Verity Hyland, 32, has a full time job as an events manager, but she has another job which she described as ‘24 hours a day as a farmer’.
Farming is in her blood. Her maternal grandparents met through Young Farmers, a post war initiative to get young people into farming. It worked. They bought a farm near Halifax, at the edge of the moors 1000 feet above sea level. They started as dairy farmers, twice a day hand milking a herd of black and white Holstein Friesian cows into buckets. The business prospered and they started their own milk round. They then purchased a second farm a couple of fields away and both farms remain in the family to this day, now run by Verity’s uncle and cousin. Subsidies have to be juggled to remain viable. Dairy turned to beef for almost 20 years but the farm is now back to dairy.
Verity was born into the family business, growing up with the routine of milking the cows twice a day, breeding calves each year and working every day of the year. She found time to look after horses, occasionally competing with them, and raising her own flock of sheep. She also bred pigs. She kept this up throughout her school years, then undertook a 4 year degree course in agriculture at a college in Shropshire. She gained experience with a food manufacturing firm, moving on to a graduate scheme in East Yorkshire with a poultry and pork manufacturing company. There Verity learned butchering skills, and was invited to stay on in the factory in a management position. However the lure of the family farm pulled her back home where she continues to help out, in spite of now ‘stumbling into event management’.
Verity now works hard at two jobs, event management and the farm. She told us of sleepless nights during lambing time, where she has to be available in the middle of the night to deal with the inevitable difficult births, along with all the other trouble which her fifty plus ewes have a genius for getting into, such as escaping into danger. She is used to carrying 25 litre drums of water to the sheep in the fields four times a day. Fortunately the sheep respond to commands from Verity, as her dog Pike is reluctant to take them on – a good companion but pretty useless as a sheep dog.
Verity combines concern for the welfare of her animals with a farmer’s typical hard headed approach to economics. Having carefully nurtured her flock, often hand rearing the vulnerable ones, she told us she breeds the sheep for meat. ‘I drop them off at the abattoir then pick them up butchered up. I make more money if I sell them dead. It costs £14.00 to kill an animal and another £20.00 to butcher so that’s £34 gone just to get an animal in a pack, plus vets’ bills, and feed, increasingly expensive because of bad weather’.
In a wide ranging talk, Verity gave us a vivid picture of the struggles inherent in farming, along with the satisfactions that make it a true vocation. Long may the best farming traditions continue – and remember when doing your weekly shop: try to buy locally produced food, and keep your dog on a lead when in a field with animals.