This role will include the maintenance and repair of small tools and equipment for curriculum and farm use. You will also work closely with academic staff to ensure student practical sessions provide a high-quality teaching experience for all learners.
You will assist with all duties necessary to ensure the smooth day to day running of the mixed farming enterprise on the college estate. A key feature of this post will be to take a pivotal role ensuring resources required for practical sessions for all teaching staff are supplied and planned.
Hours: Will vary seasonally, with other staff will cover the time from 6.30 am to 4.30 pm and be worked over Monday to Sunday with flexibility to meet business needs.
Status: Permanent
Salary: £26,057 – £27.273 per annum pro rata (dependent on experience)
The NFU once again used the Science Farm Live project to livestream British farming into primary schools, says county advisor Gemma Harvey
As part of British Science Week in March, the NFU’s education team gave students from more than ten per cent of primary schools across England and Wales the opportunity to step into farmers’ shoes in a series of live lessons.. With a record number of pupils getting involved in the 2023 Science Farm Live project (190,000 from 3,434 schools), the virtual lessons showcased how farming is intertwined with so many key science subjects. Over three virtual lessons, the programme used British Science Week’s theme of ‘connections’ to look at some of the unusual connections that can be found between farming and other sectors; they took place over three virtual lessons. The first focused on how tractors are connected to space, with NFU next generation forum chair Eveey Hunter exploring what materials a tractor is built from and how her tractors drive themselves using GPS. Lesson number two was with Flavian Obiero and his pig dog Rex, with children learning how he keeps his pigs happy and healthy as well as how pigs are connected to jumbo jets. The final lesson looked at the link between sheep and seaweed, with shepherd Susie Parish and members of the Sussex Seabed Restoration Project following the journey of wool from sheep to the seabed to help restore sea kelp populations.
The premise of the virtual lessons was to highlight how science is ingrained in almost every aspect of agriculture. By taking farming into classrooms across the country it really brought the subjects to life. The fact that the highest ever number of students and schools registered this year shows that teachers are increasingly recognising the value of teaching science through the lens of food and farming.
If you or your school would like to get involved, please take a look at the NFU education website for more information.
Meet a Dorset woman working to preserve a British breed of pig which is rarer than the Giant Panda. Tracie Beardsley reports
One of the latest Oxford Sandy and Black residents on Ham Farm. All images: Courtenay Hitchcock
Gloucester Old Spot pig, Cynthia lived on a farm where Lillie, a student at the time, had a weekend job mucking out horses. ‘I fell in love with her,’ recalls Lillie. ‘Pigs have such brilliant personalities. I was fascinated. I helped out when she was farrowing (giving birth) and weaning her piglets.’ Fast forward and Lillie, now 27, has a seven-acre smallholding in Shillingstone, appropriately called Ham Farm. Here she lives with farmer husband Morgan, their four children ranging in age from two to eleven and seven rare breed Oxford Sandy and Black (OSB for short) pigs. ‘I never planned to have so many children – or pigs!’ laughs Lillie. The five sows Felicity, Chelsea, Gladys, Peaches and Claudia (I got the privilege of naming her!), plus the two burly boars, Albert and Jethro, live outdoors for most of the year, with wallowing holes and mud galore. They really are as happy as the proverbial pigs in muck and Lillie is about as busy as one person can be; it’s a long way from her number-crunching days working in accountancy.
Lillie Smith with her rare breed Oxford Sandy and Black (OSB) sow.
Plum Puddings ‘I absolutely love this life,’ Lillie says. ‘There’s admittedly a lot of mud but it’s nothing a pair of overalls won’t protect you from. Though I do get through an enormous number of Wellington boots!’ Lillie’s porcine passion has led her to become one of only 136 registered breeders of Oxford Sandy and Blacks in the country – and she is a highly-respected breed rep for Dorset.
OSBs are rarer than the Giant Panda – there are around 400 registered in the UK, while there are about 2,000 pandas in the wild
The Oxford Sandy and Black Pig, sometimes referred to as the Plum Pudding, is one of the oldest British pig breeds, existing for around 300 years. It’s become almost extinct twice. ‘OSBs, Tamworths and Saddleback breeds are all rarer than the Giant Panda. There’s only around 400 OSBs registered in the UK – and there’s about 2,000 pandas in the wild, plus more in captivity,’ says Lillie. OSBs are on the Rare Breeds Survival Trust watchlist. As an active member of the Oxford & Sandy Black Pig Group, championing preservation of this breed, Lillie is passionate about keeping the bloodline pure. ‘OSBs have 13 female blood lines and four male blood lines. I’m strict about focusing on good breed characteristics. Out of the nine litters we had last year, I kept only three pigs for breeding.’ There’s a lot more to consider than a snout and curly tail when you’re looking for a pedigree-perfect OSB. There should be a blaze on the front, a white tail tip, white feet, a good stature and even the teats need to be spaced properly. Lillie explains: ‘If they’re not evenly spaced, the piglets can’t get to them when the sow is on her side, so they won’t be able to feed properly.’ As well as protecting this rare breed, Lillie has 14 ‘growers’, which remain unnamed as they will be slaughtered. Working with a local abattoir and butcher, Ham Farm pork sausages, bacon, gammon, pork burgers, joints, half, and quarter pig boxes are all sold in local farm shops and butchers and Lillie also delivers direct to customers.
image Courtenay Hitchcock BV Magazine April 2023
Quality not quantity Oxford Sandy & Blacks have star quality. Five of a recent litter are now petting and pig-racing stars at Farmer Palmers children’s farm in Poole. Lillie also works closely with the Countryside Regeneration Trust at nearby Bere Marsh Farm and has just sold three of her pigs to them. Their natural foraging actions will turn over the land and help to increase biodiversity on the farm. For the first time, Lillie and some of her rare breed pigs will be at the Spring Countryside Show at Motcombe this month. ‘I’m teaming up with Seb’s Saddlebacks, another rare pig breeder, and we’re hoping to educate the show visitors about these wonderful creatures, their history and their importance as a food source. ‘We value quality over quantity with our pigs. They take longer to mature than commercial pigs but they taste so much better for it. I’m with my pigs all the way – from breeding to butcher and finally to the public. I’m proud to be preserving this rare breed alongside producing sustainable food with local provenance. I know my pigs have a great life.’
Lillie Smith and one of her OSB sows
Follow Ham Farm on Facebook You can see Lillie and meet her Oxford Sandy and Black pigs at the Spring Countryside Show at Turnpike Showground on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd April 2023.
Image: Courtenay Hitchcock BV magazine April 2023
Quick fire questions:
A-list dinner party guests? Jeremy Clarkson – I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but his Clarkson Farm Show has done more to publicise farming than any other in a long time. I’d be interested in his views now he has been through issues many of us farmers have experienced.
Books by your bedside? Anne of Windy Poplars (part of the Anne of Green Gables series). I’ve been on it for a while – I don’t get much time to read!
Farmer James Cossins has used the slow, wet start to spring to assess new sustainable farming methods and asks if food production is really encouraged
Rolling the fields at Rawston in the late 1960s.
As we move into April the weather has again been challenging for farmers and growers. In February we received virtually no rain and in March there has hardly been a day without it! Here at Rawston, this means that very limited field-work has taken place so far this year. In February we did manage, in dry but rather cold conditions, to sow most of our spring crops such as beans and barley. As I write at the end of March, they are just beginning to emerge, which is encouraging. We should now be rolling silage fields and any winter crops that escaped the roller – but the conditions are just too wet. We have also been unable to turn out our milking cows as the grass seems to be only growing slowly and conditions underfoot have simply been too wet. Feed stocks are consequently getting short and, because of the late spring, we are having to purchase maize silage from a nearby farm to see us out for the last of the winter. The price of the foods that we produce largely seem to be in decline. Our milk price has dropped by 7p in the last few months and further reductions are on the way. The price of wheat and barley has dropped from the highs achieved last autumn by around £70 per ton. Oilseeds appear to have dropped even further. There is so much uncertainty in the markets – so much so that the effects of the Ukrainian War can make prices move dramatically on a daily basis. Fortunately, fertiliser prices have come down to slightly more sensible levels, but are still well above the levels they were before the war started.
The move to sustainability I have attended a number of meetings, listening intently to discover what help DEFRA is offering to farmers and growers. It seems to be a complex mix based around how to farm in a sustainable way. However, food production hardly seems to get a mention. This has made me consider one of the options of planting a legume ley for two years, taking no production from it to improve the soil structure and saving any labour and machinery costs. Unfortunately, this type of farming won’t feed anyone! Arla, our milk buyer, is also encouraging its suppliers down the sustainability route, with financial incentives dependent on milk production methods. It seems to be a logical approach: producing milk efficiently is one of the key goals. For example, not overfeeding protein in the diet and then wasting it through the manure produced. We will also be disadvantaged financially if we purchase soya from sources where there has been deforestation. The incentive starts in July, so we are still learning how we can become more sustainable.
Come on, Cherries! In other, non-farming news, we AFC Bournemouth supporters had a season highlight last month with the 1-0 defeat of Liverpool. It was a very entertaining afternoon, with Liverpool missing a penalty and Bournemouth playing with great determination, showing their desire to remain in the Premier League despite being near the bottom of the league with our local rivals Southampton. Let’s hope the results go our way for the last couple of months of the season. Come on, you Cherries!
After a sold out tour of Europe with the band, Tom returns to his home town for a surprise one off gig with his new band Electric People. Tom Waters, nominated for Young UK Blues Artist 2023, had an unconventional education growing up in Dorset. His parents were musicians who toured with well-known blues and jazz musicians such as Charlie Watts, Jools Holland, and Ronnie Wood. Tom and his sister would accompany their parents on tours during school holidays, soaking up the sights and sounds. Age five, Tom fell in love with music after hearing Willie Garnett and Don Weller play with his dad’s band, Rocket 88. He got his first saxophone shortly after and played with Charlie Watts’ band at a young age. In 2013, Charlie Watts secretly organized a saxophone lesson and gifted Tom a new saxophone. Tom left conventional school to tour with his father and played with various bands worldwide. At 16, he was offered a place at the prestigious Purcell Schools of Music in London, where he met Jack Thomas. They played in many different bands together, including The Electric People, and later went to The Royal Academy of Music together. Tom has an impressive CV, having recorded with The Rolling Stones and Sir Ray Davies, played in The Jools Holland Rhythm and Blues Orchestra, and played hundreds of sell-out shows worldwide. For his homecoming show, Tom wants to celebrate the music he loves; Blues, Rock, Jazz, and an Electric show. He has also invited local friends to join him on stage. Tom Waters Electric People at Dorchester Corn Exchange, 28th April 8 pm. Tickets (£22) and more info here
Tucked into a farmyard complex outside Stalbridge, Thyme After Time is a local favourite for breakfast and scones. Rachael Rowe reports
Thyme after Time cafe at Spirehill. All images: Rachael Rowe
The smell of a breakfast cooking is always enticing, but there’s a lot more than eggs and bacon going on behind the scenes at Thyme After Time near Stalbridge. Owner Margot Dimmer talked about how her business started and described her latest developments. ‘Nineteen years ago, when my son was born, I started making jellies, chutneys and jams. I supplied delis and places like River Cottage. I worked from home and used to deliver them all with my son in the car. I did some work for Parkers, an outside caterer, and built up networking links. People started asking me to do parties. Before I knew it I was doing 16 weddings a year. Then I had a catering business at Hazelbury Bryan, with a cafe at the side. But it was the cafe that really took off. I chatted to the landlord here at Spirehill Farm, and they found a space for me. In July we’ll have been here eight years. We still do catering, but since the lockdowns we only supply events and parties – and will shortly be supplying funerals. We don’t do weddings any more, Saturdays are too busy here at the cafe. We managed to survive the lockdowns, but they changed the business. I saw what we needed and acted fast. Overnight we did a massive overhaul of the website so we could offer Saturday night takeaways with a world menu such as Chinese and Mexican. The first lockdown was really good for us, but it was increasingly difficult in subsequent lockdowns due to the competition – everyone else caught on!’
Margot Dimmer
Dorset Cream Teas by post The lockdowns made Margot realise there was an opportunity waiting for her. She was getting regular requests to post her produce and she began to look at the e-commerce aspect of the business. ‘We set up a crowdfund to raise £9,500 so we could develop the e-commerce business. We had got half way to the target with just two days to go, and at that point a long-standing customer stepped in and made up the difference. That enabled us to purchase the Rationale cooker (which produces 200 scones per hour!) plus the additional equipment for the mail order side of the business. It has taken 18 months to get off the ground.’ The Dorset branding and eye-catching packaging have paid off. Did you know that a hare is a symbol for Dorset? It is emblazoned on the cream tea delivery boxes – not only do they look absolutely beautiful, but they are strong enough to be reused for storage. But there is more to the image – Margot shows me why the Droste Dorset Hare has its name. ‘Droste is an anagram for Dorset, but it’s also an old Dutch word describing a picture appearing within itself.’ Sure enough, if you look closer at the packaging you can see a couple of mini hares. ‘Everything is sourced locally and everything is recyclable.’ Margot says. ‘Our buttermilk for the scones is from the BV Dairy in Shaftesbury. Craig’s Farm Dairy in Weymouth provides the clotted cream and New Forest strawberries are used in our homemade jam. You can get strawberries from them 11 months of the year. Our coffee comes from Read’s in Sherborne. We thought carefully about our packaging, making sure it is all recyclable. The scone bags are bamboo and compostable. We get our ice packs (for the cream) from a medical company in Gillingham; instead of using a chemical-based gel, we use de-ionised water. You can freeze it and pop it in a G&T! ‘We send hampers and cream teas all over the country from the Dorset Hand Made Food Company. And people can add extras such as Mounter’s Gin from Marnhull or our popular chocolate biscuits.’ If you are looking for a gift for that hard-to-please person, or just to brighten someone’s day, these teas look ideal. Margot also produces afternoon teas and cream teas that can be ordered as takeaway or delivered locally.
Dorset Handmade Food Company cream tea hamper by post
How many are in the team? ‘We have ten people, including our three Saturday kids – Eve has been here for six years and Liv is an apprentice.’
What flies out of the cafe? ‘Breakfasts! We serve them at lunch as well. Our Thornhill Brunch is an 11-piece breakfast, and we have breakfast specials too. All the ingredients are local, of course – the eggs come from the farm next door! ‘We also sell our preserves. Medlars are a rare fruit – I get my supplies from someone from the local vintage motorcycle rally. The John Boy’s marmalade is named after my uncle. When I took some marmalade to him he always stirred in some whisky.’ What are you most proud of? ‘That I’m still going! Lockdown was a valuable experience; I discovered that my culinary repertoire is much bigger than I imagined. I challenged myself to come up with a different menu item each week in lockdown.’
And your biggest challenge? ‘Actually it was coming out of lockdown. It has been really tough, especially this last winter. People got out of the habit of going out. These first few weeks of spring have just started seeing things pick up again.’
Some of Margot’s preserves
So what’s next? We’re currently promoting our hampers with the cream teas by post. Here at Thyme After Thyme we’re trialling Sunday breakfast openings, with some special additional ingredients (think pre-breakfast pastries and brunch platters). There’s also a doggie full English. And for the summer I’m looking at having a Sunday breakfast or brunch event with a musician playing. You’ve got to keep moving continually in business.’
Roger Guttridge reveals plans to provide a fitting memorial to a largely forgotten pioneer of press freedom and help for the poor
Today, the Goadby burial plot is marked by a wooden fence and a young oak tree. Image: Roger Guttridge
Thousands drive past every day, unaware that barely a stone’s throw from the A30 lie the remains of one of 18th century Dorset’s most influential figures. For reasons unknown, publisher, author and bookseller Robert Goadby and his wife Rachel chose to be buried not at Sherborne Abbey, with which they had close ties, but in unconsecrated ground a couple of miles away at Oborne. Robert certainly loved the spot, and is said to have walked there most days from his home in Long Street, Sherborne. He loved nature and admired the view from Oborne (which is now obscured by a railway embankment). But his affection for the place doesn’t explain why, some time before his death at the age of 57 in 1778, Goadby acquired a burial plot not within the churchyard that surrounds the ancient chancel at Oborne but on glebe land (an area of land within a parish used to support a parish priest) ten yards outside it. The chancel – protected by the Churches Conservation Trust (CCT) – is now the only surviving part of what was once St Cuthbert’s Church. For almost exactly 200 years, the Goadby plot was itself appropriately protected by an iron fence. Inside the fence was an inscribed headstone praising nature as our link to God and describing a fir tree that originally grew out of the grave. By the mid-20th century, the original fir had long since given way to a mature elm (image opposite, top). The elm eventually fell victim to Dutch elm disease, and when tree surgeons arrived to fell it in 1977, they also removed the railings and most of the shattered memorial stone. A wooden fence has since replaced the railings and a young oak now grows on the spot once occupied by the fir and the elm. Only fragments of the memorial stone remain.
A giant elm tree marked the plot until it succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in 1977
Private, keep out Fortunately, a group of heritage enthusiasts has been working to provide a fitting memorial to the Goadbys once again – although even this has proved more challenging than expected. ‘Our original plan was to erect a new gravestone to replace the one that was destroyed in 1977,’ group member Barbara Elsmore told me in 2019. To this end, a grant was obtained from the Simon Digby Trust, only for the group to learn that a new headstone was out of the question, as the site was on private land and there was no public access. Instead, the group proposed to erect an information board on a pew in the chancel. Four years – and lots of negotiations – later and the group has finally been given the go-ahead, not only for the noticeboard remembering Robert and Rachel but also the publication of a booklet featuring articles and other information about them. Although born in London in 1720, by the age of 21 the go-getting Goadby was already running his own bookshop in Bath. In 1744 he moved to Yeovil and launched his first newspaper, the Western Flying Post and Yeovil Mercury. Five years later, he bought Dorset’s first newspaper, the Sherborne Mercury, moved his operation to Long Street and merged the two titles to become the Western Flying Post or Sherborne and Yeovil Mercury.
The Goadby burial plot in unconsecrated ground prior to the 1977 removal of the elm tree
Freedom of the press Goadby campaigned tirelessly for press freedom and was motivated by a desire to educate the public and help the poor. An inscription above the door of his Long Street printworks read: ‘The liberty of the Press and the liberty of the people fall together. Long may heaven avert it.’ The second edition of Hutchins’ History of Dorset, published in 1796, said of Goadby: ‘Few men have been more generally known in the West of England than he was, and few have had more friends, or more enemies. ‘Truth was the object of his researches, in the pursuit of which he was indefatigable … His knowledge was of course considerable, and he was well versed in several languages…The productions of his press were numerous; almost all of them of a moral or religious tendency.’ As well as newspapers, Goadby’s many other publications included the long-running Book of Fairs and, in three volumes, The Family Library. He was heavily involved in civic life, serving as a warden of Sherborne Grammar School and also as a surveyor of the local highways. He founded a subscription library in Cheap Street. When he died, he left £200 to the poor people of Sherborne and £2 a year to the town’s vicars on condition that they preached an annual sermon ‘on the wisdom and goodness of God in creation’. It was still being preached 100 years later. Rachel and Robert’s personal life was tinged with tragedy. Their only child, also Robert, died in 1756 aged seven and is buried in Sherborne Abbey. Rachel died 12 years after her husband and was buried alongside him.
Next month, Roger Guttridge will look at the fascinating history of Dorset’s first newspaper (which Goadby bought) and its early successors.
