Pasture Farm Produce: The Yorkshire horse trainers who switched to running a local produce shop in lockdown

Fiona said Andy is rarely flummoxed and always finds a way of creating new income, but that the spuds set them on a course of new friendships, as well as another strand to their livelihood.

“When everything was shut down it was a case of what do we do? Andy is quite resourceful and realised some people might struggle to get supplies and since he knew somebody who supplied potatoes he put in a call and asked whether he could buy a few bags. He then put a sign up at the end of our lane, ‘potatoes this way’.

“Next thing he decided, a short while later, was that he was going to go to Leeds fruit and veg market. We then had a table at the end of the drive and he put a marquee over it, so we didn’t get too cold.

“Andy is always moving things forward and he’d say shall we think about getting this in. He was at college with dairy farmer Ian Buxton who has Yorvale Ice Cream near York and contacted him saying something like, ‘Now then Bucko, what are we going to do about getting some of your ice cream?’ And we started on with that using some fridges that we used with the marquee hire.

Fiona said that it wasn’t just the locals who started coming and that as it had grown it was becoming too unwieldly getting everything out in a morning and back in at night.

“During lockdown we had more traffic going past us than ever, whether it was people on bikes, in cars, parking up and going for a walk. They all took a look as they came past, but eventually we decided it was getting too much having it at the roadside.

“It had been okay during lockdown when nobody had anything better to do, but in the end, about 15 months ago, we decided it was taking far too much time to take all the produce up the drive and bring it back again and so we set up a permanent shop area in what was a garage and Andy knocked out a temporary wall to the adjoining garage.

Andy said that the initial reason for starting it was to help others get what they needed and that’s the same reason today, but that it has become something that has made he and Fiona feel far more a part of the village community.

“We started it in lockdown to support the local community, so that people didn’t have to go to towns to get stuff, but we have found that it has also allowed us to meet the neighbours. I know that might sound a bit stupid, like you could just go and meet people, but there are people in the local villages that we would never see.

“But because we were in lockdown and doing this, that we now call Pasture Farm Produce we actually got to know them. Everybody suddenly had time on their hands and they stopped and we all talked.

“Now we have a core of local people that come every week and when Fiona and I sit together on a night at the weekend we will go through a list in our heads and say has so-and-so been? If they haven’t we start to wonder if they’re alright and we will sometimes message them to check.

“We like it that way, personal. People also like to come for the story as well. If they’ve come and seen lambs born and calves born one week, they will ask how they are the next week. Everybody then feels part of it all.

Andy likes to source as locally as he can.

“The only things we source direct from the farm here are logs and eggs, as we have around 40 Lohmann Brown hens. We try to source local where we can, and we have some local farmers who provide us veg and soft fruit straight from the field.

“If somebody local comes in and asks for something we don’t stock we always look at it and if we can sell a whole box of it to others as well, we will give it a go, but there’s no point getting something if it doesn’t make good business sense.

“We get milk from St Quintin’s Dairy in Harpham; beef and lamb from The Horny Cow in Wilton; pork and bacon from Rookes at Elvington. We sell jams and other preserves from Bracken Hill at Elvington; with much of the rest coming through Crofter’s in Thirsk.

The farm has been at its busiest in the past weeks with the lambing of the 30 Suffolk-cross ewes, and the calving of the 16 Dairy-cross-Belgian Blue cattle still ongoing, including Marmalade, born on Martha’s birthday out of Storm, who was the first calf we bred.

“We put all progeny through Malton livestock market but hopefully we may also be selling our own beef and lamb in future.

Owning and training pointers is Andy’s other interest away from the strict business side of marquees, farm and now the shop. He’s been successful in the past but he and Fiona, who came together through pointing, have taken a back seat recently.

“I enjoy competing against professional trainers. Winning has given me massive satisfaction. Martha’s Benefit, named after our daughter, won seven times including a hunter chase, most of the time with jockey William Milburn. We have two horses in training currently.

“Fiona and I did quite well five years ago but the economic climate and different factors and our daughter to look after meant we couldn’t put a massive amount of time into it recently.

Fiona has ridden all her life and was Staintondale Point to Point secretary, both she and Andrew are now as much in awe of their daughter as they were her namesake Martha’s Benefit.

“Martha was 9 years old at the beginning of February, 9 going on 90. She’s the driving force behind a lot of the decisions we make nowadays. She loves her horses and ponies. She’s very hands-on and will discuss with us what we should be doing and are maybe not doing.