Farm Of The Week: Daughters doing it for themselves

Its dynamo, Jennie Whiteley, jokes they are accredited NASIS – Not A Son In Sight – although she does actually have two she can call on. But thanks to the laws of leverage, she says, she can manage to shift most of what requires shifting herself, with the help of a 12-foot scaffolding pole and/or the little telehandler her husband bought her for Christmas – “he does a nice line in stocking fillers”.

She is 71 and her sister, Vivien Bullivant, is 74. They are the daughters in E & EG Bullivant & daughters, as they insisted the business be called, when they were both working alongside their father, Ernest, and mother, Elizabeth Gwendolen. The accountants had proposed E Bullivant & Son, even though there was no son. Back in the 1980s, the family broke new ground, at least in farming around here, with & Daughters. They are pleased to see a few around now.

It was a mixed farm of 155 acres when they were growing up. Vivien stayed on. Jennie went away and worked as a nurse but returned, with two teenage sons, after her first husband died, in 1986. Their dad sold most of the land when his health started to fail, on the way to his death in 1989, leaving just 34 acres. About 14 acres of the remainder grew oats and Jennie learned to drive a combine, after writing notes all over the cab with a felt-tip marker. Now the arable fields are let out to a neighbour, leaving them with 20 to grow grass and silage for their remaining cattle and pigs.

Jennie’s second husband, Ken Whiteley, formerly an ICI plastics expert, looks after the books and any repairs that cannot be managed with hammer and nails. He is 78.

It all just about works because of what comes out of a little kitchen on the side of the farmhouse. They converted a coalshed into a farm shop as far back as 1980 and that awakened them to the foodie market, although they have to be sought out, up a single-track road from the village of Claxton, between York and Malton.

The shop experience led them into farmers’ markets, 12 years ago. And Bullivant has become a name for pies, pâtés, sausages and some sweet baking – and gluten-free versions, for people with an allergy to wheat flour (like Vivien, and one of Jennie’s sons). The key to gluten-free baking is getting the pastry right and the key to that is patience, says Jennie.

When Kirstie Allsopp was making her new series, Kirstie’s Handmade Britain, Channel 4 recruited Jennie to teach her to make brawn, for Pateley Bridge Show. Kirstie was “a dream” but drew the line at scraping a pig’s ear for its meat. See the episode on November 30.

Jennie is an amusing commentator on her own life and TV has picked her up before, for the old Dales Diary series and for a documentary called A Dying Breed.

“That is what we are,” she says cheerfully. “We only want to keep going until we can be buried in the orchard. My sons will inherit it and at least one of them would like to come back here, but there is not a living for a family in it. I suppose if it was still 155 acres there might be, with two people both working very hard.”

It remains, however, a little mixed farm, with its own lessons for farming in general. Jennie disregards most of the rules of farming business. She does not even claim the small Single Farm Payment they might get “because I am not ticking boxes for anybody”. She thinks it ridiculous that the nation is paying for weeds to be left – on field margins – until after they have seeded. It means she is at war for six months a year with thistles which have blown in from neighbouring farms and dandelions which blow in as seeds from the verges of the A64 “and ruin your silage”. She tackles the dandelions with a knife, or an outdoor Hoover when they are clocks, because spraying kills clover and she likes her clover.

A small suckler herd consists of two Aberdeen Angus, an Angus-Jersey cross, from the time they had a couple of dairy cows to supply the house, a retired Red Poll and, by happenchance, a 10-year-old Belted Galloway bull, which fathers small calves, fattened for 42 months. Most breeders rear two lots in that time. But the slower-grown the better, says Jennie, as long as the beef is hung long enough.

She orders four weeks hanging from Nick and Chris Hartley at Tholthorpe, who do bespoke butchering for a lot of farm market suppliers. Her abattoir is Traves at Escrick. Her pig herd used to be four traditional breed sows and up to 80 followers but she had to throw too much fat away and in the course of winding down a bit, has cut back to a couple of commercial whites and their offspring. They live mainly indoors, but she likes them to have enough straw to hide in and she sees no need to confine them for farrowing. A bit of beer keeps the sows calm enough, she finds – an ideal combination of Vitamin B and a bit of alcohol. Otherwise, their diet is fresh grass, apples, beet and barley. “It is breed which makes the difference in beef but diet in pork,” she says. “Soya tastes of nothing and so will the pigs, even Old Spots, if you feed them on it.”

She would not get the accreditation most big buyers want because she still castrates the young males. She is, she says, among the one in three people who can detect the faintest hint of ‘boar taint’. The big producers do not always avoid it by killing young and she keeps hers to six or seven months.

Most of the pigs are for her pies and she can stick to the old way if she wants to. They kill about 36 a year and four out of five are for the bakery products. A couple of cattle a year go mainly as joints to customers who collect from the farm or the market stalls.