Hunters Hill Farm, Crakehall: The Yorkshire wheat farmer who hasn't sold a single grain to a merchant for two years

He had a herd of 300 dairy cows that he’d built up over many years and was in at the start of the robotic milking revolution, assisting manufacturer Lely in launching their Astronaut product.

He’s out of dairying, but has retained his entrepreneurial spirit with milking machines and two other enterprises to make his farm work.

Tim farms across 340 acres, part-owned, part-tenanted with a small suckler herd of 20 cattle that graze the 40 acres of permanent grassland and the other 300 acres are arable cropping – split between wheat, barley, oilseed rape and potatoes, utilising a seven year rotation – and he has developed Gibson Grain, selling grain direct from the farm, a self storage business on his farm, that he’s now rolling out on others’ farms, and office accommodation utilising farm buildings – but farming is still at his core.

“Our potato acreage varies between 30-40 acres per year and is on rotation around the farm,” says Tim. “It is followed by a couple of years in wheat, then barley, oilseed rape then back to wheat and maybe second wheat.

“This year we’ve nearer 200 acres of first and second winter wheats with around 30 acres each of potatoes, oilseed rape and winter barley. We grow and roll the barley for feed for our own cattle, as well as selling direct to other farmers.

“We’ve been selling all grain (wheat and barley) direct for a few years and now have a packing plant for bird feed, buying-in split maize that we mix with wheat, which goes into 25 kilo bags and is then all palletised. The rape is sold as a cash crop.

“Our feed made from the wheat and maize started when we bought a small feed business off a guy who was retiring and we are developing our product as it is being requested by a number of pheasant shoots and now increasingly, poultry farmers. We now sell roughly half our wheat crop that way.”

Tim has always looked to develop his on-farm business and sees the selling direct of grain, particularly through niche markets, as a way forward for Hunters Hill.

“We haven’t sold a single grain of wheat to a merchant for the past two years and our next stage is to put in a weighbridge so that we can weigh in ours and what we buy, as we’re now looking at buying in more grain because our demand is such that we’ll be through ours in the next month.

“We spend a lot of time and work in coming up with the type of product estates and poultry people want, adding value to our product, and we are now supplying largely between the A66 and A59 corridor and are gearing more towards the poultry sector.

"We also have a haulier delivering over into Lancashire and to an estate in Wales. We’ve also delivered barley into Dorset. Our product is available to go anywhere in the country the next day.

"I’ve been over to Germany see what they do with flavourings into wheat, and as we have our own commercial shoot we are able to try out some of these ourselves first.”

Tim’s self-storage business, known as YoreStore, has proved another success, and he’s now expanding his brand with other operations on other farms, plus another move he’s made into office units.

“We launched in 2020 during the first Covid lockdown utilising what had been low-roofed cattle housing where we used to house 40 cows, and now we have 40 self storage units here. We also have 12 modern offices in another former farm building and now go under the name Hunters Hill Business Units.

“Everything we run under the various names is part of the overall farming partnership. We received some funding for the business units through the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development with part of the rationale for the grant being that we would provide office accommodation that suited farmers to come and experiment with different enterprises.

“Since we opened them we’ve had cakemakers, butchers, a bike shop specialising in extreme exercise racing bikes, nail technicians, hair implant practitioners, physiotherapists.

"The turnover within small offices can be quick in some cases because startups can soon need to progress to other units on larger industrial estates, but this offers a good startup.

“We had a meeting room planned for training courses, but we now have a lady who does pilates classes full-time there with classes of up to 23 people, five days a week.

“I’ve recently started another YoreStore in Whitby, with a former dairy farmer who has gone into self storage. He converted his former dairy buildings last year and we now run a YoreStore on his behalf, as we have the contacts, the brand, call centre, office and the website.

“We’re now talking to other farmers in other locations including the Skipton area and a few others. I’m specifically looking for one in the Stokesley area at the moment.”

Tim says that when he heard of the government’s plans on Inheritance Tax, specifically the threshold, his first thought was that it was ridiculous.

“When I heard, I just thought that the £1m threshold was a joke.

"We are only a small farm in the grand scheme of things with a few cattle going into Darlington livestock market each year and what we are doing with our grain, but it doesn’t take long to reach that £1m figure in terms of worth of land and buildings and to say that this will only affect 500 farms is a real joke. It will affect nearly everyone.

“I’m less vulnerable than many because later land that we have purchased has gone into my direct name, but I still have a mixture of owned and FBT land. Mum and myself are in partnership over some of our land, but I will potentially have some land to inherit.

“I am concerned and I support all the voices that are out there. I’m a member of both the NFU and CLA and have recently joined the British Farming Union and Farmers to Action. I can see things getting very hostile and a difficult scenario for many.

“I’d not had a bank manager on the farm for five years to do a review and interestingly, since the new IHT was announced, I’ve had one, because they want to know what the position is.”