand me something to build with?
It’s hard work.
We’ve made a living but …
it’s a way of life that you’re brought up into.
You don’t do it for money really, so there you go.
Did you ever think Adam would be a farmer?
I didn’t really think he was showing all that much interest.
Even though he was helping me, I never really thought of him being anything
more than an academic, I guess.
But yet, he loved his sport and he loved hills and everything.
Did you want him to be a farmer?
No.
No, I don’t think I did.
Down, down now, woah, woah, up a bit. Right. It’s on.
Yeah, so, the tree’s kind of in the way but
that’s Gummer's How over there
and my dad grew up this side of Gummer's How, and our place,
where we are now is just this side of this little hill here.
This is Yewbarrow, so we’re kind of a stone’s throw that way really.
It’s cool, and actually the other reserve that I’m going to be renting is a piece of land
that my grandad rented back in the day so kind of like,
yeah, there’s connections there which, I’ve not tried to cultivate them deliberately,
but it’s great, it’s really cool to be taking on a bit of land that my grandad had once.
For different reasons but, you know, hopefully I wont make a mess of it.
I’ve got roots that I can’t seem to get away from, even though I’ve tried,
because the experience of life on a farm is quite intense.
You find yourself in some unusual places at unusual times.
There’s grace in that, even if it’s like a horrible wet night and you’re trying to lamb sheep,
it’s really, I don’t know, it’s another level of living.
I’ve found and made and had the opportunity to make that what I do for my work,
so why wouldn’t I do that?
And this is one way that’s fairly true to me
that I can you know,
make a little bit of difference to the state of wildlife hopefully for the positive.