Farm Of The Week: Farm where the people come first

Now it is back in action, with a small but varied selection of stock and quite a lot of people – learning to turn up to work on time, get their hands dirty as necessary and carry on rain or shine.

The social enterprise Lucy is running there, under the title The Hayshed Experience, is not unique and could become commoner as the state casts around for ways of getting people out of the habits of unemployment.

What makes this one unusual is that it is run by somebody severely disabled herself.

Lucy, 37, was healthy up to the age of two, when she was hit with a disease called juvenile chronic arthritis. There is a gene for it but nobody in the family knew it was there.

Her growing up was painful and included long spells in hospital. She relies on an electric wheelchair.

But when she could, she went to school – Castleton Primary, near her home at Commondale, in the North York Moors; then the Rudolf Steiner School at the heart of the Christian community of Botton Village; then Stokesley Comprehensive.

She got A levels and went to Wolverhampton for a degree in American Studies, including six months in Arizona; then to Leeds for a Master’s in Disability Studies. She was going for a PhD until she was struck down once again, by kidney failure, until she was give a transplant by her younger brother – a senior lecturer in sports coaching at Leeds Met.

She moved closer to home, in Saltburn, but lived independently and got work for disability charities, organising training for employers, carers and users of carers.

She has three healthy brothers who all have their own careers. Apart from the one in Leeds, one is a graphic designer in Canada and one a photographer in London.

When her parents, Sue and Sandy Muir, wanted to retire, they sold their 600 hill ewes and turned some farm buildings into four holiday cottages with wheelchair access. And Lucy came home to see what she could do with the rest of the farm – 86 acres plus some moorland ‘stray’, meaning grazing rights.

The Hayshed Experience was formally incorporated as a Community Interest Company in September 2008 and took its first trainee in November 2009.

Lucy was clear from the start that she wanted a business, not a charity. She got £20,000 start-up from a social enterprise fund. But that was gone in a year and everything else has been earned – mainly from health and social services but a steady trickle from farm produce.

It is a year since Lucy started counting the enterprise fully operational. She held an open day recently for managers and buyers of health and social services for North Yorkshire, Redcar & Cleveland, Middlesbrough and Hartlepool, and Robert Goodwill, the MP for Scarborough and Whitby.

They saw an operation which is still finding its way but is becoming impressively organised. It already takes up to 25 day placements a week and employs five people.

Andrea Russell, who runs the farming team, works five days a week. Mike Patterson, who is in charge of restoring a seven-acre woodland, and Charlie Cross-Gurnell, the gardening leader, put in four days each.

Charlie learned ‘biodynamics’ at Botton – a kind of ultra-organic method, based on astronomical calendars, which you could describe as mystical but which its practitioners see as practical acknowledgement of the one-ness of everything. It also involves a lot of manual labour, from weeding to complicated composting.

Sally Sansom works three days a week with the younger trainees. Lucy is manager – and, incidentally, employs six personal assistants/carers on a rolling roster, using a personal budget from social services which she administers herself.

The trainees look after 25 Highland cattle; a small pig operation which produced 60 finished porkers last year; 30 Wensleydale Longwool sheep; 18 free-range hens; and a market garden. They grow hay, make silage and maintain walls and fences. The woodland supplies firewood for the two main farm houses, where Lucy and her parents live separately, and for the workers’ canteen. The trainees take turns to cook for each other once a week.

Volunteers include the ‘wool workshop ladies’ who come every Thursday to help take the clip from the Wensleydales through from raw wool to products. A retired maths teacher, Barry Adamski, and a mate of his, are building a woodworking shop, paid for by Lucy’s parents, to produce things like gates and garden furniture.

The produce has sold so far through local stalls and shops and to visitors staying at the farm but the long-term plans include a butchery and a shop – plus a doubling of trainee numbers and formal accreditation for a two-year foundation course in working skills.

The workforce are people with a mix of learning difficulties, mental health concerns, autism and long-term health conditions – and some whose disability boils down to their attitude to authority. Lucy says they all have in common the frustrations of dealing with an impatient world.

“Many of the people that come here have never been expected to do achieve anything,” she says. “I set this up because there are still disabled people who spend their days doing jigsaws.

“It is not a therapy centre. We call it a workplace and we expect people to turn up on time, bring their own lunch, make sure they have appropriate clothing and learn the etiquette of working with others.

“So far, unfortunately, we cannot take people who are as physically disabled as I am. But we do have people who have walking difficulties. We find ways to make them part of the team. We don’t have deadlines. All we ask is the job gets done.

“It does not all have to lead to employment. But some of our trainees could get jobs, with support. The trouble is, the system is fixated on people working nine to five, Monday to Friday, and either you do that and they take your benefit away or you are ‘disabled’ and you do nothing. Eventually, I would love to get involved in feeding back into the system on how it could be made more adaptable.”

Meanwhile, you can find out more at www.thehayshedexperience.com/ and place orders for meat online at www.fowlgreenfarm.co.uk – or call by for tea and cakes in the summer.