Farm Of The Week: Down on the farm with the celebrity animals

It’s not everyday Will and Kate and Ant and Dec share a stable on a farm and it was these quirky celebrity references that brought Lane End Farm to my attention.

Tiny pigmy goats share the names of the Royal couple and alpacas those of the ever present Geordie television personalities at the farm in Tong, Bradford, and all for good reason, for farmer Martin Hare is a sucker for putting a smile on the faces of young customers to his farm shop. He keeps five donkeys too.

On this April afternoon, tiny lambs totter cheerfully across fields at 1,000 feet above sea level against a panorama reaching Baildon and Emley moors. Spring feels imminent, even with the chilly easterlies. Martin reckons it’s the worst spring he can remember. The threadbare grass is unsuitable for sustaining his livestock.

His sheep are finally emerging into the fields towards the end of an ‘indoor’ lambing season. Even without the adverse weather, the season has been far from straight forward, Martin said.

“I’ve just had to deliver one coming out backwards, one of two lambs. All season, I’ve been having too many ewes with twos or threes. It’s a problem if they have three or four at once. They’re small and weak because they can’t all get to their mother’s milk at once. When that happens I foster the extra ones to ewes that have only had one. After three or four days they’re fine.”

One particularly small lamb emerges, it seems, out of nowhere from a snug bed of straw at the foot of a gate, as Martin opens the pen to check his performance notes. By the end of this season, his flock of 120 will have produced about 200 lambs; a good result, he says. He lambs each spring and with Dorsets in November.

Sharing the farm buildings is cattle which Martin purchases at 10 months old and rears them for another 10 months on a corn diet. Their meat stocks the farm shop via a Rawdon abattoir, as does lamb from his flock of sheep and free range eggs from his hens. Locally produced pork, bought from Wharfedale Farmers’ Auction Mart in Otley, is also for sale from the meat counter.

The farm shop sustains Martin’s operations, having given up on trading livestock. The challenge now is to stagger stock so he’s never short of meat. He replenishes every six weeks or so with purchases from Otley and Penrith auctions.

Originally a mobile unit resembling a caravan, a small team of staff help run the farm shop which is now housed in a smart stone building with a 10.5 metre meat counter to display burgers, sausages and steak. Martin couldn’t have invested in the new premises without funding from the Rural Development Programme for England. “At first we were only open on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays and people would be queuing in the cold,” he said.

“Business is growing all the time and since this horse thing it’s been going up and up. People are more concerned about where their meat comes from. We tell people ‘this isn’t British meat, it’s Tong meat, it’s better’ and they love it. Everything we sell is reared here on the farm.

“We tend to get more people from over Leeds way, from Pudsey and Calverley, as well as from Bradford.”

Martin has great pride in his hardy Dexter cattle. Their meat doesn’t come cheap but it’s a favourite of his regulars.

“They just stop outside. It’s unbelievable how they just live off the land.

“It has a great taste, it’s unlike anything else. People go mad for it. They take 12 months longer to fatten up because they are so small. When we know we’ll have some to go in the shop, we’ll put a sign up in advance and people start placing orders straight away.”

As well as the shop, Martin’s wife, Arlene, opened a cattery on the farm, catering for 50 cats, in 2003, an idea encouraged by the success of her doorstep egg sales. She said: “I started keeping 100 hens, then 500, selling their eggs from the front door. We had people queuing and ringing up for orders.”

Martin’s route into running his own shop is a story which began as a youngster helping his father, Thomas Mare, at his butcher stall on Bradford’s Rawson Market. Thomas was 11 when he moved on to the farm. Thomas’ father died during the purchase and with money tight, the land was initially rented out, leaving Thomas to seek work washing down blocks at butchers’ shops on Rawson Market.

Thomas was taken on as a butcher’s assistant and after his employer passed away, Thomas bought the business. It would have been easy for Martin to fall into the permanent employ of his father but he had other ideas.

He said: “I used to have a milk round. It wasn’t going great because people were going to supermarkets. I had always been interested in farming so I took tenancy of a nearby farm and made hay for horse riding schools but the summers were getting worse so I turned to cows, taking them to market but I wasn’t getting good prices.

“At auctions there used to be 20 or 30 butchers round the ring, now there’ll only be five or six and you might get one who is buying for a couple of big firms so there’s no competition. But people are realising they would rather have local meat and prices are rising – although we’ve not changed the prices in the shop.”

It was when prices were depressed that he opened the shop. “It made sense. I knew about meat from working with my dad. I was born here so I’m well known locally and people knew my dad from his days on the market. It’s a nice feeling.”

A photograph of Martin’s father at his market stall adorns the shop and serves as a reminder of the family’s proud history in the food industry. It is a tradition that may just evolve under Martin’s grandson Darwin, who is soon to turn one and has already been presented with three sheep to call his own. His bonny smile is popular with customers and befits the family-friendly environment the Hares are keen to embrace.