Farm Of The Week: Dream project broke through red tape

Pursuing a dream takes perseverance and patience, as the Welbanks found out. Ben Barnett reports on their new venture.
John and Sylvia Welbank outside the farm shop and cafe.John and Sylvia Welbank outside the farm shop and cafe.
John and Sylvia Welbank outside the farm shop and cafe.

Camped around a coal fire as the winds howled off the Dales, John and Sylvia Welbank could have been forgiven for thinking they had made a mistake.

Last winter was tough on the entrepreneurial couple as they lived out of two rooms in their recently acquired, rundown farmhouse amid its much-needed renovation.

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The Welbanks had sold their home in Sedbergh, the small market town in the north-west of the Dales, to buy Ireby Green Farm at Cowan Bridge near Ingleton and had taken on a major project – one that was proving more complicated than expected.

Dilapidated buildings in the farmyard and the farmhouse itself needed rewiring, a new central heating system and substantial repair work, but the biggest challenge was untangling the maze of red tape they had ran into to obtain planning permission for a farm shop and cafe.

The planning process took seven months, five more than the local planning authority’s target for dealing with planning applications. But, having moved on-site last November and eventually getting the okay from planners for the shop and cafe in February, they’re now living their dream of running their own enterprise on land of their own.

The 75-acre farm has a caravan site with 22 pitches and the farm shop and cafe, which opened at the start of October, is in a new building where cattle and sheep pens used to stand. The couple run an 80-strong dairy herd of Holstein Friesians for Sylvia’s father and brother, Harvey and William Robinson, and John, a chartered surveyor, operates his own rural planning consultancy, Rural Futures.

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Sylvia is enjoying baking cakes and devising daily specials to serve in the cafe and the couple’s children, Jamie, aged eight, and Ellie, six, have taken to growing up on a farm.

“We wanted a project,” John explains.

“I’m terrible if I haven’t got one and we wanted to try and do something together. We didn’t necessarily look at a farm but we looked at other tourism business opportunities and we literally looked all over the country, from Scotland to Cornwall, but I always hankered after my own little piece of England.

“It had come to that crunch point where if we didn’t do it now we’d never do it because we wouldn’t have the energy or the physical capability to do it, so we took the plunge and sold our house.”

The Welbanks had to persuade their bank to lend them significant funds to turn their project into a reality.

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“I suppose we’re quite unusual in that we didn’t have a ton of cash – we hadn’t won the lottery – but we put a package together with a mixture of businesses on the farm that required a huge amount of borrowing,” says John.

“We have 75 acres. As it stands we’d struggle to make it a viable farm on its own because it’s so small, but by putting the extras on top – the caravan site, the cafe, farm shop and my own business – we put together something a bank would consider.”

The final piece of the project, to develop the café and shop, proved stressful despite successfully applying for a grant towards the costs from Defra.

John says: “We were incredibly lucky to get a £50,000 grant from Defra as we simply couldn’t afford the development from our own resources – but the offer was dependent on planning.”

“The planning was a real battle,” says Sylvia.

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“If John hadn’t been in the industry he’s in, we would have given up long ago. It’s ridiculous the amount of paperwork you have to go through. We were nearly refused on the basis we were not in a sustainable transport location.

“Then they wouldn’t classify us as a farm. There wasn’t a single public objection.”

In his line of work, John has helped a number of farm shop projects come to fruition and is familiar with the planning process. He is a member of the Country Land and Business Association’s (CLA) national policy committee and vice-chairman of his local CLA branch.

“There is still a resistance to a lot of business development in rural areas particularly at local authority level where they regard rural areas as nice places for folks to go out and walk, but the fact is there’s a real economy out there as well and that’s the frustration,” says John.

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“Sometimes it seems that they see business in rural areas is an inappropriate use but it’s got to be about encouraging these small businesses to start in the first place and when they are established, allowing them to expand naturally. There still has to be restrictions around what is appropriate but it’s important that there is business development.”

Sylvia is glad they didn’t give up during the long-winded planning process.

“My advice is persevere,” she says.

“Keep going with it and get some good advice – that side shouldn’t be underestimated.

“It’s very easy to take the initial no as the answer. It’s just incredibly hard work.

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“There have to be safeguards in place but it’s overly complicated. Everything was such hard work to do.”

As well as keeping cattle, the Welbanks have their own flock of Lleyn sheep. Its lamb will be sold in the shop and will feature on Sylvia’s cafe menu.

“The idea is that we will produce more of our own,” she John.

“We’re looking at getting our own hens and pigs, and through the cafe we use a lot of soft fruit so it would make sense for us to start our own fruit production area with an orchard.

“We want to use produce from local farms here, too.”

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The couple are also keen to bolster the farm’s green credentials. They have installed a biomass boiler that uses wood chips to heat the house, the cafe and the caravan site’s toilet block, and they don’t use any pesticides, herbicides or fertilisers.

The farm shop and cafe, located off the A65 on the edge of the Dales, are open Wednesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm, serving breakfasts, lunches and afternoon teas.