A Part-Time
Small-holder's Experience

Reading John Seymour's 'The Fat of the Land' precipitated an idea which had, looking back, been developing in our minds for a long time. Successive moves of house had brought us further into the countryside and we increasingly wanted to limit our involvement with the commercial work and insensitive institutions which seemed to us to degrade all they touched. It was quite by chance that we were lent a copy of John Seymour's book at a time when we were both feeling acutely frustrated in, and sapped by, our work - both in teaching. There was perhaps an element of frenzy in the way we grasped the idea of a small-holding and hurried off every weekend to look for holdings nearby.

Fortunately, capital was not too much of a constraint as a result of judicious house purchases in the past. Location was more important as we both intended to retain our jobs, at least for a while. We finally settled on Lowsonford Farm, a redbrick farmhouse with 3 acres, to which we added a further 5. And once we had the land, well, we had to act quickly because the grass was growing fast. This meant fencing and housing before we could get some animals. Don't forget to allow for fencing in your budget - fencing our 8 acres with sheep netting cost us 900 pounds! It didn't take us long to realise that self-sufficiency can be very expensive! We soon had sheep, hens, geese, bees and cattle (Dexters) and it was a long time before they yielded anything more than feed bills.

Skills? Well, our younger son had some part-time farm experience, which meant that we could handle our animals with confidence. But we were quite without specialised and management skills. There was a lot of trial and error with things like feed rations - particularly for the cattle and nightly searches through accumulating reference books. After a sheep-shearing course at the local agricultural college, at which the instructor had kindly gone out of his way to provide tuition in hand shearing, we managed to shear our 3 ewes in two and a half hours!

Machinery, we found, was quite easy to pick up at local farm sales. Admittedly there were many wasted visits, and some of the machinery is not very reliable, which can be very frustrating under lowering skies during a tense hay-making. But we have pretty well all we need to manage our grasslands: and old petrol/TV0 Ferguson T20 tractor, plough, harrows, acrobat and finger bar mower - totalling under 500 pounds.

It's now 3 years since we moved to Lowsonford Farm. It is still difficult to know quite what role our small-holding should play in our lives. We are both still at work, although one of us intends to give it up shortly. This has meant that we have had almost no time for anything outside of work and farming. We tell ourselves that things will ease as we need to spend less time building the holding up. We could probably run it spending 2 hours a day feeding and milking and a day at weekends mucking out, rotating the animals, and doing odd jobs. But, add fencing, building a barn, felling and chopping diseased elms, planting trees and hedges, laying on water, hedge laying......and there are times when the burden lies heavy. Fortunately, cultivations and hay-making can largely be slotted into the school holidays.

We have never really been able to decide whether our aim is food self-sufficiency or mini-farming. Eight acres is really too much to supply the needs of just one small family, particularly if you buy in protein foodstuffs, which we do partly because we haven't the time to build up an arable side. We have a ready outlet for what we produce through people at work and they are anxious to buy. But this changes the way we approach small-holding. Our Dexters, although the meat is really excellent, are a bugger to fatten. We are considering turning to Herefords suckling on a Jersey which is much more viable. Or, better still, buying in calves to rear on the bucket. We could then make better use of our buildings, and at a squeeze, (with a few sows and a lot more sheep) we could almost make a living out of our holding. That would be exciting...But we like Dexters and if we bought in calves we would lose something of the wholeness of the cycle of birth, rearing, and breeding to improve our stock - quite apart from condoning the removal of newly-born calves from their mothers to be bundled off to market.

It's nice to have a few geese for the table and they are real company around the farm. But when you start them to others you cannot help calculating that, what with plucking and (yes) the taxman, it's really an exploitation rate per hour.

We haven't reconciled these conflicts. It isn't really a simple case of 'ideas to practice'. Both are changing all the time, under pressure from such things as work, and our own evolving values and understanding of our situation. Maybe we will look for a farm. Or perhaps we will try and make a living form this place - we might be able to buy or rent more land. Yet, we are in some ways loath to give up teaching, which can be satisfying in ways full-time small-holding perhaps couldn't. But the immediate future is certain; both the animals and us need feeding, so someone has to bring some money in from outside!

We are not altogether satisfied with the largely horticultural environment that lacks a sharing or adventurous spirit of fellowship. There are isolated people who hae helped generously and there are rewards in opening people's eyes to strange possibilities. And a warning. One hears so much about the helpful neighbours; regretfully there are those who seem particularly eager to take advantage of the inevitable inexperience and the likely naivety that often accompany the call to a simpler life.