Seting-up any kind of documentary photography project can take time and after 12 months of conversations in early 2024 Hampshire County Farms kindly agreed to introduce me to a number of their new tenants – people who have been given the chance to lease and run their own farms for a period of 7-10 years.
Council-owned farms are becoming scarcer each year as cash-strapped councils sell them off to fund other services and in the past 40 years over 50% of county farms have disappeared. However, for new farmers they are often the only affordable route into the profession.
As someone who spent numerous school holidays on a farm managed by a family relative, I was interested to understand why people want to farm today and how things changed since I was on a working farm in the 1980s.
I started by visiting six farms but soon focused on Alice and Billy, a young couple from farming families who were juggling full-time employment with sheep farming. In their early 20s, with good jobs it seemed crazy that these two would want to give it all up to farm full-time when it’s obvious that as a nation we don’t appreciate or even understand the farming sector.
Over the next 18 months I watched and documented how they worked and their transition from sheep to dairy farming. It was inspiring to watch.
Farming has to be the least understood of all professions, even though we spend over £220bn a year on food and drink. It seems that we’ve been conditioned by marketeers to expect cheap food, which may help account for the 10 million tonnes of food we waste each year in the UK, or as the latest TV advert asserts, £80 of food every month per household.
According to government data, average Farm Business Income in 2020/21 was £72,000 of which £22,200 was actual household income for the farmer, the rest of it covers the costs of running the farm.
In 2023/24 average Farm Business Income had dropped to £41,500, which suggests that household income for the farmer was around £13,000, although like all businesses costs have gone up, so it’s probably less than that.
Alice and Billy both work the farm, starting at around 5.30am and often finishing after 9pm. Dairy farming is a 7 day a week job, so no weekends off. Between them they are doing about 100hrs a week, which at current minimum wage levels (£12.21 per hr) means they should be grossing about £1,221 per week, or £58,000 a year if they give themselves 4 weeks holiday, but the reality is that farmers like Alice and Billy earn a fraction of that.
So what is is that drives them? Quite simply a passion and love for farming.
What does it take to be a farmer?
To farm you need to be dedicated and focused, there’s no phoning-in sick after a night out or long lunches with friends where you can lose track of time. Livestock has to be checked every day, twice a day and if you’re a dairy farmer that means milking the cows, not something you can put off because you don’t feel up to it.
You also need to be a mathematician, an engineer, and a veterinary nurse, just to name a few of the core skills required. With very low profit margins and high up-front costs you simply can’t afford to over-order feed or fertilizer, so you need the ability to accurately forecast exactly how much is required.
Stuff breaks on farms, it’s just par-for-the-course and being able to weld and fix mechnical moving parts will save time and money.
Whilst every care is taken to ensure the safety of cattle and sheep they can be injured and get ill. Alice and Billy have had to deal with dog attacks on their sheep, something that is completely beyond their control but the sheep need medical attention which they have to administer, whilst assessing whether to incur the expense of calling out the vet.
People in offices talk about multi-tasking but farming is where you really see it happening, and that’s before the endless administrative hurdles that have to be jumped that requires meticulous record keeping otherwise operations grind to a halt – literally. Everything has to be recorded.
Of course the weather governs farming to a great extent. Heavy rains one year that mean crops rot in the ground. Which can then be followed by the driest months on record meaning that nothing grows. Alice and Billy try to maintain some circulatory within their farm operations, which means growing crops that will produce feed and bedding in the winter months. However, dry weather has meant that yields are down (by 75% in some fields) which now means they’ll have to buy-in hay and straw, incurring more expense that cannot be foreseen or mitigated against. The dry conditions have also meant less grass for their livestock during the summer months, another unforeseen challenge that has to be overcome.
For now, Billy and Alice are optimists, loving the fact that they have their own farm and are living the life they want. “That’s farming” is a phrase I’ve heard on numerous occasions when I see something go awry, and it is, but farming is not for everyone.
Suicide rates in the agricultural sector have been steadily rising since 2021 and when you consider the declining financial reward versus the workload, it’s not hard to see why some people feel utterly desperate.
I think Billy and Alice are amazing, they have a passion, they support each other and are learning every day, it’s been a privilege to watch and document. I just hope that before too long our farmers get the support and respect they deserve – not the big landowning corporates but the small and medium-sized family farms who have to watch the pennies just to survive.
We have all been led to believe that we are entitled to cheap food but it’s a myth. 60% of farmers are tenants – not rich landowners – and they are ones being squeezed so that every household can waste £80 of food every month.
Andrew Cameron
I am a social documentary photographer with a passion for documenting the skills and trades that are less well understood or under-appreciated.
My book, Making Documentary Photography, a guide for photographers who want to embark on documentary projects, can be downloaded here.
You can contact me here.
