After doing holiday jobs on a few farms, I knew this was what I really wanted to do. After 4-years of study at Shuttleworth Agricultural Collage in 1980, I left with an HND and a job as a on-farm grain-buyer in the Beds and Bucks area with a company called Grainec.
I loved this job but I still wanted to be a proper farmer one day, so started taking on small parcels of grassland and buying ewes with lambs at foot to fatten up. I soon discovered sheep farming was too time consuming to keep the day job so turned my attention to taking on arable land, using contractors to work the land to allow me to expand quicker.
I'd noticed a few of the farmers I was dealing with felt trapped on their farms because it was impossible for them to take time off, so I offered to take the land on for a year to give them a break. The first farm I took on was 242ac in 1985, by 1990, this has grown to over 1000ac. Evo came along in 1998 after a lucky break and the farming(now 2000ac) had to take a back seat