Faces behind the familiar names

Edward Hart reflects on 45 years of organising and writing The Year Round – the Yorkshire Post's weekly diary of farming life.

The basic idea of The Year Round is the same as it always was. Five Yorkshire farmers contribute their experiences in turn, from five varied farms. It was four to begin with. Lowland arable, Wolds cereals, hill sheep farming and West Riding producer-retailer were the original categories.

The agricultural editor of the Yorkshire Post floated the original idea in 1965 and gave encouragement and guidance in the development of it to me, a freelance countryside writer farming at Fair Hill, Bilsdale, north of Helmsley in the North York Moors.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

"High Wolds Farm" admitted selling barley either too soon or too late for the best prices, and one farmer's wife wrote with news that her husband said he had done exactly the same thing. The sharing of setbacks is part of the appeal of the column.

Milll Farm is the latest recruit – actually Dean House Farm at Luddenden, near Halifax, run by Geoff Midgley. Its 200 acres are one third owner-occupied, one third tenanted, and the balance rented summer grazing. This acreage carries 50 milking cows, 100 other cattle ranging from baby calves to dry cows, sheep, and a few pigs.

The dairy cattle are mainly Friesian/Holstein and include a Holstein bull whose successor is a young red and white. Geoff finds a lot of pleasure in breeding the type of livestock he favours, and chooses his bulls of neat rather than heavy type, to encourage easy calving.

The ewes are mainly Mules (Blue Faced Leicester x Swaledale), run with Texel rams to start lambing in mid-February. This throws lambs to go fat during the summer. The aim is to reduce the number of mouths to feed when grass growth declines from its June peak.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Geoff's grandfather started here in 1902, since when various enterprises have been added to help survival, including an on-farm dairy. Fencing is done for a businessman who has a place nearby and any sort of work is taken on, provided it brings in money.

The farm transporter is regularly involved moving stock for other people. Geoff's brother Allan and son Jon enjoy this work, which keeps them in touch with the farming community. No corn is grown at this elevation on the south Pennines and all straw has to be purchased in from arable areas,. Mill Farm lies only a mile from its predecessor, Brink Top, from where Guy and Caroline Mallinson contributed to Year Round for 10 years.

High Wolds Farm has been through a lot of technical development over the years. Its real name is Moor Farm at West Heslerton, near Malton, run by Paul Stephens. He took over as diarist from his father, Des, who set the farm's pattern of broilers alongside cereals.

The farm has a high level of efficiency, with 900 acres and 140,000 broiler chickens worked by two men. The efficiency improvements on the farm are not matched, according to Paul, by the ever-increasing array of agencies and quality assurance schemes he has to deal with.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Paul has seen the time taken to raise a chicken to table weight halved in his lifetime. But he has seen the bureaucracy double at the same time and finds the farming "less enjoyable" because of it.

Dealing with the chicken manure is a big part of the job but using it on the cereal fields means a considerable saving on artificial fertilisers.

Low Fields Farm succeeded Chestnut Farm, following the death of Philip Ward of Sutton-on-Forest, who was one of the original contributors. Alan Barker of Moors Farm at Swinefleet, near Goole, took over and after his death in 2004, his son, John, took over the farm and the diary duties. The farm is an arable holding, part of a large family partnership near Goole, with some of its land actually below the nearby Ouse, composed of warpland that is entirely stone-free.

Warp is a deposit of silt, through natural flooding or artificial irrigation. The process of laying it down by man-made interventions was initiated on the banks of the Ouse and the Humber between 1730 and 1740 and was not used widely in Britain for another ten years.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Alan's grandfather farmed Grade 3 land in the West Riding, but in 1927 moved to a bigger acreage between Barnsley and Doncaster. In 1948, the family moved to their present holding of Grade 1 land.

Though very fertile, it has the big disadvantage of being subject to flooding. Main crops are potatoes, sugar beet, winter wheat and oilseed rape. Peas for vining are also fitted in, and the family-owned viner justifies its high capital cost.

CW 6/11/10

Related topics: