My Passion With Shane Tate

THE deer farm was a project driven by my family because it was something we could do outside the regular world of work where no-one else could pull our strings.

It’s our farm, our choice. We don’t have to feel pressured to produce or sell anything, but can just enjoy the farm and landscape. I like the physical challenge, and I love the fact it’s not mental but physical work. And learning about herd management is a new challenge I have to overcome. I’m hugely technical, and I like research and the learning process, so I’m taking a pasture management and soil management course.

My wife loves horses, and was brought up around horses by her mother. We’ve always had a bit of land and lived rural. We wanted somewhere to use as an equestrian site for livery and the development of horses, and the farm has that potential.

It all started really with the Yorkshire Post though. We saw an article about a year ago. It was about a guy called David Holmes who was selling parkland at Tatefield Hall in the hope that it could become a farming ground for red deer, which it was in its past days as a large royal hunting estate. He said it used to be hunting ground for William the Conqueror. The seed was sown.

We went to visit the land and fell instantly in love with the rolling landscape. I hatched a masterplan to buy it, put the farm and an equestrian business on it and over time get a house on there to live.

One year later, we are buying a part converted barn that wraps into our land at the bottom of the farm that we hope to be in by Christmas. It’s perfect for us, and it’s another piece of the masterplan jigsaw completed. We have secured planning permission to put up three agricultural barns, a new entrance, 600m of access track to the farm yard and a temporary worker’s dwelling on the farm. The access track is in and the foundations for the barns have been cast this week. And we are finalising our designs for our equestrian centre. It’s all part of our five-year plan to create a lifestyle that’s completely different to corporate life.

We have two kids, Ellie, nine, and Dan, 15, so it’s a great legacy for them. And there has always been this sense of destiny with the deer farm. You know how in traditional romantic novels, there’s always a Thomas Hardy sense of fate and destiny, well this is my novelistic destiny. When we first bought the land, the name Tatefield Hall obviously rang bells with our own surname.

When I went to introduce myself to the neighbouring farmstead and said: ‘Hi, I’m Shane Tate me and my wife have recently bought the adjoining land.’ She said: ‘Oh, I’m Mrs Tate, we own Tate Oil.’ It was like the clan of the Tates. It must have been meant to be!