plans

on general

So it’s been a while since I posted anything here.

It’s easy to start a blog but it’s hard to keep it going.

Anyway a bit over a year has ticked by since I last looked at this site. In that time we’ve been making plans about how we want our lives to look over the next few years.

The life we’re currently living isn’t really how we want to live. It has good bits that we want to keep and less good bits that we want to minimize.

Don’t get me wrong we’re in a lucky position, we work for ourselves and have a lot of options available to us, so are very fortunate in that sense.

However the day to day grind of running a (smallish) dairy farm is wearing on us:

We have no days off.

We’ve not been on holiday as a family in about 5 years.

Our kids have never been abroad.

We’re faced with ever increasing inspections and audits from various entities whose rules seem to have been created in spotless committee rooms by people who have never set foot on a farm.

The financial juggling act I have to perform every month to try and not be (too far) behind on paying peoples bills is (really) draining.

There are new rules coming into force in a couple of years that will require potentially £100,000+ of investment with no return on that investment…just has to be done because the government says so in order to be compliant.

Now maybe you could look at me and say “shut up, man up and get on with it, that’s the same with lots of small businesses” and that would be a valid point of view.

But if we’ve got the ability to improve things why wouldn’t we?

Life is for living, our time on this planet is short….we’re sat on a fairly big asset struggling along trying to make a living farming … but to what end?

What does the end goal look like? Is it just to keep going, to survive?

We can do that in lots of different ways.

We could continue the struggle for the next 20 years, gradually resent everyday more than the last, cling onto it all to the bitter end, die, and the kids just sell it because it’s too small to be a commercial farm by that point anyway.

The other route is to use the assets we’ve built up in a different way… and yes that might mean selling some of it…something that doesn’t come easily to the farmer mindset.

We’ve been kicking around ideas probably for 18 months.

  1. We could just sell the lot, clear the mortgage, buy another house, have a decent nest egg and probably get by with part time jobs if we wanted.

  2. We could just sell the land, clear down most of the mortgage, be left with a nice house, some farm buildings, our camping business and a small small holding.

  3. We could try and max out the value of the buildings with residential planning permissions where possible, sell some buildings / houses and keep the land.

We’ve decided option 3 is more the route we want to take.

The buildings are replaceable, but this patch of land isn’t, so we’re aiming at keeping as much land as possible.

Over the long long term land has generally been a good asset for maintaining purchasing power, it has utility in that we can make food on it, and earn some sort of return from it - whether that’s just renting out to a neighbor, or growing crops or rearing animals ourselves…..and if we’re lucky enough to pass it onto the kids, it’s pretty easily divisible allowing one to sell if they wanted/needed to without impacting their siblings, a house doesn’t have that same flexibility.

Plus we think it’s the route that works out best financially.

It’s certainly not the easiest route.

If we get the planning permissions we hope we’ll get, we can build another house, and in time put up new sheds on the land we’ve got left.

We’d hopefully be in a much more financially robust position than the rather fragile position I feel we operate in at the moment.

So the rough plan is:

  • Sell the cows and a field to give us some cash for runway to cover mortgage and living costs for a decent while (planning departments and land transactions move at glacial speed so this needs to be a fair chunk of cash).

  • Get planning permission on some of the sheds. There is a permitted development order called “Class Q” that should allow us to get permission for 5 properties. (We’ve already got permisson for 2, so just need to do another application for a further 3 in some different buildings.)

  • Some mix of selling plots and building at least one or two houses ourselves.

  • Sell farmhouse and rest of yard to fund the above house building and clear most of the mortgage debt we’re carrying. This will make us homeless for a bit, but we’ll work something out.

This is all a big change, and quite a scary process to be thinking through.

We live pretty frugally, but our monthly outgoings are pretty chunky.

What we’re currently doing just about makes ends meet, so killing that off and doing something else unknown is scary.

I don’t know whether that’s just a blokey thing to be feeling, that sense that I must provide for my family etc, or what, but my stomach is in knots about a lot of the unknowns….but it’s also exciting thinking about how the future could look if it all works out…. and the reality is that worst case it all goes wrong and we end up having to revert to option 1…or 2 … neither of which are terrible.

That said, my inner dialogue is screaming at me at times, catastrophizing every step I take down this route.

What if you run out of money? What if you don’t get the planning permissions you want? What if you can’t sell the properties / plots? What if you don’t get a good price for the cows / machinery? What if the first land sale falls through? What if…..

It’s a big change.

I’ve found a podcast about change (A slight change of plans by Maya Shankar) which is brilliant. I’ve consumed several hours of it already, and have several more hours lined up. If anyone is going through big change in their life I’d highly recommend it.

So along with mental battles about a big change, this all has an emotional / sentimental element to it as well.

My grandfather took on the tenancy of this farm back in the 1940’s ish, then my father farmed it and we moved back from corporate life to take over that tenancy thinking we’d do the same.

It’s been a blessing in many ways that we were able to buy most of it almost 5 years ago as it’s opened up a whole world of opportunity for us.

We very much should be thinking about this as a business asset, which is what it is

… however there’s that inner voice saying: “you Mark are the one that failed”, “you gave up”, “you quit” etc….

I’m starting to view that language the same as when people say “Oh, you quit/gave up drinking” … making a f’ing massive improvement to your life isn’t “giving up” or “quitting”!

I’m mostly past that cycle of thoughts…..

When we moved back to the farm back around 2010 there were in the region of 12,500 dairy farmers in the UK - we’re now down to 7500 ish. So 5,000 dairy farms have exited in the past 13 years or so….about 1 a day, and we’ll be another on that list moving to the other side.

The interesting thing about that is that UK milk production hasn’t changed all that much in that period. The big farms have got bigger. Now there’s lots of great farmers that run huge dairy herds, but I’m not sure it’s the model the general public imagine when they think about how their milk is produced, and I’m not sure it’s the best model for protecting the countryside or environment or for disease prevention….but I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole in this post.

There’s going to be a load of challenges along the way, there’s going to be some awkward conversations, some things will go our way and some won’t.

We’ve just got to be a bit flexible, get the wheels in motion and crack on!

Hopefully I dont leave it another 18 months for the next post and keep this site a bit more up to date with progress and things develop.