Opinion: Farming on edge of the city has more ups than downs

I love living where I do. Our little corner of Buckinghamshire is exceptionally pretty, which is why, I understand, my great-grandfather chose this spot to lay down roots in the late 1800s.

It’s just 24 miles to the centre of the Big Smoke (aka London), yet in a scene of bucolic tranquillity checking my heifers grazing just above the tube station, I look over Chesham.

See also: Opinion – farming under attack from cyberattacks and AI

About the author

Ben Harman

Ben Harman is a fourth-generation mixed farmer of 360ha in the Chilterns. He owns the UK’s oldest herd of Charolais, as well as Salers and a meat brand, Chagyu (Charolais cross Wagyu). He is chairman of the NBA and Checs, and is a Beef and Lamb board member at Red Tractor and AHDB.

Read more articles by Ben Harman

A church steeple and smoking chimney pots nestle below the chalky banks where ana­camptis orchids and discarded bottles of cider spring out of the pasture with equal persistence.

Five strands of barbed wire separate the youngstock from the railway embankment – or at least would do, if they hadn’t been cut… again. 

I used to think the cutting was done by miscreant kids, but it’s been going on for so long they would have grown up and moved somewhere they could afford the rent.

Legal & General recently named this town the best place to retire in the UK, but I don’t recall them informing their pensionable investors that as part of any retirement plan they should buy a pair of bolt croppers.

They need to be just small enough to fit in the poacher’s pocket of their Barbour as the pesky local farmer insists on attempting to keep his stock contained within the pastures in summer by having a boundary fence stretching between the multitude of public footpaths that crisscross the farm.

So many footpaths, in fact, that viewed from above, they resemble the Tube map displayed in the station below.

The inconvenience of a barbed wire fence is only a minor hindrance to our intrepid pensioner, armed with a chocolate Labrador, a breaking-and-entering kit and a determination to exert a right to roam that they misread about in the Daily Mail.

It’s a bit of a relief when the cattle come in for winter, as they mostly remain secure within the steading.

The heifers, though, spend their first winter a few miles away on the most remote corner of the farm where they run across an old quarry reclaimed in the 1970s.

They have a barn to shelter in, though less from the weather and more from the 4x4s whose riders, armed with angle-grinders, chop the padlocks to access the 116-acre arable field beyond.

Not for hare-coursing, though. I haven’t seen a hare in a couple of years as the burgeoning population of red kites seem to have taken all the leverets.

No, they come because it’s a great open space to race round, the chance of being caught is slim, and the probability of real consequence slimmer still.

Less than half a mile north of the farmyard lies the invisible border that snakes between home county shires. Tantalisingly close, only 500ft from the edge of my fields, lie the sunlit uplands of Hertfordshire and the relative safety of TB4 country.

Here, on the edge of the edge area, we are about to embark on our annual TB and Checs tests, after which we’ll head to Camden for the 12th gig of the year so far.

Just 26 minutes on the West Coast Mainline will have us in a friend’s restaurant for cocktails, then bouncing around the Electric Ballroom like only someone with either half my age or twice the flexibility should.

It’s not all beer and skittles living on the edge of not-always-civilised civilisation, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.