The Year Round: Farm shops are proving invaluable link

They last for ever once successfully established where wire has a definitely limited life and does not fit the environment as well as a new living hedge.

White Smocks is a 76-acre intensive livestock holding in the Northallerton area. Neither sheep nor cattle are kept, but soil fertility is well maintained by manure from 210 breeding sows and 30,000 laying birds.

Young pigs all go as baconers to the factory, apart from some to a local farm shop. These farm shops are a boon and bring town and country closer together.

Customers appreciate knowing where the produce comes from, and we enjoy selling meat to a certain specification.

All sows are home-bred using artificial insemination, all of which we do ourselves. We buy carefully selected semen to produce fast-growing hybrids, based on Large White and Landrace blood. Since Christmas returns have been satisfactory, the main worry being the variable cost of soya bean meal.

The 30,000 laying poultry are well past their peak, but maintain a useful number of eggs for the factory to hatch into broiler breeders. Feeding all this stock takes a good deal of each day, and there are continuous maintenance jobs repairing slats and pen divisions. One man is employed regularly with help from our son when not at college. They manage very well and my wife and I took a week's skiing.

This was a complete break from farming and world news; winter breaks fit into the calendar far better than summer ones.

Thirty acres of winter wheat, 10 acres of winter barley and 10 acres of spring barley make up our arable acreage. Spring barley sowing will be our first field job, but there is no sign of that as yet.