Farmers
An
abstract for each of the
ten farmers interviews are presented below. The abstracts are ordered
by
the
date of the interview. Five farmers were interviewed in May or June
2002: Marilyn
Ivings, Jane Bowler, Clive Hawes, David
Orpwood, Charles Peers. Another
five
farmers were interviewed in December 2002 or January 2003: Chris
Freeman, Daphne
Saunders, Christopher Lewis, Mark Howard, Michael
Soanes.
The interview form or record for
each farmer gives further details about each farmer and where they
farm. The
farmers were interviewed in semi-structured interviews using a questionnaire.
Marilyn Ivings
Marilyn Ivings
didn’t come from a farming background; her family lived in Bristol, her
father was a plumber and her mother a dressmaker and home maker.
Marilyn says
she wanted to work outside and went into farming as ‘at school I didn’t
pass my
Latin ‘O’ level. I wanted to be a vet’. She answered an advert in
Farmers
Weekly and became a live-in herd’s woman on a farm two miles from where
she
farms now. The Ministry of Agriculture gave her a scholarship and she
went to
agricultural college in Somerset. Upon leaving she returned to the farm
and met her
husband Ted, a local farmer, while planting kale. Marilyn worked with
her
husband as a farmer, growing cereals, keeping pigs, cattle and a dairy
over the
years. These days they grow cereals for bread, biscuits or feed
and keep
cattle which are sold directly to a supermarket. Marilyn also keeps
some
chickens and ducks, selling the eggs at the door and locally. She also
enjoys
life off the farm, singing in amateur opera productions and has also
served in
the local branch of the National Farming Union. She says of
farming ‘I’ve
been very fortunate, you know I’ve loved every minute of it so, it’s worked’. However Marilyn doesn’t expect her
grown-up
children to return to farming: ‘They've got good jobs, as I say, with
good
money, and really they're better off, doing what they're doing. None of
them is
temperamentally suited to coming back, and
slogging
for nothing’. What will happen to their farm in future? She says ‘well
when we
pop our clogs I have an idea that the whole lot will be lotted
up and sold, and we shall have some very rich children’.
Marilyn was 61 years old when interviewed in May 2002 at Mill Farm,
Church Enstone, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Marilyn Ivings interview
Read the
interview form
for Marilyn Ivings interview
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Jane Bowler
Jane Bowler
was
born into a
farming family. Her father had a mixed farm with a dairy and he was a
coal
merchant during the winter months. She left school age fifteen to milk
the
cows. But her father didn’t want to borrow money to modernise the dairy
and so
he sold most of the farm. Its land was divided by the increasingly busy
road
between Oxford and Wantage.
Jane’s father
retained the smaller part of the farm; just twelve acres. Jane then
worked
outside the farm but continue to rear pigs. It seems it’s something
she’s
always been doing, in fact she says ‘there’s a photograph at my dads
with me
when I was about two, bottle feeding a, a little piglet’. Jane and her
husband
built a bungalow on part of the farm as their home. They found that
despite
their best efforts it was not possible to produce pigs profitably as
the sale
price was less than the cost of raising the pigs. Jane was one of the
founders
of Ladies In Pigs, an organisation which
set out to
promote pork and network pig producers. Jane and her husband started to
produce
pork from pigs fed on feed free from growth promoters (antibiotics).
Initially
she sold the meat to local butchers and advertised it in the local
papers using
the phase ‘I’m Free’. Their pork is now sold at their farm shop,
converted from
what was their garage. She is a keen supporter of farmers markets and
local
food initiatives. Jane has two children, one of which, James, is the
butcher in
the farm shop. He husband works on the farm and formerly worked for a
feed
company.
Jane was 50 years old when interviewed in May 2002 at Dews Meadow Farm, East
Hanney, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Jane Bowler’s interview
Read the
interview form for Jane Blowler’s interview
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Clive Hawes
Clive Hawes
parents were
farmers and he remembers being taken milking with his mother at about
three
years old. At that time they had a mixed farm. His father kept
pedigree
cattle for which he won County prizes. Clive kept sheep, having his
first sheep
at age seven and about a thousand by the time he left school. He’d also
work as
a shearer on local farms. Clive’s father died when he was eighteen. The
dairy
was closed and he concentrated on arable and sheep farming. He
developed other
business interests including livestock trading. He’d visit the
livestock
markets often and says they created ‘a very healthy community, that's
what I
used to enjoy, that’s to me what it was about, you know, mixing,
interacting’
and he regrets the closure of most markets. Clive has diversified into
various
non-farming activities including managing property development on his
farm
holdings and a nursing home which he runs with his wife. The M40
motorway now
runs next to his farm and he says the village of Little Chesterton where he lives is now
‘suburbia’. Clive’s sheep at Grange Farm were infected during the 2001
Foot and
Mouth outbreak. They were killed and burnt on a pyre at the farm. He
also had
sheep in Lincolnshire which were culled to prevent them
starving due to
movement restrictions. People sent letters of support to him during the
outbreak and the local metal detecting club, who used his land, held a
collection for the family. Clive and his wife Carol have two children.
He hopes
his sons may continue farming but recommends farming in France,
which he visits regularly, and where he keeps some sheep.
Clive was 48
years old when interviewed in May 2002 at Grange Farm, Little
Chesterton, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Clive Hawe's interview
Read the
interview form for Clive Hawe’s interview
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David Orpwood
David Orpwood
used to worked on a farm as a teenager to earn pocket money; he recalls
South
Oxfordshire and ‘one of those old fashioned Easter holidays, when
it was
cold and snowy and everything, and it was a horrendous bloody job, but
in the
last few days, weather was fantastic and ... [it] just got me’.
After
attending agricultural college, David worked at a farm running an
outdoor pig
herd and set up his own in 1979, buying two hundred sows. The size of
the herd
increased to about thirteen hundred in 1993. He had also joined a
marketing
company, Thames Valley Pigs, as a director. However changes in the pig
market
including, he says, an over supply of pig meat and collapsing
international
economies, lead to reduce prices and he lost out. David stood for
election in
1999 to the National Farmers Union for Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and was
appointed
its President. The foot and mouth crisis of 2001 were for him ‘the last
straw’
adding to his former losses. The restrictions on the movement of
livestock
meant he couldn’t sell his pigs. He therefore decided to leave farming.
Instead
he used his experience and contacts to set up a company Local Food for
Local
People. David’s wife is a chief who’s cooked for, amongst others, the
royal
family, MPs and senior businessmen. David met her while she was setting
up a
local restaurant and living in the farmhouse on the farm where he kept
his
pigs. They met in the farmyard one day and ‘it went on from there,
really’.
They have three children, the oldest sixteen, and the youngest twelve.
David was 49 years old when interviewed in June 2002 at Woods Farm,
Watlington, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of David Orpwood's interview
Read the
interview form for David Orpwood's interview
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Charles
Peers
Charles Peers
says his
forbears came to Oxfordshire in the 1700s; they made their fortune in
the
East India Company. They were members of the cloth and benefactors for
local
schools and churches. His father was a farmer, the first in the family,
at
their seven hundred acre estate at Little Hampton, near Stadhampton.
After
National Service, Charles studied agriculture at the County Institute
in
Northamptonshire, where he also met his wife. He worked on his father's
estate
and took it on in 1966. Finding substantial debts, Charles decided to
sell up
and move to a smaller farm, but one with better quality land. He has a
strong
sense of place saying that he wouldn’t have considered leaving
Oxfordshire: ‘I
couldn’t move out of Oxfordshire that would be … heresy’. Besides
farming,
Charles ran an agricultural contracting business at one time and he has
now
diversified into holiday accommodation, and office accommodation;
presently let
to the local branch of the National Farmers Union. The farm currently
produces
beef cattle, cereals –wheat, oats and barley, and eggs from chickens.
One of
his two sons works on the farm and they have now formed a family
partnership
including his wife. Most of the farm is now farmed by a former farming
colleague, who rents most of it, with Charles giving some advice and
direction.
Charles started farming cereals organically in the late 1970s/ early
1980s,
finding that it was more profitable than conventional crops. Later he
started
to rear beef cattle organically. He has served as a parish and district
Councillor, a school Governor and at the time of the interview he was
the
Chairman of the organic certification body, the Organic Farmers and
Growers. He
says the public needs to realise that if they want farmers to conserve
the
countryside then they need to pay for it: ‘because I have to live’.
Charles was
63 years old when interviewed in June 2002 at Views Farm, Great Milton,
Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Charles Peers interview
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interview form for Charles Peers interview
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Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
says he had no
hesitation becoming a farmer and he’s committed to farming for the rest
of his
life. His father farmed and ran a coach and haulage business. One
of his
Chris’s sons works with him on the farm as the herdsman. They milk the
cows
twice a day at five o’clock in the morning and the afternoon; there’s
also
feeding, clean out, and bedding up to do. Chris is very proud of his
herd of three
hundred and twenty pedigree Holsteins which won him six prizes in 2002. He’s
artificially
inseminated his Holsteins, importing semen from abroad, mostly Canada or America. He
now undertakes contracting work and studied reproductive techniques at Bristol University. During
the Foot and Mouth outbreak he quarantined the cows as best he could;
he recalls
leaving the farm only once in four months. The herd is feed grass and
fodder
maize, which Chris grows. Contractors plough and then plant the maize
and Chris
harvests it. One of the changes Chris has seen in dairying is the size
of the
herd needed to be economically viable: ‘in ‘70s when I started farming,
sixty
cows you could make a living out of, you’ve got a job with six hundred
now, you
know’. Perhaps this explains why Chris is selling his farm, where he
farms 260
acres, to farm eleven hundred acres on a tenant farm in Sussex. Chris
has been active with Farmers for Action and attended demonstrations at
supermarkets and their distribution depots. The village where Chris
farms, Goosey,
has seen a spate of family farms being sold; they can’t make ends meet.
The
farms are ’being bought by London business men, with city money’.
Chris was 48 years old when interviewed in December 2002 at Goosey House Farm,
Goosey, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Chris Freeman’s interview
Read the
interview form
for Chris Freeman’s interview
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Daphne
Saunders
Although
Daphne
Saunders's
parents were farmers, she started her career as a researcher in
irradiation and
entomology. She met her husband, Pat, at a dance organised by Faringdon
Young
Farmers when she was nineteen but it wasn’t until four years later that
they ‘got
together’. Her parent’s welcomed Pat’s farming background: ‘my father
was
immediately talking prices of calves and prices of wheat and everything
else
and it just seemed so natural’. Step Farm, Faringdon, where Daphne and
Pat farm
belongs to the National Trust. They farm one thousand five hundred
acres organically,
growing cereals, vegetables and rearing beef and dairy cows. They’ve
received a
dedication from the Soil Association for their twenty years of organic
production. Daphne’s particular skill is marketing but four other
people,
besides the Saunders family, are employed on the farm. In the
summer there are
extra labourers, from abroad, provided by an agency. Finding
agricultural
labourers is difficult says Daphne, between Swindon and Oxford ‘there’s
not a person
who wants to come and work on the farm, who wants to get his hands
dirty’. Daphne
was first approached by a supermarket in 1990 to supply organic milk.
She was
incensed by their unfair buying practices and organised an organic milk
producer’s group that became OMSCO, The Organic Milk Supplier’s Co-op.
However,
today over supply in the organic milk market means that their milk
selling
price is less than production costs. Daphne’s neighbouring farmer Chris
Lewis,
is growing a Genetically Modified crop: ‘it’s a great worry’ she says,
‘I don’t
see why he, should just decide where he’s going to put his crops and
then … we
can’t possibly grow the same crop … because we might have cross
contamination’.
Daphne was 62 years old when
interviewed at her home at Wood
House,
Faringdon, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Daphne Saunders interview
Read the
interview form
for Daphne Saunders interview
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Christopher
Lewis
After a
couple
of years of military
service in London, Christopher Lewis decided to farm as he didn’t like
city
life and he didn’t want to work for anybody else. He’s been farming for
forty two
years and his present farm is six smaller farms which have been
amalgamated
into one. He farms two thousand acres, of which he owns five hundred as
a
family partnership. His step-son is the head of the farm, which employs
four
people. Part of the farm includes land next to the river Thames which
works
well for grassing and attracts a grant for conservation measures. About
seven
or eight years ago a pig unit on the farm was losing increasing amounts
of
money and was closed; some of the empty buildings remain today. The pig
unit
was highly mechanised and in the top ten percent of producers for
efficient pig
production. Christopher blames foreign competition for his loses,
especially
from subsidised pig farming in Denmark. He’s sceptical about diversifying his
farm
production further. He’s disturbed by people trespassing on his land
and
refutes complaints about smells or noise from neighbours in the
village.
Christopher volunteered to be part of the Government’s Farm Scale
Evaluation of
Genetically Modified crops after the Royal Agricultural Society of
England
was approached; he was one of it’s Council members. He grows GM maize
and oil
seed rape. At a village meeting people were very angry and he says ‘I
felt a
little bit like a Jew with a shop in the middle of Germany
in the late thirties … being vilified for all the wrong
reasons’. There have been
several occasions when anti-GM protestors have damaged his crops at
night.
Christopher was 68 years old
when interviewed in Jaunary 2003 at Glebe
Farm, Hinton Waldrist, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Christopher Lewis's interview
Read the
interview form
for Christopher Lewis's
interview
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Mark Howard
Mark
Howard
returned from
studying agriculture at university to take on his father’s farm in
Wendlebury. When
Mark took on the farm, twenty four years ago then they employed a total
of six
people; now there are no employees, and contractors do most of the work
with
Mark pitching in as needed. Mark raises beef cattle, fifty at present,
from
three months old and sells them at two years old as fat cattle at Thame
Market.
He says ‘the farm now feels very empty’, at one time the farm had a
dairy herd
but ‘once the dairy cows go, it does feel, very much like a ghost farm,
because
there is a lot of activity with dairy farming … with the whole of
agriculture,
there is this, this change where, where people, where living things are
going
off the land and certainly in Oxfordshire here, I mean it’s becoming
almost
like a livestock desert … it’s becoming very quiet, which is almost
eerie’. Marks
has diversified by letting some of the farm buildings for either
storage or a
running small business; being next to the M40 motorway and A34 junction
helps
with this but the ‘tranquillity has been spoiled’. In the middle of the
farm is
thirteen acre ancient woodland that is a county wildlife site. Mark
bought a
farm in France between Bordeaux and Toulouse twelve years ago. It grows asparagus,
carrots, sugar
beet and tobacco. Mark visits every other month and he’s employed a
local farm
manager throughout. They converse in French, but he finds it difficult
to communicate on occassion. Mark is studying for an MBA in
agricultural
and food
industries.
Mark was 42 years old when he
was interviewed in January 2003 at Weston
Park Farm, Weston-on-the-Green, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Mark Howard’s interview
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interview form
for Mark Howard’s interview
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Michael Soanes
Michael Soanes
farmed 300
acres with his father at Royal
Oak farm, Beckley. They reared sheep and free range
chickens and grow
cereals. Prices were falling and interest rates increasing. When his
father
retired after ill health Michael bought his father out. They
converted
a disused building into a farm shop. They sold the farmhouse and
farmland which
helped meet some of their bank debts. Michael now works in the farm
shop and part-time
at a supermarket, mainly cooking. Michael’s wife Natalie sells home
made cakes
at farmers markets. They have three children, the oldest is nine.
Michael
recalls when he was a boy ‘I was out with dad when I was six, seven
years old,
all the time, you know, five in the morning milking, go in doors, have
breakfast, go to school, come back out, straight back on the farm’. But
childhood on a farm is different now ‘they’re much more dangerous now
cause … it’s
not hand work, it’s all machinery ... small children are not allowed to
get
near’. In Michael’s lifetime the village of Beckley has changed ‘the
village
has always been about five or six hundred people … I bet there isn’t
more,
than, twelve or thirteen village families left, whereas there would
have been,
seventy or eighty’. New people have come to the village ‘the village
families
which would have been, mainly country workers … their sons and
daughters have
had to move to the cities, to get work … then the professional people
have come
out from the city … their salaries were good, and they’ve come and
bought all
the houses … some villages look lovely, cause there’s money in them
now,
whereas there wasn’t before’.
Michael was 49 years old when
interviewed in January 2003 at Royal
Oak Farm Shop, Beckley, Oxfordshire.
Read
the
transcript of Michael Soanes interview
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interview form
for Michael Soanes interview
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