East Anglia team spirit

Jimmy Laurie might be in his 70s, but every morning he’s in the farmyard at 7am prompt to discuss the coming day with his two brothers, his son and his nephew.

All five men are partners in David Laurie & Sons – a 600ha (1500-acre) family-run arable farm in the village of Stuston, just outside the market town of Diss on the Norfolk-Suffolk border.

“I was born in the main farmhouse and I’m not ready to retire yet,” says Jimmy. “In fact, none of us want to retire – you’ll find all of us in the yard every weekday morning ready to work.”

Jimmy and his brothers, Roger and David, are all sons of David Laurie, who came to Stuston in the 1930s. Like many East Anglian farming families, they have Scottish roots. “Father brought the entire farm down on the train from Scotland,” says Jimmy.

Also in the yard is Jimmy’s son, another Laurie bearing the family name David. So is Roger’s son Jeremy. Both in their mid-30s, these two cousins form the younger generation of the family partnership.

Many family farms are run by partnerships involving husband and wife or father and son. But farms involving a partnership of five family members working together every day like this are altogether more unusual.

A year ago, the three brothers would have been able to veto most of the business decisions. But today, everyone has an equal say. And so that each person can put their point across face-to-face, all five men meet in the yard every morning.

“We’re going through a real transition at the moment,” says younger David. “Not so long ago I would have said Jimmy, Roger and David held the reins. But over the past six months I’ve taken on more responsibility for the farm side of things.”

The main farm enterprises are wheat, sugar beet, potatoes, barley, asparagus and field-scale herbs. There’s also a thriving farm shop, a wholesale fruit and vegetable business, and a Montessori nursery run by younger David’s sister Hannah.

Despite these diversifications, food production still forms the heart of the business. And although there are so many people involved, the family has much in common with other families in their pursuit of successful farming.

Each family member brings something different to the set-up. Younger David’s main responsibility extends to looking after the farm, while Jeremy’s main interest is the wholesale and herb enterprise, which he set up with David about eight years ago.

Jeremy explains: “We still have to justify the reasons for what we want to do and where we want to go with the business financially, but if we do so, our fathers and uncle David are quite happy for us to take the lead and they will go with us.”

Both cousins went to college for a year before returning to the farm. “When we started on the farm we were both dogsbodies,” says Jeremy. “Jobs were passed down and generally I got the worst because I was last in line.”

Gruelling apprenticeships – sometimes lasting decades before a junior family member can take his place within the partnership – are commonplace on many farms. But younger David is certain that they have their advantages.

“We’ve learned the farm from the bottom up,” he says. “We’ve both had to dig ditches by hand for weeks at a time. It has been hard work but it has its plus points – we certainly know where all the drains are!”

It also means the two cousins know that they have worked hard and earned the right to be treated as equals – just as the three brothers did with their father before them.

“Nothing really comes down to a vote,” says Jeremy. “One thing we’ve learned over the past 12 months is that everyone is entitled to express their opinion – whether it’s the same as the others or whether it’s different.

“We usually come to the right decision. There have been times when I think we’ve done something wrong but we are very open. You can’t afford to be shy coming forward, but at the same time your opinion is never thrown back at you.”

Reaching decisions like this might sound like management by committee, but David believes it has one major advantage over a farm run by a single decision-maker because everyone has to justify their thinking.

“It’s a good model because you never get single-tracked. You’re forced to think things through. You are always challenged from a different angle or asked why you haven’t thought of doing it another way.”

Opinions and ideas which cannot be justified end up being ditched. “Every decision we make is made this way – it’s how we run our business,” explains David. “But we always try to find a positive in everything we do.”

It turns out that there’s much more female involvement than is first apparent to the casual observer. David’s wife Tracey, for instance, helps to stock the farm shop and was the first to serve customers from behind the counter.

Then there are the shop sales, which are boosted with local jam made by David’s mother Avril and baking by Jeremy’s mother Diane. And Jeremy’s wife Debbie can often be found preparing herb orders for customers late into the night.

The sales and marketing skills of all female family members will be called upon again over the coming months to help plan the layout of a bigger farm shop which is due to open this summer in time for Open Farm Sunday on 1 June.

“In many ways, I don’t think we give the women the credit they deserve,” admits David. “They don’t sit in on board meetings, but having a female point of view has proved vital when it comes to making something like the shop a success.”

New ideas are crucial. “We’re always keen to push the business forward,” says Jeremy. “But sometimes we find we have too many ideas about what we could be doing when we ought to be concentrating on what are doing.”

Recent ideas which received the thumbs-up have included the establishment of a suckler herd and a flock of black-faced Suffolk sheep. Meat from the livestock will be sold in the farm shop.

A flock of free-range chickens already supplies the shop with eggs. This year the farm will start rearing turkeys for the Christmas market. The Higher Level Stewardship scheme has helped with the establishment of an orchard.

All of this is welcomed by the older generation, who have more than 150 years of farming experience between them. “You have lots of ideas when you’re young,” says Jimmy. “We’re lucky they are so involved.”

But the older men remain involved. The secret to working this way successfully is for each person to have a clearly defined role, explains Jimmy – whether it is combining, fertiliser dressing or drilling.

Jimmy’s role these days mainly revolves around form-filling and completing paperwork. “I make sure we have one meeting each week where we decide which cheques we’re going to pay.”

In an age when many farmers’ sons don’t want anything to do with the family farm, the Lauries are lucky in that a fourth generation of the family could be waiting in the wings – both cousins have young children of their own.

“There was never any pressure on us to come into the farm and there certainly won’t be any pressure on them either,” says David. “But I think at the back of your mind there’s always the thought that it would be rather nice if they did.”