Farm of the Week: Farm project starring Kevin the camel

Maria and Andrew Henshaw are a couple from Lancashire who came to farm in Yorkshire.

The pair overcame exhaustion and adversity to set up a highly successful farm shop, acquiring a camel called Kevin along the way.

The pair are passionate, but slightly unusual farmers, seeing themselves as the last of a generation who could start with virtually nothing and build a successful business.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“My father was a farm worker originally, he only got his farm in 1981,” says Alan Henshaw, in Yorkshire for the past fifteen years; he still speaks with a noticeable Lancashire accent.

Along with wife Maria, from a small dairy farm near Blackpool, they rear cattle, sheep and pigs, all sold through farmers’ markets, and their farm shop at the very northern edge of North Yorkshire, next door to the main A66.

They ended up here after efforts to find a farm in Lancashire proved fruitless.

“We’d been going out together and we both knew that we wanted to farm,” says Mrs Henshaw. “We’d built up our own livestock with cattle. We’d gone all over the country looking for rented farms, but we weren’t fortunate enough to obtain one of those, so my brother saw this little advert in the Farming News for this here, under Northallerton Auctions, and he said ‘do you want to go and have a look?’. We did and we were fortunate to purchase it.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Mainsgill, near Scotch Corner, was 57 acres of heavy land, used for grazing, with buildings for pigs and cattle.

“It was everything we ever wanted,” says Andrew.

“It’s just that circumstances and the farming industry let us down as new entrants into it, new entrants which had set themselves up. We regard ourselves as the very last of the people who could set themselves up off their own bat. I know people probably say ‘well, they come from farming families’ but we did set ourselves up. Nobody gave us any money.”

In the beginning the Henshaws produced pigs, and dairy replacement heifers, but that soon ran into difficulties.

“We were paying out more than what we were getting in. The trouble is that buying pigs in, and the same with the cattle, the job collapsed overnight. There was BSE, there was Blue Ear in the pigs, the dairy industry was declining and everything had a knock-on effect.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“We had no wool on our backs, big financial commitments which we had to make, which other people have to make, we didn’t sit back and put our head in the sand, we said ‘we’re going to have to do something about this’.”

That involved turning the pigs into sausages and bacon, and selling them direct to local people rather than just as commodities.

“It worked, just from me and Maria doing the farm work, and going round knocking on doors, we had a butcher who came, he used to work here from half past five all the way through until half past two in the morning and he’d do that three or four nights a week, and we did that for two and a half years.”

The Henshaws were exhausted, but starting to see that the strategy of building up a network of direct customers did offer a better chance of survival than just selling their meat at a loss in the conventional way.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

A farm shop was the next logical step, and a makeshift one was set up in the garage attached to the farmhouse.

Andrew says he faced a long wait for planning permission, and constant rejections for loans from his bank manager at the time, who kept asking for an increase in weekly turnover which Mr Henshaw kept achieving, but every time the bar was pushed higher. He finally lost patience, changed banks and got his loan.

But as Mrs Henshaw points out, the Gods were still looking to have their sport.

“We started building in February 2001,” she says, “and we’d just got to the height of the windows, and foot and mouth broke out. We had to shut the little farm shop here because we had a big pig producer next door.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Out of courtesy I shut it down because I didn’t want to fetch foot and mouth into the area,” says Andrew.

Stringent biosecurity allowed the building work to continue and in June that year, exactly ten years ago, the first version of the farm shop opened.

Since then it has expanded with a tea room, a kitchen plus a butchery with seven butchers in another building. Mainsgill now employs 40 people, on the farm, in the shop, cafe and butchery.

The area farmed by the Henshaws has grown from 57 to 480 acres through renting more land in the area. All of the animals are sold direct either through the shop or stalls run by Mainsgill at local farmers’ markets.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Mrs Henshaw says that customer service is everything, and key to the business they run.

“There’s a lot of people who wouldn’t be able to do it because they’re not ‘people-friendly’. It’s very difficult every day, you’ve got to be happy, you’ve got to be friendly.

“Although you can be tired some days, you’ve still got to have that chat with people.”

Part of the key to the success of Mainsgill is it is more than just a farm shop, there are areas where children can play, and even a mock ‘neolithic’ stone circle at the rear of the cafe, but perhaps the stars of the show are some rather unusual animals for visiting children to see.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“We’ve got all the farm animals,” says Maria, “but then we’ve got llamas, we’ve got alpacas, we’ve got wallabies, but quite a few farm shops started jumping on the bandwagon, so I wanted something different, so I got a camel and he’s called Kevin, and everybody loves him.

“Everybody knows the farm shop with the camel, they forget it’s called Mainsgill, but they know it’s the place with the camel.”