Host Peter Green gives an insight into his farming life and why the theme of the first series of the podcast 'resilience' is particularly personal and important to him.
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Hello and welcome to Farming Focus. I'm your host, Peter Green, and in this bonus episode, I'll let you know a little bit more about me and why I'm so excited to be involved in the podcast. I'm the fifth generation on my family farm at Stithians near Falmouth, and my wife Claire, and I have five year old twins who are generation number six.
My family have been on the farm just shy of a century. My grandparents and great-grandparents on all sides were farmers down in West Cornwall originally before moving up to Stithians, when I was growing up, we had a thousand weaners on the farm for pork at any one time. And then in the late 1980s, my dad, David, transitioned out of pigs and increased the milking herd before switching solely to, suckler beef operation in 2001.
He ran that alongside his work as a lecturer at Dutchy College, and he absolutely loved that job and the interaction it gave him with bright, enthusiastic young farming students. My mum, Lynn was a farmer's daughter and a home economics teacher at a school in Truro. After leaving school myself, um, I was encouraged to get as far away from the farm as possible and get as much experience as I could away from home.
I studied physics and then accountancy, uh, not because of any particular passion for numbers, but more because I just wanted to understand how things worked and, and particularly businesses. While I was at university, I was determined to try as many different things as possible, and one of those things was presenting on the university radio station.
I had a weekly show there with a sidekick for three years and really enjoyed the opportunity to learn something technical, something different from what I'd done before, the multitasking that it afforded, and also the jeopardy of performing live and, and the challenge of producing interesting content that engaged with listeners that you couldn't see. And that's definitely one of the reasons why I'm so excited to be doing this podcast with Cornish Mutual.
After graduating, I spent some time traveling, uh, first in South Africa and then Australia, New Zealand, and then I came home and worked for large corporate businesses in the southeast. Sadly, just as I was finishing my professional qualifications in 2007, my parents were killed in a car accident and obviously this was a massive change and required a large adjustment.
Um, farming being what it is, we had to react quickly. You know, dad was actively farming at the time of that accident. We had 250 cattle. We had, um, just cut grass for silage the day before and we had two employees, and it was always going to be difficult to manage that placement from that farm. From, I should say, from my placement in Spalding near Boston and Lincolnshire.
My employer was really, really supportive and our two employees at home on the farm were just fantastic. We stabilized the business, made sure that we didn't react too quickly, but sadly we did have to sell the suckler herd because it just wasn't feasible to be keeping that going while I was away from home.
I did move a little bit closer to Cornwall working at Heathrow for British Airways as an accountant, and then coming home every other weekend to manage the Farm and see family. Despite having had a really exciting start to my career, living in and around London, seeing friends and, and doing lots of, uh, exciting things I always wanted to get back to Cornwell eventually, but this change in circumstances really just brought that timing forward. I met my wife in London in 2010, and the next year in 2011, I managed to persuade her to join me in moving to Cornwall where I'd got a job as an accountant with the fashion retailer, Seasalt.
And shortly after that, Claire got a job with Cornish Mutual, and that's how the connection between Cornish Mutual and myself started. It was a bit of a culture shock for a city girl to live on a farm after having worked in the square mile. But in 2013, uh, we got married and in 2015 she was actually the one who encouraged me to restock the farm with my own, um, herd of stabilizer beef cattle.
We've still got them today and we run them outside on grass alone all year round. Fast forwarding eight years, I've worked for various Cornish businesses, including Healy Cider. But now I'm entirely self-employed, working to get our farm in the best possible shape for its next hundred years. We calve about 20 cows at the moment, and we are looking to get those numbers up to about 30 calvers plus followers.
We sell some stores at local markets in their second summer off grass and keep replacement heifers and sell about five or six bodies of beef in boxes each year. We've not yet had to advertise. It's all word of mouth, and that's something that I really, really enjoy doing. I just get a massive buzz from the contact that that process gives me, both with our end product, but also with the consumers of that product.
I get to really talk to them about the farm and how we are rearing our beef and the difference between what we are doing. And what other processers - the sort of more commoditized beef industry might be undertaking. It is really interesting to see people's attitudes changing and to get asked questions by those end consumers.
I love that interaction. And I particularly enjoy hearing stories about how they've enjoyed our beef. You know, I've had a friend who tells me the story about how her Spanish mother-in-law comes across and she always says that Spanish beef is the best, but when they fed her our Cornish grass fed beef, this Spanish mother-in-law was just blown away and couldn't believe the flavour and the texture.
And it's stories like that, which really add to the richness of selling our product off farm. We've been in stewardship schemes, entry level and mid-tier for about 20 years, and like so many people at the moment, we're trying to cut back our inputs every year and just to take a bit more of a strategic view on the productivity of different parts of the farm.
So we're looking at the areas which produce more and produce less, and we are trying to manage the soil health, particularly in the way we farm. So thinking of ourselves less as livestock farmers and grassland farmers, but thinking more about being stewards of the soil. We're rolling out more acres of herbal leys every year, not least with half a mind on drought tolerance and the risk that climate change is posing.
We're taking steps to reduce compaction. We've got a planned rotational grazing system that we work to, and we've just built a new cattle shed, which prioritizes animal wellbeing and handler safety. We routinely soil test and have been doing so for over a decade, and we use the results from those soil tests to inform our liming and our fertilizer planning.
We test our fodder, um, and make sure that we're giving the right feed to the right class of stock. And all of this is aimed at maximizing the value from everything we do. Probably partly because of my accountancy training, but I just want to get as much bang for my buck from every pound that gets spent on farm.
And I do all of this because I want to pass the farm on in an even better heart than it was when I took it on. And to get the farming enterprise in a place where it doesn't need other parts of the business to subsidise it. We are diversified. We've got a solar array, we've got some low level storage, and we've just built new workspaces for third party businesses to come and use as their own.
In addition, we let out about, um, 90 acres of grazing to other farming tenants on a variety of agreements. And actually those relationships with our tenant farmers are really valuable to me because it's great to chat to them about what they're doing and to sort of use their know-how and to really involve them as part of my network.
The latest diversification that we're embarking on is to try and use, um, my skills and experience a bit more to provide another income stream for the business. I've been fortunate enough to be asked to lead workshops for the Prince’s Countryside Fund’s Farm for the Future Programme, and that's a fantastic scheme. Um, which, you know, I'd thoroughly recommend people take part in if they get the opportunity. I really enjoy the chance that that gives me to meet new people and to challenge myself to try something different, but most of all, having grown up and worked on the farm, all of my life on and off I just want to know more about farming.
I never, I never went away to, to agricultural college and, and studied agriculture. So I feel like I've got this massive gap in my knowledge that I, I really want to fill. And I think the most exciting thing is that right now we're going through a time of such massive change in UK agriculture. There is a wealth of information out there on a variety of platforms that we can get to grips with and the Farming Focus podcast from Cornish Mutual gives us all a great chance to dive in to find out about that.