Moving on

So the last post I wrote back in November, but only published today because I was trying to be sensitive to people working here.

I’d discussed potential plans with them, but didn’t want to publish anything until we’d had that proper conversation and what those changes meant for their jobs here.

It’s never nice or fun having those types of conversation, but it’s done, and hopefully they’re all OK with it.

The past couple of months:

We’ve stopped milking

This was pretty huge.

I’ve been on the hook for making sure the cows were milked twice a day everyday for the past 12 years ish since we moved back.

Now I did have help for most of the milkings, but was always there as backstop if someone didn’t turn up, and there were always jobs to be done whilst the cows were being milked, or some decisions to be made about a problem that occurred or something to fix.

We stopped milking mid December, and it’s been … amazing.

I cannot explain the sense of relief I feel, even though the downside is that I’ve got no money coming in.

No longer having that daily grind is wonderfully liberating.

Emma, my wife, said I’m looking better.

One of the kids said he’s so happy we’re not milking any more because I’m around a load more for them … it’s amazing.

It was weird for a couple of weeks, and then it started feeling really good.

Up until last week I’d still been waking up at 4.30 am even with no alarm, but the last week or so I’ve managed to sleep in once until 6am and a couple of times until 5.30am … which is all progress on the return to normality!

Some of the cows have been sold to other farms, the rest are on their holiday (dry) period before calving again.

I’m hoping we can sell the rest before they calve as I don’t want to be dealing with a load of calves again…but it’s a bit dependant on their forthcoming TB test at the end of the month, and whether we can find buyers in time.

It looks like the milk price might be picking up a little which always helps dairy farmer moral and in turn cow prices…so fingers crossed.

Phosphate credits

This is a bit of an outlier, I’ll try to explain.

In our area the waterways are high in phosphates.

That’s bad because high phosphates can cause excess algae blooms which then shade out the waterways and good things die / don’t thrive.

Building new houses, or rather the waste water families create by living in those new houses increase phosphates in waterways.

Understandably, Natural England and the Environment Agency don’t like that, so for new housing developments to be approved they have to offset the expected increase in phosphate production with a decrease somewhere else to be neutral or even provide a net reduction in nutrients potentially entering the waterways. (I hope I’ve understood the issue correctly, anyway, that’s my layman explanation).

We’re stopping dairy farming so we’re looking at signing an agreement with Natural England to never have cattle in our yards for the rest of eternity. (I think in our area, legally, eternity has been defined as 125 years, but whatever, it’ll be far beyond my time on the planet).

There’s a calculation to be made detailing how many kilos of phosphates the cows would / could have created if they were still here (or if we still had the option to have cattle here) and what percent of that might have made it’s way into the waterways.

That reduction in kgs of phosphates the cows could have created can then be sold to local house builders to offset the increase in phosphate production their new houses would cause.

…I’m sure there’s a better way to word all that, but hope that word soup made sense….and let’s pretend the sewage companies treat sewage properly

It’s a bit of an outlier of an opportunity, but potentially worth a decent amount of money so we’re going to pursue it and see where it ends up.

Given how difficult it can be to extract money from developers, and the likelyhood of the Government flip flopping rules to try and bolster their election hopes I have very little confidence it’ll result in money in the bank.

…but anyway we’ve had a report done, had a Zoom call with Natural England, and might find out around the end of the month if they’ll sign off the report.

It’ll then be onto finding developers that need the credits, and making sure our local council accept our credits scheme for developers….time will tell…. there’s a load of BS bureaucracy to navigate, but something that’s ticking over in the background, an agent is working on it on our behalf for a sizeable % cut, and if it works out if could be quite a game changer for us.

Field sales

It’s amazing how slow land and property transactions progress, but we think we’re in the final stages of selling a 12 acre field.

It’s sad to let it go, in an ideal world we wouldn’t have to sell anything, but whenever I summon the courage to glance at our bank balance it always confirms my fears that I’m not living in an ideal world, so the field is going.

Land is a great asset over the (very) long term, but it’s not very liquid when you want cash in the bank to pay bills!

Once complete it will give us a bit of capital to keep the mortgage ticking over for 12+ months allowing us to get on submitting planning applications on some of the sheds here.

Hopefully the sale is all closed out by the end of Jan and then in theory I should be slightly less panicked about finances in the short term at least!

It doesn’t sit naturally to be planning on burning through capital to pay for living costs.

All my life, well since early 20’s, I’ve been a saver and tried to build a nest egg / assets whenever I could, and now we’re selling assets to fund living costs…but if it works out it’s going to create a better life for us for the next chapter.

Planning applications

We’ve had a meeting with a land agent and our architect, we know what we want to submit but haven’t yet given the go ahead until we’ve got the field sale in… I’m not wanting to spend anything until we’got more runway from the field sale as we’re ticking over on fumes at the moment…or maybe I’m just being cautious…it is what it is :)

Farm consultants

We’ve just had a useful meeting with a farm consultant recommended by our accountants (if any farmers reading: Lily at Andersons, was definitely one of the better consultants I’ve spoken with over the past few years)…which prompted this post, just to continue documenting this journey to either freedom or bankruptcy!

There are some really useful grants available via the Sustainable Farming Initiative.

I’m not very trusting of the Government because they change their mind on things so often it’s hard to build out a longish term plan based on any support from them, plus we’re likely to get an election and change to Labour later this year, who might decide they hate farmers and landowners because we’re all SOOO privileged and cancel all these sustainable farming initiative grants…who knows.

(As an aside, if you’ve got 25mins, this is a refreshing take on the world by a global leader in comparison to our 2 party, same nonsense, political landscape.)

Up until this point I had been aware of the grants but had ignored them all as I didn’t want to submit myself to the world of pain of paperwork and bureaucracy they involve.

But they do look useful, especially for our new world we’re trying to create, I can see they deliver benefits to the environment, and I’ve heard from other farmers that they’re worth looking at…so look at them we will.

We might go down the route of having some bird friendly mixed fields, some mixed herbal leys that can still be grazed by cattle or made into hay, and do some work on protecting and enhancing our bits of woodland and hedges.

They all seem like pretty interesting projects, good for the planet, and if we can pick up a bit of money to cover our costs and time of doing it, it’s probably a decent thing to do - not enough to cover the mortgage, but hopefully if other things go well we’ll be paying down a load of that capital and reducing outgoings considerably.

If finances / National Grid allow we might well look at some solar panels as well and sell electricity back into the grid…rough ball park it looks like 100kw of solar panels might cost us about £100k and earn about £20k for 25yrs…ish, so a pretty good return, and once set up hopefully not too much input.

We’re very much looking at more passive income streams that still allow us some freedom with the kids.

Having spent the last 12 years tied to the needs of the cows, and running a glamping business that was always busy when they were on holiday, we really want a couple of years to make up for the past 12.

That one is going to be reliant on having some spare cash to invest, and at the moment I certainly don’t have that spare, so we’ll have to see how things progress.

Shed clearance and farmhouse improvements

We’re in the early stages of starting to clear down the sheds for planning applications - there’s 3 generations of treasure / crap in some of them, including what I believe could be nasty asbestos, and old chemicals - all sorts of crap for me to work through, I’m tackling some of the easier stuff and trying to build up my motivation.

The farmhouse is also pretty tired, it’s a nice old traditional stone long-house, which we need to make that look better for marketing purposes, if we end up having to sell it… so we’ve got a decorator lined up for next week to hopefully achieve some quick wins, and again…once I’ve got a bit more money in the bank, we’ll look at doing fairly vanilla refreshes of the kitchen and bathroom, both of which look like are from a house that’s been rented for 70 years…which to be fair they were up until a little while ago.

So we’ve got a few streams of activity we’re working on, nothing set in concrete, and no confirmed progress, but it’s moving in the right direction…I think…. and I’m glad I’ve rambled all of this out onto here.

At bare minimum we can look back at some point in the future and marvel at how far we’ve come, or look back in despair and pinpoint the exact moment we f*cked it all up :))