Farm Of The Week: Eggs and coffee serve up exciting new era

Tim Pybus knew he was on to a good thing when he found himself better off selling eggs produced by 100 free range hens instead of cultivating 300 acres of crops.

That is why, 13 years after his initial foray into poultry, Village Farm in West Tanfield, North Yorkshire, is a very different place and a unique local operation.

Tucked along the roadside of Main Street between Masham and Ripon and a stone’s throw from Lightwater Valley, the ancient Thornborough Henges and Nosterfield Local Nature Reserve, Tim and wife Sarah have reinvented their farm, first by diversifying into the eggs business and by opening Weetwoods Country Shop and Tea Room.

It is an arrangement that allows Tim to concentrate on meeting egg quotas required as part of a deal with supermarket supplier Noble Foods and gives Sarah the chance to open the shop seven days a week. It opened three-and-a-half years ago in converted farm buildings which used to store Sarah’s tack and for keeping pigs, and in a former life it was a garage operated by Tim’s brother, a self-employed mechanic.

Sarah, who has an equestrian background, started out by selling equestrian supplies and animal feed but quickly widened her stock.

She said: “We bought out the local equestrian business so we came into it with a database but we realised we had to go more lifestyle and have something for everyone.”

It’s not been all plain sailing but business was good, she said.

“We started up during the recession and we have found that you have got to be slightly ahead of the game and come up with new things.

“The gifts section is going really well. We were heaving at Christmas. It saved people going to Ripon and battling with parking.

“We have a lot of passing trade. We get people who are travelling out from Leeds coming to us for their free range eggs who go on up to Masham and make a day of it.

“This road goes all the way up to Hawes where people go for the cheese.”

The addition of the tea room last month complements what is a well-served village with two pubs, a shop, a post office and a church. West Tanfield’s cosy character seems aptly symbolised by the fridge at the end of the farm’s driveway where locals can help themselves to eggs in exchange for dropping some coins into an honesty box.

As well as hot drinks, the new tea room serves up a delicious-looking array of cakes.

It is a far cry from the farm that Tim’s late parents, Jean and Gerry, moved into in 1960 having tended to a little farm elsewhere on the Bourne-Arton estate.

Tim was born on the farm, in the same room that he sleeps in to this day, and in 1995, when his father passed away, he went into partnership with his mother. Five years later, with the sale of his crops yielding a limited return, Tim introduced a bird unit with capacity for 8,000 hens and struck the deal with Noble Foods.

On a good day, the hens lay 12,000 eggs. They arrive at the farm at 17 weeks and are kept until 72 weeks when they enter the food chain and the majority are sold overseas.

Between arrivals, Tim is given a month to wash out the bird unit. As a packing centre, he can also package eggs to sell to local businesses, butchers and at markets.

The farm now covers 180 acres. Crops are grown for feed across 110 acres and the rest is occupied by hens, B&B pigs and a herd of 45 Dexter cattle which Tim bred over the last six years, starting out with just five cows. He sells males off locally for meat.

Five llamas guard the hens on an incline behind the shop to protect them from foxes.

It was an easy decision to leave arable farming behind, said Tim.

“It’s the bigger boys with more land who run that game so we went back to 180 acres and specialised in free range eggs. We had 100 hens and were making more money selling eggs in the pubs and on the gate than we were from 300 acres of arable.

“We’re the only farm on the estate, out of ten, that’s diversified.

“We don’t know how some of the farms have managed round here. For arable farmers, it’s a seriously worrying time. It’s stressful. You take your finger off the bottom and you’ve lost a plot.”

The transition was not without its stresses though, including the advent of bird flu.

Sarah said: “For the first year in the summer we would go up there (to the bird unit) every night with the dogs, tear the kids away from Emmerdale farm, take the quad bikes and walk 8,000 hens back to the hen shed because of the foxes but we got up there one night and every hen had gone in the barn.”

Tim added: “We’d tried sounding a klaxon horn one night and they all ran in. We went the next day, pressed it and they did nothing!”

Sarah finished: “We’d been trying to round them up when the hens had figured out for themselves that when the sun goes down they go inside. That was really one of those things where we thought ‘you idiots’. The kids still remember it now.”

Sarah and Tim have three daughters, Annie, 25, who lives in Harrogate, Emma, 24, who is engaged to a local dairy farmer, and “horse mad” Stephanie, 15, who Sarah said was why they have six horses.

She said the new business model was more likely to appeal to the girls, rather than out and out farm work. Tim’s brother-in-law, Dave Josling, is essentially the farm’s trainee manager having worked alongside Tim for the last six months.

The family hopes that his involvement will bring some consistency when Tim takes a step back.

Tim admits he’s found the weather conditions tough.

“We’ve not had a week without rain since last April,” he said. But all in all it’s a life worth living, concluded Sarah.

“There are some days you come in and think what are we doing this for? But you look around and realise you live in a good community and a beautiful village, so it’s hard work but it’s worth it.”