Tony, Sue & Laura
Scoriton Farm, Scoriton, Dartmoor
continued
Tony: My Grandfather bought the farm in 1947. I’ve been here for 70 years. I was born in Morton Hampstead, but I don’t
remember living anywhere else but here. I grew up with my parents farming this farm. We’ve got about 150 acres and I
hope our daughter Laura will carry on the farm after Sue and I. At the moment she wants to do that. The farm keeps us
all fit and healthy. I don’t suppose there are as many 75 year olds that do as much as I do!
The biggest threat to the future of hill farming is the environment and then after that, there’s the financial threat. The
general public simply doesn’t want to pay the price for food that we are able to produce it at.
Sue: One of the messages of farming is that we are custodians. But these days, profit has become more important than
looking after the land and the animals. As humans, we have this idea that we are in control of nature, but we’re not in
control. Mother nature is in control. We’ve been given tools, and now with mechanisation, we have perhaps been
desensitised to being at one with nature in the same way as our forefathers were. How often do we now prefer to rely
on weather forecasts rather than looking at the sky, smelling the air? Having said that, it’s not very often that we don’t
know when it’s going to snow. We can smell it before it starts!
Tony: As farmers we can often recognise a poorly animal. It might look like there’s nothing wrong with it to the untrained
eye, but you can sense it somehow. You can’t put your finger on why you know. It’s a sixth sense. Sadly, our kind of hill-
farming is dying out. It’s something that’s not going to be going on for very much longer. Farms now are getting bigger
and bigger and they’re all becoming fully mechanised and commercialised.
Sue: To us farming is not just a job. If it was, we wouldn’t last five minutes. It really has to be a love and a way of life. If
you’re always going to be looking at the bottom line, you’re going to be so disappointed the whole time. We’re coming up
to Spring now. It’s a beautiful time of year. A time of new life. And every year, one of the things that is still so special to
me is when the ewes talk to their newborns. They actually change their language during this time and I’ll always love that.
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