Ever wondered what really happens when you start handing over the family farm to the next generation? That’s exactly what Lisa Edwards is navigating on her cereals and potato farm up in Lancashire - and she’s spilling all in this episode of The AG Show as we dive back into the world of succession planning.

Fancy making your own trainers? Yep, actual trainers. We meet the Wiltshire farmer turning cow hides into a hands-on sneaker‑making workshop.

And have you ever been to the British Cattle Breeding Club Conference? No worries if not - Hannah’s got you covered with the inside scoop on what went down and what headwear was spotted.

Oh, and Charlotte's got a new sofa don't you know?!

SOME USEFUL BITS

Succession planning | AHDB

Andy Rummings Beef | Grass fed beef

British Cattle Breeders Club

UK Ruminant Antibiotic Stewardship Roadmap

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Charlotte, have you had a delivery today?

The most exciting of all the deliveries. Like, literally, they left about five, 10 minutes ago. I've got a new sofa and it's actually made my day.

So our old one, it's like eight years old, which you think, ah, it's not too bad. But ours has been abused by three dogs. Me, gaming, husband, all of that kind of thing.

So what have you gone for? Corner?

No, we have gone for an electronic recliner and oh, my God, it's amazing.

Oh, bougie.

So I was like, I don't have to be anywhere near Jo either, because I can be at the far reclined up. It's got this middle bit that you can pull down that makes a drinks table. You can plug your phone into it to charge.

Like, I literally don't need to be near husband for him to pass me a drink. I can just be sat there with the dogs and a duvet and, oh, it's gonna be amazing. So I honestly can't wait.

And I did toy with actually sitting on the sofa and podcasting from that this morning.

Oh, you should have.

It comes in time. Maybe next.

Hello, I'm Hannah Clarke.

I'm Charlotte Forkes-Rees.

Oh, sorry. I was waiting for Tom to come in, but then I just remembered, yeah, sad times.

No more Tom. But we do have Lisa, Alex, Ian, Matthew, Andy, Molly, Emma. Jeez. And producer Martin joining us on this episode of The AG Show. Welcome, by the way.

That's right, we're talking success again. And hearing from one farmer's experiences of working with their son as they gradually hand over the family business to them.

They might ask you for advice and you might tell them what you think. They might do it differently and then you've really got to bite your lip as to not I told you so when it goes wrong.

We'll hear how a Wiltshire farmer has been creative in finding what to do with his animal hides.

I have some back. And make belts. And we sell quite a few of those. And then we sell an awful lot of trainers.

So people come to the farm and do a work workshop to make a pair of trainers.

And you can hear who else I caught up with at the British Cattle Breeders Club Conference.

A reminder, new episodes of the Ag show drop every Wednesday at midday. Available wherever you get your podcasts.

And excitingly, we've got audio and video versions for every show. That's right. You can Watch us on YouTube. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss an episode and get in touch with.

We'd love to hear from you, comment on any of our social posts or email agshodb.org.uk Charlotte, it's just you and I now. No Tom, no, just the two of us. I would sing, but I'm awful at.

Singing in his absence. We need someone to do the old cow impression, so maybe I'll give it a go. It's time for the news. Charlotte, what you've been reading this week?

Well, actually I haven't been reading, but if you can remember, back listener to In December, we were joined by Fiona Lovett and Mark Jelly discussing the Ruminant Antibiotic Stewardship Roadmap, which was calling on cattle and sheep farmers to take part in an important new survey shaping the future of responsible antibiotic use. Now, Fiona reached out and just said that the survey is still live and they are still looking for respondents.

So your input are a cattle or sheep farmer will directly be influencing how as an industry we're actually able to demonstrate good stewardship. So across both of these really important sectors and this is going to help with protecting on farm value, reputation and market access.

So every response really does count. Cattle, sheep, farmers, you are needed to take part.

I did find it is much easier just to google UK Ruminant Antibiotic Stewardship Roadmap and it should be the first comes up. Or if you head to our show notes, I'll make sure that it's linked there so you can find the webpage. Hannah, what have you been reading this week?

So I guess keeping on the theme of ruminants, I've been reading in the Farmers Weekly about wool prices. Now, there's a bit of positive news for the sheep sector on this.

So British wool prices have recently hit their highest level in nearly 10 years, which is quite impressive. So according to Farmers Weekly, average greasy wool prices. So that is wool that is raw, it's unwashed. It's basically straight off the sheep.

Greasy wool prices are up around 30% over the last four months, which is really positive, reaching around 1 pound 25 a kilo, according to British Wool's latest January auction, where the wool is sold, clean wool is now hitting £1 86 a kilo. Why is this? Well, it's the good old metrics of supply and demand that we talk about all the time. So basically supply of wool is down.

I think that's probably the main kind of reason for why we're seeing those stronger prices.

So the national flock in the UK has seen reductions over the last few years, but also further afield, there's less wool being produced so New Zealand is a massive producer of wool globally and their flock is in decline as well. So this reminded me of a piece of analysis I did a few years ago on the New Zealand sheep to human ratio.

So there's five sheep for every one person in New Zealand.

So anyway, that's sort of driving the reduction in wool availability in Australia as well. They're again, I think they might be the second largest producer of wool in the world.

So China, Australia and New Zealand are the big ones and they're, they sort of see changes in their production that there's been a lot of issues with drought recently. But also they're kind of shifting away from more traditional merino type wool.

So they're really famous for their merino wool production, which goes into high level sportswear, athletic wear, fancy socks, expensive socks. But they're moving away from that in some areas to more kind of meat specific breeds and self shedding animals.

So again, that's kind of a reason why we're seeing lower supply. So what this means is it kind of points to a more positive market potentially for wool prices for farmers in 20.

We've sort of seen the market recover since COVID and there was a bit of a backlog of product on the market. So a bit of a positive story there for British wool. Maybe we should get a wool specialist on to talk about that. I think that'd be interesting.

And it sort of chimes in with what we're talking about at points in this episode as well, around maybe by products.

You sort of consider maybe wool as a bit of a, well, maybe now a byproduct of lamb and mutton production, but it sort of goes into all that other elements of, of a carcass of an animal that's produced. And, you know, the challenge with production of animals is finding market for all these products. That come off. Off the animal.

It's not just the meat, it's everything else as well. So it's a fascinating subject.

And the chap I spoke to at the British Cattle Breeders Club conference the other week, he talked about his leather business and how he's found outlets for that and. Oh, it's just absolutely fascinating.

I think we're hearing a bit more about that later, aren't we, Hannah?

We are. That'll be really interesting.

So last week, we introduced you to Lisa Edwards.

Lisa and her husband Simon are tenant farmers growing cereals and potatoes in Lancashire and are in the process of ceding control of the family business to one of their sons, Cameron.

That's right, yeah.

Lisa told our reporter Emma Craig how she's navigated that changing relationship with her son, from him being her child to now her business partner and still her son.

He's quite difficult because he's. I mean, he's worked on the farm since he was 13. Of course, he's spent all his life having his dad tell him what to do.

As part of his college course, he had to go away and work away for a year. So he worked down in Leicestershire for a year, which was really good because he had somebody else telling him what to do.

And then he came back and it's been a very, very long process. We started off first just by giving him responsibility for little things, like we gave him responsibility for all the hay and straw production.

So it was like, there's the bailor, you sort it, you organise all that side of it. And he took that on. And I think up to that point, he would have kept asking his dad, what shall I do with this? What should I do with that?

He just took it on and started fiddling around with stuff and making sure that Baylor was how he wanted it. And because he was given that responsibility, he knew the book stopped with him, so he couldn't come back to us and ask us stuff.

So it was a really good way of getting him to take on a show of the business. And now, a couple of years ago, he took on sole responsibility for the spraying.

And we're gradually handing over things to him for him to sort out and him to be the liaison with external companies, you know, for various things. And it's a way of just passing it on in sections rather than going, here's the whole business, we're off. Bye, bye.

Which could be incredibly overwhelming. It's a way of doing it with little things that, you know, as you.

Go along and how do you manage that? If he wants to do something a bit differently to how you and Simon would have wanted to do it.

Yeah, that's always where you come into a bit of conflict.

We've had to realise that if you do hand something over and you might stand there and they might ask you for advice and you might tell them what you think, they might do it differently. And then you've really got to bite your lip as to not I told you so when it goes wrong. Because the problem is you only learn by mistakes.

You don't learn by doing everything right. So you've got to give somebody that responsibility to go make those mistakes.

Because in the end, if those mistakes mean they end up learning how to problem solve, they learn how to. How to resolve issues and that will make them a better manager in the future.

If you just constantly sort stuff out for them, they're never going to take that responsibility. It's been hard with something. I think it's harder.

Harder for my husband than me, because he's been sort of in sole charge of certain sections of the business for that many years. But I think, yeah, we're all. We're all learning. There are days where we fall out.

Of course there are.

Yeah, of course there are.

Every family.

Yeah, yeah. A spanner gets thrown across the workshop. You know, everybody sulks for a bit and everybody carries on.

And how do you feel about stepping back, Lisa, and kind of going into that next phase of your life?

We're both of us, finding it harder each year. The problems of the weather and climate change and the effect that that's having on the farm business and the uncertainty of the seasons.

Now it does start taking its toll with, you know, we're at a point where we've been doing this for 40 years and you don't enter the harvest period with the same enthusiasm you used to do. Because you know what can go wrong? Because it's gone wrong a number of times over the years and it's hard to get that buzz going anymore.

Whereas when you're young, you've not been worn down by it. So I think we are looking forward to not having as much of that responsibility. And, yeah, it does get harder. It gets harder as you get older.

You see a weather forecast, you think, oh, here we go again. You know, the best crop I've ever grown could end up being the worst crop overnight. So it does start to take its toll.

So it very much sounds like you've both accepted it and said, we've had our go, we had our mistakes, we had our successes. And now it's his turn.

Yeah, yeah. Although, as Simon says, he says nobody ever knows about his mistakes because he doesn't tell us. So he's very quiet about that.

That's the best way. Yeah. I'm really interested, Lisa, on how often you kind of review your plans and how that works with your succession planning.

We try and review it annually, particularly, you know, when you're doing the business plans as to what you, what crops you're planting for the next year and we're discussing all of that. That's when we start to think about, you know, the next stage and who's going to take control of what in the next 12 months.

So it's probably on an annual basis. And then, as I said previously, we review wills and that side of things on a five year basis.

With everything that's happened so far, is there anything you would have done differently?

So far, I think everything's going fairly smoothly, but, you know, we just, just hope that nobody falls out in the future and that we all continue to.

Get along on a serious note with that. How would you approach that if there was kind of a fallout brewing or something?

I think you're better off nipping it in the bud before it develops any further. It's better off to sit and talk about things rather than just letting stuff fester, make sure that things are clear. I think it's too easy.

If you don't say anything and think, oh, it'll blow over, then you don't quite know what the other one's thinking. So it's better off to sit down and talk things out.

What would your advice be to anybody that hadn't started the conversation yet? It can be something that waits till tomorrow. I'm busy. What would you say?

I'd say the earlier you start these conversations, the better because it sets a plan going forward and everybody knows where they stand. Always work on what the worst case scenario might be and hope it never happens.

Because if you've planned for something that could happen, then everything's in place.

If you ignore it and the worst happens, then it's absolutely devastating for everybody involved and it will cause a lot more hassle and money in the long run than it would do sitting down and actually sorting things out now.

So you're saying get on with it. Is that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're better off sorting these things out when your children are young adults than just leaving it until your children are in the 40s.

It's better that everybody, everybody's heading in the right direction then Everybody's pulling together if everybody knows what the end goal is.

Thanks to Lisa Edwards for giving her time and advice on succession planning. It's clear she advocates for those early conversations. There's more advice and other farmer stories on our website.

Just search successionplanningdb.org UK.

Hi, my name is Molly Gimson and I'm here at Star. We're an outdoor breeding unit with 1,100 sows.

At the moment, we are in the process of moving some of our fields, which is a really exciting but busy time. Takes lots of organisation and for everyone to get involved.

Something that's really important to us at Starvegut Pigs is continually making small changes to better our business, whether this is through taking trials or just changes to our everyday routine. For example, at the moment we are taking part in a trial that involves monitoring fridge temperatures remotely.

This allows us to stay on top of how our vaccinations are kept.

We've also made some really positive changes to our biosecurity systems, which is becoming increasingly important with the risk of notifiable diseases. As well as this, we have made some improvements to our machinery.

The thought process behind this was having a better work environment, which leads to good team motivation, but overall it's actually helped us reduce costs with machinery breakdowns and just overall improve the productivity of our farm.

What's going well is definitely the process we're making with the productivity of the herd, as well as winning Pig Farmer of the Year, which has given me a huge boost personally. Like any other farming business, the weather is always a huge challenge, but unfortunately it's something we can't control.

So for us it's just staying on top of things, trying to be organized and flexible.

That was Molly Gimson casually slipping in that she was voted the Young Pig Farmer of the Year at the National Pig Awards last year. So congratulations. Congrats to Molly. That's huge.

Really interesting to hear about the work she's involved with on her family farm in Suffolk, isn't it?

Although something she didn't actually mention was her horse trailer, which she's converted into a mobile kitchen to sell pork products at pubs and events. That's fantastic.

I think we're probably gonna need to have a proper catch up with Molly, including that horse trailer in a future show. But in the meantime, if you like, Molly, want to get in touch and tell us what you're currently doing on farm, email us on ag show@agshowdb.org UK.

And as Hannah mentioned earlier in the show, we're now, talking about animal hides, Andy Rumming, a beef farmer from the banks of the River Thames in Wiltshire, has an interesting sideline because as well as producing plates of meats, he makes trainers, which I guess Cockneys at the other end of the Thames would put on their plates of meats. And I'm sorry, that's awful.

The apples and pears.

Guilty, I scripted.

That's got Martin all over it. Andy's farm sneaker business makes the footwear from the hides of his cattle and even offers the public the chance to create their very own pair at workshops.

Yeah, that's right. And I had the pleasure of catching up with Andy at the recent British Cattle Breeders Club conference in Telford.

And he began by telling me about his farm.

Rummings have been farming cattle in North Wiltshire for a very long time, well over 100 years. And they've gone through various different forms. So dairy herds, pure beef, a bit of both buying and selling cattle.

And I came back to the farm about 10 years ago and decided that in order to make a business that didn't just survive, that really thrived, that we needed to kind of get all the value out of our animals. And so they were pretty much 100% grass fed anyway. So we became Pasture for Life Certified.

We started selling our beef in boxes and then we basically looked at using the hides.

And so now we've got a sort of thriving on farm butchery and we put, we'll put through 30 bodies of beef through that this year, mainly sold through pre orders and then people come once a month to collect.

And then we also have a leather business and all of our hides that come from our contract killed animals go into various different, I guess, regenerative or sustainable leather supply chains.

And it's very niche, isn't it? Why did you sort of get into that side on the leather?

Well, so there's nothing wrong with niche, so niche is good. And I'd be, I'm quite comfortable in a obscure corner of the kind of cattle market.

And so, yeah, there's very few people selling leather with provenance, very few people selling pasture for life leather and the products. And so whilst most kids who lived on farms were perhaps busy welding something, I was busy sewing stuff.

So I was making tents, one of the world's biggest kites, all sorts of stuff, stuff. And so when I look at a cow's hide, I see a kind of a fabric that can be turned into three dimensional objects, which is what you do with leather.

And so I was interested in the kind of Manufacturing process. But I also realized that if we had a great story which made people buy our beef, surely we could use that story to make people buy our leather.

And so that's what we're trying to do.

So we sell some hides that go straight into to a single supply chain that go to some handbag manufacturers and some fashion goods and a third party runs that I have some back and make belts and we sell quite a few of those and then we sell an awful lot of trainers. So people come to the farm and do a workshop to make a pair of trainers.

We've got one in February and then we're getting the dates for the next one online as soon as we can.

What kind of challenges have you faced in setting your various businesses up?

On the meat side it is. So I do most of the butchery along with another butcher. So getting the right labour. But at the moment we're very lucky we've got the right people.

A big driver for getting the right people is having the right facilities. So we built a new butchery last year that makes it as easy as to operate.

Really efficient, light and bright, good stuff facilities and people want to work there. So that. So that's good. On the leather side of it. The biggest challenge is getting the hides processed.

And so we've had three of tanner's clothes in Britain in the last couple of years. And so the number of options I've got is I'm down to one option at the moment and they have only got limited ability to take hides for myself.

So that's the big issue. Although I've got a couple of plans in the pipeline that should allow me to get hides into tanneries overseas.

Yeah, the supply is part of it, but the interest. There's a huge interest in the experiential economy.

So farmers have got amazing farms, loads of great stories and so there's all sorts of products you can sell that are experiences based on farms or around farms. Mine's about making a pair of sneakers. It could be many other things. So there's huge opportunities for farmers to do this.

Yeah, you've inspired me massively with you with your on farm workshops and things like that. Because I'm a very crafty person myself, so coming to do that is right up my street.

And if there's any other listeners that might be inspired from your story, what advice may you give someone that's looking to start up or go into a niche market?

Yeah, yeah. So I think do your research and also work out how you can have a go at this with the minimal amount of capital investment.

So if you're looking at the. On the meat side of it, could you actually get someone else to contract cut it? So don't invest in the good trees. Straight off.

And on the leather side, actually, could you work with a local craftsperson perhaps, to make belts and do something? So look at how you can make a network of people that you can use for research purposes and perhaps to kind of spread your risk.

But at some point, you have to literally kind of jump in and have a go at it.

Yeah.

And so have a go at it. Use YouTube. It's all out there.

That was Andy rumming. I don't know about you, Charlotte, but I think we need to take a day trip to Andy's farm. I'd love to make a pair of trainers.

What colour would you go for?

Yeah, I think we need to go. Mine would definitely be pink. I'm a pink girl.

I don't remember seeing a pink cow.

Sure, you can dye it, can't you?

I think I'll have to go traditional. You know, traditional tan. A tan trainer fair.

Boring, though.

I think you mean timeless.

Oh, okay.

You are listening to the Ag show now, Hannah, you were at the British Cattle Breeders Club Conference in Telford last week, rubbing shoulders with all the Hoovers and Shakers chewing the curds. Martin, what's with this script here?

Sorry?

Oh, no, but you were there, weren't you, last week, Hannah, how was it?

Oh, it was brilliant. I learned so much, I'm not gonna lie.

A lot of the technical genetics and genomics discussion might have gone a little bit over my head, but it was a fascinating day, spoke to loads of people, learnt lots of things which win. Win. Right. And one of those fascinating people that I spoke to was Dr. Alex Brown, who was chairing the club.

When I caught up with her, Alex told me what the aim of the event was and what it was about.

I've called it Joining the Dots From Blue Skies to Greenfield. And really, that's a fancy way of saying research to impact my background.

I've moved from academia into industry over the past past 10 to 15 years, and it's really frustrating for me to see amazing stuff happening and all of these cool ideas that are popping up, but not necessarily managing to see them turn into something tangible. And the conference is a really nice mix of people from all across the industry, from academia all the way to people on the ground.

And so I've wanted to talk about how we can actually try and connect things a little bit better. So that we can can try and use the different kinds of minds that we have across our industry to actually, you know, make change happen.

It's fascinating. That concept of a bottleneck of all this information that goes on in research and academia doesn't quite make it into practical applications.

What are your kind of key messages for maybe how we can do that as an industry? There's been a lot of discussion on that topic and it's not an easy question to answer. But what's your view?

Absolutely not an easy question to answer.

I've already been trying to take notes to be able to wrap up the day, but I think one of the key things that comes out is that we need these opportunities to talk to each other.

And I know that the conversations that we're having today aren't going to be the start or the end of the conversations that we need to be having, but we should table them. We need to find ways to collaborate.

We've had competitors sitting on the same stage talking about their perspectives on things and they have admitted that they need to collaborate more. And that's whether you are a processor, a genetics company, a farmer, you know, are you collaborating or competing with your next door neighbour?

The more conversations that we can have about how we can try and move things forward, the better.

That's Dr. Alex Brown. Ian Hewitt is the managing director for Livestock Information Ltd. And he told me what he'd learned about at the conference.

Well, I've only seen the first two sessions of the beef day, but the real message is coming out to me is the importance of data.

I've also heard you can have too much data, but the key is that there are lots of different data assets that the whole supply chain through keepers all the way through to the processors need, and it's how you get that data to them efficiently. And I think the service that we're standing up, which is primarily for government, will also benefit industry.

Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing with livestock information?

So at the moment there are five fragmented and quite old systems that deal with movements, Earth's movements and deaths of cattle. Sheep and pigs. Pigs, obviously, with AHDB colleagues, cattle with defra, through the British Cattle Movement Service.

And we've already started to transform the sheep service, which we now operate on behalf of defra. We're looking to do the same for cattle. That's the next kid off the block and big kid on the block, and then that will be followed by pigs.

But the aim is to get the systems into and services into one place so that you've got that multi species data service for the benefit of industry and government.

And what kind of improvements could we expect from your new system?

Well, it's going to be future proof the first thing and obviously at the moment there are services that are quite old, so you've got to have that forward looking pillow.

The second is the flexibility that you can add different species depending on whatever the interest is, if there is interest from sponsors like defra. So you know, you look at the moment, you've got poultry issues through avian influenza. Equines is a subject that's often talked about.

At the moment the priority is to get the cattle service working, which will be digital first with, you know, removing paper passports to get electronic identification and then moving on to migrating the sheep service into the new platform. And then you've got pigs coming on as well.

That was Ian there speaking about digital passports, all underpinned by data, of course, which is a word we've heard a lot about over the last few weeks on the podcast and it certainly seems like the industry is talking a lot about it.

I just want to finish off my look back at the British Cattle Breeders Club conference with a chat I had with Matthew Cleveland from Genus Abs, a company that specializes in bovine genet as well as sporting a very impressive cowboy hat that I was quite frankly pretty jealous of. He had some positive comments about the event.

It's been really interesting to hear from key stakeholders from across the supply chain. You know, we started with the processor, we heard from the auction segment, we heard from the retailers, we heard from the farmers after the break.

And what I think is really interesting is I think, think everybody wants to do the right thing and everybody wants to pull the same direction. But, but even today there's still some confusion sometimes about what that direction is that we all want to go.

Definitely. And how does this compare to the sort of industry and developments in the States?

Yeah, I think, you know, obviously there's a lot going on in the US when it comes to, when it comes to beef cattle production.

I think what's unique about the UK is that it's, it seems much more natural to have all of those key stakeholders in the same room and all really be talking about what is our objective, what are the things we need to do to get to our objective, what's the type of data we need to share, what types of programs do we need to build. I would say that's probably a bit unique from other systems that I'm associated with around the world.

So what are you going to be taking away from bcbc?

Again, some of those key insights are really around how how do we build not just integrated chains, because those integrated programs like we heard from Henry this morning about the Sainsbury's Game Changer program. I mean, that's really interesting, but that is a fairly small percent of what they do.

But how do we put some of these programs together whether they're integrated or not integrated? But again, how do we share key learnings? How do we share data? How do we share value?

There's that word again. Data.

And if you haven't already, check out our episode from a couple of weeks ago when we heard about the Farm Data Exchange, a proof of concept that HDB is currently working on.

Well, Hannah, I think that's about all we've got time for this week. I think we have just about survived without Tom, as well as putting up with Martin's dodgy jokes littered throughout some of the script for today.

But thank you so much for listening to the Ag Show.

If you are enjoying our conversations and insights and the different stories which are shaping British farming, make sure that you hit subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Join us again next week. We'll be here same time, same place. New episodes drop on a Wednesday at midday. We can't wait to speak with you then.

And don't forget to get in touch. If you've got anything you want us to talk about on the show on the pod, please do reach out agshowdb.org uk see you next week.

Bye.