For nearly a quarter of a century, I was an investment manager in London. One of those overpaid bankers but I was on the "buy side" when it was almost impossible to make a mistake, bond yields were falling, and stock prices were rising. We looked like genius when in reality it was the tide that was raising us all. I was very very lucky, I worked for a dedicated group of overachievers. We even outperformed the market. Compensation was out of this world, but 7 years ago I decided after a health scare that I would do something else with my life.
Four kids who were grown, and a few grandchildren on the way, and my wife and I decided to go home. We are both from Norfolk and the price of arable land had been dropping for years. I had for the past few years become very concerned about real assets, as opposed to shares and bonds, I guess it was the return to our home county was driven by a desire for a change, and so in 2017 I decided to purchase family-owned farmland...with nearly 600 acres of land.
So farming is not a small business kind of thing. Because it was family-owned I got a deal and only paid five million pounds (about $ 6 million), which included some farm equipment, a number of equipment sheds, and a small stately home (which had been built by one of my wife's great great great grandfather). We had a plan to build a commercial farm, because almost everyone in the City (the financial district in London) knew that Brexit would be a disaster, and that's not taking into account the impact of the embargo with Russia, and Covid.
Our plan was threefold, build a generalist farm that would provide high-valued goods to the UK during the transition from Euro dependency for agricultural goods and eventually become a provider of ultra-high-quality meats and vegetables to the UK commercial market.
The target was to build three operations: first vegetables and fruits, using modern technologies, second poultry and meats (including beef and lamb), and lastly dairy and cheese products. The objective was to build this farm in such a way that all production would be considered ecological and low impact...although there are always problems with 18-wheelers!
On November 4th, 2019 one year after we bought the farm, I resigned from my job in the City, we sold our London home and moved to our newly partially renovated home. The area around the great house was in generally good condition, and we were able to move into part of the house that was renovated, part of the roof was no longer doing its job and over the next three years additional renovations were undertaken, but that's not the interesting part.
It is our eldest daughter, who pointed out sometime after we started our adventure that Jeremy Clarkson, of Top Gear fame, was doing something similar to what we were, but on the other side of the country. We had some of the challenges of Clackson, but since we were locally known, about 30 cousins live in the area, and we are not television presenters, we didn't face the same kind of animosity. In addition, we employ nearly 100 people on our farm and its overall operations. Granted the vast majority work part-time, but we provide the equivalent of 30 full-time jobs.
The first item of business was to purchase 10 greenhouses so that our cultivation could operate nearly 365 days a year. Then we built a number of pastures so that we could segregate our herd of cattle so that they could forage. Most people don't know this but if you provide cattle with covered pens, you will be hard-pressed to kick them out into pasture. In addition, we had two cattle herds, those raised for meat and those raised for milk. We were somewhat lucky in that we were able to purchase a fully automated (really not that automated) milking machine for the cows, but the goats still had to be done by hand (to some extent), the idea was to produce in excess of 500 liters of milk per day to transform in cheese and high-quality butter. We sell no milk so our herd of milk cows at 60 is small but perfectly adequate. the milk cows also produce about 30% of our meat herd, the rest we purchase every season.
Funny enough the hardest thing to obtain, was our certification for the vegetables, despite them being grown in a controlled environment. 100% of our fruit and vegetable production is sold to brokers who work with the restaurant and the hotel industry in the country. Our prices were about 80% higher than for normal production and despite the initial upfront costs of setting up greenhouses, our costs are only 10% higher. In all cases, we worked to produce a superior quality product, but we do not brand it, we just represent a quality threshold and availability that is somewhat better than most. Granted we cannot beat summer tomatoes from Spain in terms of flavor we are nearly there and are consistent.
Local farmers don't see us as competitors which makes them amenable to our operations.
Our biggest shock and the one thing that made our operations hugely profitable was the UK government's incompetence (when I considered that I voted Tory my whole life...). It was a huge boost to our revenues. First, 100% of our inputs were always from the UK, and we entered into long-term contracts to purchase compost from three adjoining pork and chicken farms. It may sound ridiculous but for us, with greenhouses picking is a daily activity. We produce all year round, and our pickers select ripe fruits and vegetables.
In 2020, we built our meat processing plant that processes all the meat on our farm. With nearly 500 heads of cattle, the processing is a daily thing. Again the logic is that we sell meat and not cattle our price points are therefore nearly 4 times higher than if we were selling on the hoof. We have even opened the plant to a number of neighbors because our capacity is about twice as high as we need (the smallest processing plant that can deal with lamb, chicken, and cattle).
COVID was a challenge since restaurant and hotel demand fell to zero, but we were able to shift production to meet a new demand, since people still had to eat, with our distributors we were able to create a business to ship boxes of vegetables directly to consumers. This occurred because one of our son's summer projects was to create a website, and he suggested, as a summer job on the farm, that he set up a website where we could sell poultry, lamb, and beef directly to consumers. Something that we had used as consumers when living in London. The strength of our distributors who suddenly saw their business sink to nothing was that they already distributed stuff to consumers (restaurants and hotels) so what we did was not so much of a stretch, the biggest challenge was to retool our packing operations, to package smaller portions.
these past five years have been amazing, the work is from sun up to sun down every day, for both of us, our farm is unusual because we don't have any downtime, granted during the winter months when we had exceptionally cold and snowy weather thing got interesting, but never a challenge beyond what we could endure.
the next challenge will be to take the farm towards an increasingly off-gride model. This summer we completed the construction of our first biodigester that will be used to heat our home and our greenhouses. The UK is a terrible place for solar and our region (near the East coast of the UK) is not good for wind. However, our cattle are a great source of manure that is consumed by the biodigester. We anticipate reducing our external energy input by nearly 90% (all that will be left is diesel for the farm equipment).
Now you know who we are, and yet you have no idea who we are!
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