BUSINESS ON THE FARM


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ON THE FARM WITH RICH AT RISBURY


Each month Richard Thomas will join us to talk about life on his family farm in North Herefordshire, where they farm beef, sheep, arable and apples. Their ethos is to try to farm in a more regenerative style for the benefit of future generations.


There is always a lot of time to think when you spend time on your own. Walking, or running, or indeed farming.


We are a sector of industry that is well known for isolation, but as for everyone, with the advent of technology, most notably the mobile phone and earphones, the world has got a lot smaller. We can listen to podcasts, or music or simply talk to our friends, something that is especially important at the moment.


I was listening to the Farmers Weekly podcast this week and they interviewed a lady called Samantha Seaman who talked about the challenges in agriculture. In particular, the things we tend to worry about are things we cannot control; the weather, government policies, market prices, crop failures and poor yields to name a few. We need to shift our focus to things we can control, how many animals we have, what crops we grow, how we manage those animals and crops, can we change our business to work with current policy and the grants and funding that is available.


We may disagree with government policy, or how we are treated by our big retail customers, but worrying about it is futile and we often have more options than we think.


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In June we were starting to feel the effects of the dry weather. I thought to myself that it would be tough if we didn’t get rain in July. Then, at the end of July the farming chatter was a bit more weather focussed, thinking that we really do need rain in August and here we are with little to no rain in the forecast and even if it does rain, we are three to four weeks away from grass.


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