My father in law is due to retire in a couple of years and i would love to take over. The problem lies in the fact that he looks after young stock from a local dairy farm. On the dairy farm are 2 lads mad about farming so i think they'll take over this task.

 

If anyone knows anyone who could advise me on what i could do with this small farm (90 acres) could you please post their details here.

 

 

Thanks

N

Time for a quizzing first I'm afraid!

Where abouts in the country are you? What is the farm down to at the moment? (Permanent grass, or cultivatable). What buildings are there? What is your background and experience? What is the typical farming around you? And what are looking for from the farm? (Full time and all your income from it, lifestyle choice with money behind you, or just keeping the farm in the family while you work full time elsewhere.)

Sorry if it sounds intrusive, but we'll all chip in our ideas, and the more we know, the more helpful it might be!

Not intrusive at all. i appreciate your interest.

So.....  were in cheshire so its predominately dairy here. The farm used to be a dairy farm but the parlours gone as has one of the sheds. Were left with a modern 40m x20m shed. The land is all grass and at the moment a little wet! the soil is clay.

Ideally i'd like to work full time and have it as my main source of income. I'd always worked on my uncles farm which i'd hoped to be a part of but he went and had a son! i studied agriculture at reaseheath in 2001 but since 2003 have been a builder! so i have a base of knowledge but think theres quite a few things i've forgotten

 

Cheers

I'm in a mainly arable area, so others on here are more qualified to suggest things for you. I know someone who moved with his family to Devon on a similar sized farm, and makes a very good go of it. He's a very practical person, and some of his income isn't from actually growing things, he'll turn out to help anyone who needs an extra pair of hands, but he has planted trees, rears organic poultry, makes hay and has made a very pleasant life for himself.

What's the horsey market like around you? I don't necessarily mean having hundreds of them on the farm, but I think you have a lot of towns fairly close to you, and growing and supplying really good hay and haylage can be a nice niche. It's proper farming, growing and harvesting a crop, with a decent return if you can get good relationships with the right small stables. If there's the money around, a small liveries could work. Just a few stables, built well and looking pretty, with everything done (at an extortionate rate!) for wealthy women to just turn up and have their horse ready to go!

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what you might do.

bovril:

If there's the money around, a small liveries could work. Just a few stables, built well and looking pretty, with everything done (at an extortionate rate!) for wealthy women to just turn up and have their horse ready to go!

 

It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what you might do.

Just to re-iterate what Bovril said there - my friend's livery bill for this week was nearly £60. She mucks it out, feeds and waters it, all the farm does is provide a stable, the hay and straw. Do the sums! Another friend sold a couple of round bales of haylage for £45 a piece. Normally around the £20 mark but still, if you can get the grass cut, turned and baled into some good quality feed, you should be pretty sorted.

Good advice from others so far. Can I suggest that you ruthlessly focus on 'margin' not on turnover. That will mean that you will end up doing a number of niche things rather than one big thing. Some of the things you do might be seasonal.

Always make sure your service/product is better than average overall. (Becoming sucessful usually comes about after years of being better than average and gradually climbing up into the upper quartile and then into the top ten per cent.)

For example you can do high spec poultry all year with a decent margin but if you target only the Christmas market with direct selling your margin will be huge. Just to labour this point a little. If you provide high spec poultry all year you cannot then simply beef up your prices for Christmas as your customers will feel ripped off. The point  is therefore, that you will need to focus your efforts not only on the product but on the market you are aiming at.

Another market, as has been mentioned is the livery one but here again, do not sell on price. You do not want customers who think of you as being 'cheap.' That kind of customer will always go to the next cheapest.

Specialist veg is a good bet but you must have outlets ready. It is never any good producing something and then wasting hours and hours looking for someone to buy it. In the old industries such as agriculture it doesn't work that way.

As to is it worth it? The satisfaction from being, to a large extent, master of your own destiny is worth it.

I bet as a proportion, there are more employed people wishing they had their own business, than there are self-employed wishing they were employed by someone else.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Wells:

Can I suggest that you ruthlessly focus on 'margin' not on turnover.

Good point, but can I sugest you focus on enjoying your life rather than be a slave to the last penny?

No point mucking about with chickens if you dont like chickens. No point running an organic goat milk yoghurt facility if none of that it your thing.

A lot will depend on how much you need to make to live - how much rent will it cost you etc to live, pay mortgage, feed and clothe kids etc. But with 90ac, any traditional stock farm will really need some kind of "bolt on" to keep the heaters on in winter - many have been sugested but also things like B&B. Many are going to depend where you are in relation to a town / city.

Endless possibilites though. Enjoy choosing one.

Thanks for the input! There are a heck of a lot of people trying to capture the horsey market around us with a huge amount of liveries springing up. I do like the idea of the horse feed Market though. Ideally i'd like to go in to dairy but the size of the farm and huge start up cost are off putting I had thought of something like contract calf rearing or beef. As I've always been involved in the dairy industry this is where my skills lie. With regard to being self employed I already run my own business and feel priviliged to do so but have always hoped to go back to farming and feel that if I don't do it now I'm going to be too old. To answer my own question I do think it would be worth it. I just need the right business plan to take to my father in law!

Of course it is worth it. Quite a few of us on here started off with nothing - and I dare say some of us will end up with nothing too, but enjoyed the journey.

Do not give up the day job. In your case, keep the building business and go slowly on the farming side. Very much low key to begin with and gradually move to part-time then if you are still keen full-time. Whereupon you will have a dramatic fall in disposable income. All this, if I read you correctly, is dependent upon your FIL. I could never, ever have gone to my FIL with the sort of proposal you need to persuade him. I do not know your FIL of course, but you want to be 110% certain he will accept what you have to offer before even broaching it with him. A rejection is going to damage relationships a lot more than if he simply smacked you across the mouth wiht his fist. Any chance of your wife sounding out things in a very, very nonchalant way?

I like Tesla'ssuggestion of enjoying life. We are only here once. It took me a long time to realise that whilst I thoroughly enjoy cattle and had up to about 400 head at one time, I make a better job of small stock. Problem is, I do not know why.

Buy some good quality dairy heifers calves from a dispersal sale rear them well, put them in calve to top quality sexed bull, calve them, sell them and start again with the calf. A good system if done right without the hassle of milking 365 days.

I really like this last idea and it's something I intend to look at. Although I was always led to believe the margins on this are really small, but I suppose most things are in farming!

n1q, That last sentence proves you are made of the right stuff. A very sensible attitude, because unfortunately you are right.

n1q:

but I suppose most things are in farming

Nope. Many things are large:

1) Overdrafts.

2) Arable kit.

and this year and probably next year, returns and margins from wheat and oilseed rape. And I mean seriously large.

If you are keeping the job, then you will want simple farming system, which will probably mean small margin. If you ditch the job, you can spend more time adding value / complexity - ie organic goat daairy yoghurt etc - which will make a larger margin. So it comes down to, do you want to invest a lot of time and effort in a niche startup, or just muck about with some beasts on the side of your exisiting job?

If you you can turn out consistently healthy, quality stock and build up a name for doing so then you should be able to turn a good profit in raising dairy heifers. In Cheshire you would have a large amount of buyers and if thats where your skills and heart lie then you should look into it. There was an article in the farmers gaurdian (i think) a few months ago with a farmers who had sold his herd and was doing this.

Thanks for the help. Just need to get the family onside now!

Had a look at this?

first what are the dairy youngstock rearing enterprise leaving in profit, is there room to grow this business? milk is king done well but can be v easy to do badly! be cautious with niche marketing or livery especially during a recession. good luck, bob

Cheers Bob.

 

Milk would be ideal but i couldnt raise the huge amount of investment needed,

more importantly the wife doesnt like that idea!

dont let capital levels put you off as there are any gods amount of milking parlours and tanks sitting doing nothing, non pedigree stock isnt much different cost wise to beef cattle either. starting small and growing is best option in any venture say 25/30 cows thats min 12 heifers in year 1

n1q, I do not disagree with ayrshire bull, but at the same time do not go in for something that either you or your wife does not want to do. Coming up to 40 years married I know that I need my wife to continue doing her job of first looking after me, second looking after the ornamentals on the place, and third looking after the farming side in an emergency. Lose that and you are doomed to failure. Apart from that, if you are farming something that you are doing just because it pays better, then it is no different to a job. You do it because you have to. You will not be enjoying life as it should be lived, and consequently you will not be doing as good a job as you can. First and foremost, farm something you really want to do, and then live within whatever income that gives you. You will live a long time.

does your good lady have an interest in the potenial new start up or is this from a work/life balance that she thinking about? few things to bare in mind are does she work and if so is it 9-5 or shift or what ever? yes the dairying is prob the most tying but also ur joining family for 3 meals a day and can arrange work load around other halfs time off. i take old mac's point, however remember that the cost of living is increasing, and not all sectors are able to keep up, on the other hand if the farming is the second job then its got to be easy managed, crop it end of debate but u got to do as much as possible with out contractors or they will run away with ur margin!

She has an interest but ultimately doesnt want the ties that come with dairy farming.

Like old mac says if were both not happy with the balance then its doomed to fail.

She works elsewhere so it wouldnt need to cover both our incomes. (fortunately).

As for cropping, the land here is quite heavy and stays wet all winter and were quite limited on the machinery side.

People alredy keep horses here and its no great money spinner as there are quite a few in the local area and the people can be around when you dont want them to be.

I think i'll have to get a job on a local farm before i commit to working at home for myself as a refresher. I think the building skills ive learned have pushed farming knowledge out!

 

n1q, have you considered sheep ? They would largely look after themselves for most of the year, so you could continue working if that's what you want. I certainly wouldn't like to try and live off 90 acres with any type of farming, but sheep could provide a modest income without taking over your life.( except for 3/4 wks lambing time ). You could even have a few suckler cows, but don't expect them to make a profit.

It all boils down to why you're doing this. Is it for the way of life or a serious business proposition ? As someone has already said, keeping animals that you're not interested in is no different to going to work each day. The only way farming is bearable is if you enjoy what you're doing. Farmers who don't enjoy their work are invariably bad at it.

sheep!!! bjesus they dont look after themselves thats for sure! sorry i missed the soil type earlier cropping not a great option then, a few beef cows then is likely to be a good option though dont expect them to bring forward that early retirement plan, in fact they'll be better a reducing ur tax bill from the building trade lol.

My uncle kept sheepl. I'm not sure if it was his bad fencing but we seemed to spend the time in-between milking chasing them around Cheshire! So after that we don't really get on. I know there isn't a huge amount of money to be made but running my own farm is something I never thought I'd get the chance to do so I intend to grasp it with both hands. Not like the people on A farmers life for me! I don't know why I called this forum is it worth it because I already know the answer!