Anton, Alison & John Sherberton Farm, Princetown, Dartmoor continued

Anton: We came onto Dartmoor in the 14 or 1500s, out of the South Hams where we appeared when reading and writing started. I’m the fifth generation in this premises. Here we run a saw mill, cutting local timber into useful products, and we retail rugs from our cattle, we retail granite, which we cut and prepare a bit, we also do sheep and I write books and for newspapers. I write a weekly column for the Western Morning News and articles for Dartmoor magazine and I’ve been writing for the NFU for several years. I’m not sure all of my children are interested in farming. I work with my son John now and either he will take over the farm or nobody will. Neither of my daughters are interested. Running a family farm is like running an extension of the household. So instead of just feeding the kids, you’re feeding hundreds of sheep and cows as well. It is quite different from going out to work and doing 9 to 5. My job is physical and I’m glad it is, otherwise I’d be a couch potato. I’m starting to ache at the extremities a bit though. Every day brings a new set of joints that don’t want to get up! If the NHS could lend itself to having grease nipples put in my knees, that would be a big improvement. The main farm is 1500 acres. We also graze part of the common which is probably as much again. We also have 150 acres off the Moor. The main farm is Duchy land. The common is the largest common in England. It’s 26000 acres. If you look at a map of Dartmoor, the common is more or less the central core. A lot of Dartmoor doesn’t receive a lot of tourists because it’s very isolated. Once you get away from the two roads that go through the middle, you see a few people but not very many. When we’re out gathering sheep, we hardly see any walkers or tourists. We have daily problems caused by walkers. Mainly gates left open. Animals will mysteriously get through a gate – that means someone has come along and opened a gate, left it open then someone else has come along and shut it. It is a constant burden. Cows getting in with the wrong bull, stallions getting in with the wrong mare. Alison: Odd colts that haven’t been dealt with (castrated) get in with my pedigree mares! It is a serious financial burden. Anton: That one moment of somebody leaving a gate open, is going to cost me two man hours to sort it out. DEFRA allowing the re-wilding lobby to become entrenched is a threat to us. Re-wilding is when you let certain areas go back to nature and you don’t farm them anymore. And the target for the re-wilders is particularly the uplands – that’s us. They want my entire culture gone off the landscape. There are some words for people who want to remove entire cultures from landscapes, and they’re not very pretty. Everything in civilisation relies on farmers, farming the landscape. The fact that the hills are the least farmed makes that the most attractive target to re-wild. Re-wilding is a theory being put forward by people who don’t really understand what civilisation is. Re-wilding is just nonsense in a small country of 68 million. It means we have to import our food requirements from other countries with is irresponsible and unsustainable. They want to bring wolves back for example. On the continent, every mainland European country has a wolf problem. The Germans are at the front edge of it, because the wolves are coming in from the East. They made the wolf a protected species and they are now taking sheep and German livestock industry is being torn to bits. In Northern Italy, there are daily pictures of sheep with their guts torn out. Not animals on hills, but at pasture. And it’s ok apparently. Apparently, that’s the natural way! But unfortunately DEFRA are allowing those fantasists to have a voice. It’s hard to see how our farm will survive BREXIT, unless the UK government is prepared to shovel support into farming. And we won’t have the French farmers out on the street protesting for us anymore! It does also look like, post Brexit that DEFRA will be indifferent to our plight. It doesn’t look like our farm will survive, which doesn’t particularly bother me, because I’m not going to starve. I’ve got other business interests. Somebody, somewhere else will starve though. I believe the vast majority of farmers voted to leave. It comes from a stubborn mind-set I suppose.