Famer Focus: Selling direct makes small family farm viable

Things haven’t been easy to get where we are today, but we finally feel like things are coming together.

We scanned our outdoor lambing flock, which is up 17% on last year’s scan, to 169%, so that’s great, especially since a lot of flocks are scanning lower than normal this year.

There were only a few triplets too, which should make outdoor lambing easier.

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About the author

Louise Elkington

Louise Elkington runs 500 breeding ewes and a small suckler herd in Lincolnshire with husband Chris. Gelston Lamb sells all meat produced on the farm through pop-up shops, deliveries and catering. They have 54ha (133 acres) of grass on a farm business tenancy and agreements for stubble turnips and hay aftermaths.

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The extra lambs will be needed as we are selling more each year privately through our farm butchery.

We built the butchery in September 2019 to make our lambs into burgers to sell at events, as it was becoming difficult to find a butcher to make them in large numbers for us.

March 2020 brought a national lockdown, and all our events were cancelled.

Cue mad panic about how we were going to get our flock of sheep to support our family and pay for the butchery we had just put in.

With people not wanting to go to the supermarkets, we decided to start a home delivery service.

The demand for our lamb boxes was amazing and we sold out every week. It kept us going during all the lockdowns.

Fast-forward to 2023 and we now supply lots of local restaurants and a few shops, including some local Co-op stores, plus we have all our events and country shows where we sell our award-winning burgers.

With a week to go until lambing, we decided to push ourselves further by doing a pop-up shop at the farm. I got a few local businesses on board and had their fabulous produce for sale alongside our fresh meat.

Chris made a joke the night before about it being like Jeremy Clarkson’s farm shop with people queuing to get in.

Little did we know that by 9.10am we would have just that at our stand, and shortly after, people were waiting to park their cars.

The support was amazing, and we are still in shock about how many people came to support us and bought literally everything we had.

Selling direct is hard work, but when you get such wonderful feedback it makes it all worthwhile and makes our small family farm a viable entity.