Farm Of The Week: Something special in the hills

ABOUT the time a lot of hill farmers were giving up and getting out, Nathan Brown was heading the other way.

Seven years ago, he and his wife, Carole, and four children, moved from a town terrace to a farm in that Pennine borderland where county boundaries are invisible and mysterious.

The farm is in Littledale, Lancashire. But its local show is Westmorland’s. And its shop window is the Dalesbred Butchers in High Bentham, which is Yorkshire with Lancaster postcodes.

The business caught the Yorkshire Post’s eye as a bidder for Dalesbred sheep at Skipton. How specialist can you get?

It is, of course, not just an outlet for lamb from the Dalesbred breed. But that lamb is a big part of its trade and one of the reasons for its name.

Nathan, 39, grew up in Chorley but left school at 16 to go farming. He learned to shear sheep and discovered there was more work to be got if you could take a couple of dogs and get them rounded up. He got as far as New Zealand with the shearing and then into following the lambing northwards through Britain as a freelance shepherd.

“It’s a great way of life for a single man,” he sums up. But at 21 he hitched up with Carole and her two children. They married and had two of their own. Stephanie, 18, is just leaving to study law. The eldest, Robert, 23, works on the farm. Then there are Jodie, 12, and Angus, 10.

Carole, 43, worked with Nathan on relief milking. They rented bits of land and raised their own livestock and saved for the chance to run their own show. Eventually Nathan’s parents threw their house into the pot and in September 2004 they all took over the house at Deep Clough Farm, plus some barns, and Nathan and Carole did one up for themselves and the children.

They rented 792 acres of mainly rough grazing which went with the farmstead, and another 800 from the farm next door, and got grazing rights thrown in for Littledale Fell, rising to 1950 feet and mainly useful as home to grouse. There are some half-decent fields but altogether it is the sort of holding which, in national averages, returns less than the minimum wage.

“It was all I ever wanted,” says Nathan. “But to be honest, if all we were doing was selling fat lambs at auction, we would have a pretty meagre living.”

As it is, the 455 ewes they took over have turned into 2,500. And the 20 beef sucklers they brought with them have given way to about 180.

The original cattle were Limousin-Xs and “they just melted”, says Nathan. The sheep were Dalesbreds, and they were perfect – except the lambs were worth £25 each in the butchers’ markets at the time.

The Browns started looking for their own end users, through neighbours, then farmers’ markets. They launched a website which is now an important part of the business.

“But your phone doesn’t start ringing straight way,” says Nathan. “Nine out of 10 online customers have met us first.”

They hired a butcher, Mark Paige. And two years ago, he mentioned the butcher’s shop in Bentham, seven miles away, was up for grabs. He went shares with the Browns and they agreed to call it The Dalesbred Butchers and source all the meat locally – most of it from the farm. The name was also a reference to the Dalesbred breed, in recognition of the recent trend towards branding of lamb.

Sainsburys does Scotch Blackface. M&S promotes Swaledale. High Bentham does Dalesbred lamb, for nine months of the year – Texel-Xs and Suffolk-Xs, from the lower ground of the farm, when they are not available.

Nathan will not swear he could single out one breed from another as meat. But he can tell when they have lived off heather, he says. One of the things the customers want to know is that the animal has fed naturally, and it is one of the virtues of the Dalesbred that it can be left to forage, even up here.

The shop lives largely off local trade, in a town with no supermarket. But it also acts as a pick-up point for online orders, a destination for customers picked up at markets and shows, and a noteworthy name at the marts where Nathan tops up. He recently went to the Scottish Winter Fair and bought all the 25 Dalesbreds they had. Skipton, Otley and Bentham, are his usual sources.

The Limo-X cattle have been replaced by a herd dominated by Galloways, but including Herefords, Anguses and a rare Shorthorn called the Whitebred.

The farm is on a Higher Level Stewardship contract which includes restrictions in the interests of breeding waders. It also gives a few pounds a hectare for support of native breeds, which about makes up for the fact that, as Nathan jokingly says, “the trees grow faster”.

Actually, he is delighted with them. A Whitebred Shorthorn on Galloway cows makes a cross called a Blue-Grey, well-rated as a hardy suckler. He sells some and crosses others with Charolais and Simmental to make beef calves he can sell as stores, while taking the smaller native beefs for his own customers. The Galloways and the Blue-Greys can live off the land all year without poaching it. The rest come in for winter but all live on grass and silage except for the crosses for the market, who get 10 weeks of extra fattening before slaughter.

The sheep include 800 Dalesbreds, 500 Swaledales and Mules out of the Swaledales. Some lambs go to Lytham for the winter – replacement ewes and 40 wethers a year which are kept on to make mutton for the direct sales customers.

A customer in the Isle of Man likes a rib of Galloway every couple of months and came to inspect the farm before he started ordering, which makes Nathan happy. That is the sort of customer he was after.

To complete the Dalesbred promise, he buys in Saddlebacks and Old Spots to fatten – about 70 at a time, housed in winter but let out in summer. They do that and everything else with just son Robert and one hired hand, James Hesketh. Carole goes to Settle every Tuesday and Sedbergh every Wednesday; travels to markets in Manchester, Liverpool and Preston; and takes a stall at shows including Kilnsey and Malham.

Albert’s Meats, at Bury Market, one of the biggest meat markets in the country, started buying from them a year ago and now takes 15 lambs a week to sell as ‘Dalesbred and heather-fed’.

The Bentham shop and the other outlets use about 10 more, plus beef and pork in proportion.

And for the moment, of course, the marts are returning prices for stores which make them wonder about all that effort to do their own retailing. It is still a lot of work. And Nathan still needs to go shearing every summer.

“We should spend two days a week in the office,” he comments.

“But we don’t, because we do the paperwork at night. If I could get out of all that in exchange for giving up the grants, I’d do it like a shot.”

See www.dalesbredfinestmeats.co.uk or call 01524 770574.