Simon Smith interviewed by Ian Reynolds 10 December 2018
I was born in North Tees Hospital in 1972. My parents lived in this house, I was raised in this house and I have now moved back into this house. I didn’t go to school in the village, I went to school in Stockton, to the local Catholic school. I continued my education through the Catholic state school system. I went on through university and did a degree in agricultural biochemistry and nutrition, and eventually ended up back on the farm 18 years ago. At university I wanted to diversify slightly from agriculture. Obviously with an interest in agriculture but ultimately my wish was to come back to the farm and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to do it.
I have two brothers and a sister. They have all moved away from the farm. My sister is a doctor, I have one brother who is an engineer and my eldest brother has maintained links to agriculture. He runs a business, the core of the business is producing livestock feed supplements. He has kept a closer link to agriculture. But none of them have chosen to take up farming.
As a farmer you do everything. As someone said to me the other day, a farmer has to be as comfortable unblocking a drain as he is talking to a lawyer! That about sums it up.
We currently grow arable crops, the main crop being wheat. Also, barley, oil seed rape, oats, beans and we grow grass for livestock, for silage and grazing. We rear cattle and sheep and we also keep chickens. So, we’re fairly diverse by modern farming systems. I’m spread on four sites. The reason being as businesses need to expand to maintain viability, we’re very restricted here. There is no further farmland, as you’re well aware. We are geographically constrained by the River Tees and the amount of housing on all sides. So, if I want more land I have to go and find it elsewhere. The furthest piece of land I currently farm is about eight miles away. But everything is within that radius. It’s all within half an hour on a tractor, depending on traffic going through Yarm.
So, with the livestock I try and feed on a home-produce basis. The livestock reared by me is reared and fed almost exclusively by ourselves. There are other grains going to different markets. Wheat has become a fairly diverse range. What I produce, historically went into livestock feed, into flour mills for biscuit-type flours. The kind of wheat I produce is generally quite popular on the continent for making bread, French and Spanish style bread. So, a lot of that used to be exported to Europe, in particular into Spain. Quite a lot of it used to go into Scotland for distilling into whisky. Now, probably the bulk of what I would’ve previously exported goes into Ensus, which is a bioethanol plant built at Teesside. They have a large requirement for wheat for distilling.
With the cattle, we operate what I would call a closed herd, where all my cattle have been bred by me. I will buy a bull so that I get new bloodlines and rear my own stock and sell the calves, either as anything from a growing animal to a finished animal. The sheep are a slightly different scenario. I buy breeding sheep, usually from the hills, from the Pennines. That’s the way the sheep industry’s stratified in the UK. They tend to breed the breeding stock in the hills and move down