Selling Christmas trees as a teenager helped Billy's Hill Farm Shop, Oliver Wright learn the ropes in business

His father, Newton Wright, encouraged him to cut his teeth by loaning his then 14-15 year-old son the start-up costs of buying the trees, with Oliver pocketing the profit.

Unbeknown to him at the time this exercise was to pave the way for Oliver’s studies in business at university and to setting up Billy’s Hill Farm Shop in 2007. It has been a crazy time since lockdown and the Covid-19 regulations brought a surge of interest in farm shops and buying local.

“There was an instant change in shopping habits,” said Oliver. “I think we’re going to see that continue. We’ve had a mass influx of new customers who have stuck with us and I see people now buying in a more traditional way once again.

“I’m not a massively cynical person and like most others I thought people would maybe go back to supermarkets once again and many have, but in many ways farm shops like ours have proved to be more flexible over this period.

“I think people have started to find that they like the more traditional ways of shopping once again, whether they come in to us or they have their items delivered. We have a van that was going out 14 hours a day during lockdown.

“Don’t get me wrong, we’re not exactly click and collect but we will write down your order and send it out immediately. I think people like that too. We’re far more personal than a supermarket.

“We are a small independent business, not some big corporation. Our team is four of us and our core strengths are in butchery and the bakery. Our customers have an average basket spend of way below what people would spend in a supermarket but that has improved quite a bit during and since lockdown.

“For us it is about a customer coming in for maybe a piece of beef, pound of bacon, pork pie or steak pie, a loaf of bread and maybe a bottle of wine or a few bottles of Bradfield Brewery beer.”

Oliver’s original plan had been to stock the farm shop with produce from the farm, particularly home reared beef, and to come up with their own preserves.

“It sounds so naïve now, but at the time my ethos was going to be to cut the supply chain and sell what we could produce direct from the farm. That way we would create great margin.

“It looks brilliant on paper but as any other farm shop will tell you it doesn’t exactly work in practice. Jars of fruit, for instance, you have to think of legislation, quality control and, of course, the labour involved, as well as the crops themselves. I quickly found it was better to find other local farmers and growers and offer them a bit of the farm shop cherry.

“Our beef, pork, lamb and poultry now all come from local farmers in West and South Yorkshire. We decided to buy the beef in rather than continue rearing on our own Limousin X cattle bought at Selby livestock market because our customers were going for certain cuts of meat and that left us with too much wastage.

“Now we only buy what we know we can sell. It makes sense. The lamb comes from Howard and Richard Lee in Thurgoland and the pork from Marr Grange at Marr near Doncaster.

“The butchery came first, like it does for most farm shops, and the rest has been an organic growth that saw the shop grow in square footage by around 20 per cent a year for the first eight years. Pies became the next significant move, which then led on to the bakery when we couldn’t find a decent baker to buy from.

“One of our major successes with local farm businesses has been Bradfield Brewery beers. We were stocking a number of others at one time and when we researched what our customers wanted Bradfield smashed the others out of the park. We now concentrate on two local brewers – them and Acorn.”

Oliver pays tribute to his father’s entrepreneurial spirit.

“Dad has always been forward thinking. We were one of the first farms to get into haylage and my form of childcare, from dad, when I was little, was being sat in a wagon delivering haylage for horses up to Scarborough.

“Running the farm shop has always been very much my project, but it was dad who first suggested it. I wasn’t massively into livestock as I thought animals were a bit tying and now I’m running a farm shop that is even more tying!

“Dad still farms the 250 acres but it’s all down to grassland and arable acreage now and I help a bit with that. We grow wheat, barley and maize as well as grass. Dad came out of dairying in the 1980s and we had the beef cattle until about a year ago.”

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James Mitchinson