Recently I’ve been thoroughly enjoying a series on the telly called “A farmers life for me”. Nine couples are given the opportunity to win a 25 acre farm in England. All of them are as green as the grass about farming but all have the passion and gusto to win a farm. Jimmy, a well-known friend of Jamie Oliver and who is a pig farmer himself is the judge and the jury on who to send home each week. The couples are to turn their farming experience through a series of challenges into a business to pay the bill at the end of the month. The thing he stressed the most was that farming was not so much about farming but about running a business. One of the things I took out of it was a simple statement Jimmy made at the beginning. If your farm does not pay your bills then you are only a hobby farmer. Making your farm earn money is a hard full time job and it’s been the aged old question to us here at pine haven. I can supplement our income which I am doing through the Farmstays, calve sales and eggs sales but could I survive on it? Definitely not, which brings me to thinking about how I could change that? Turning the raw products you produce into a marketable item in an unsaturated area is the goal. Sounds much more easily said than done. That is my challenge to try. Someday in the future I will be making cheese. We will have a cheese making outbuilding. Maybe then I will be able to change the title I have as a hobby farmer. Until then I plan to continue learning and growing.
This series is good viewing and I whole heartily recommend the BBC production.
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