They started with sheep as a hobby, but in 4 years the flock has grown as they look after it around rented pastures
In 2020, Sam and Samantha Edwards took up a hobby involving a handful of sheep in pony pens near their home in west Dorset, UK.
Now, just four years later, they run a successful livestock business with 900 ewes – despite not having a farm to rent, the BBC reports.
Instead, they rely on temporary grazing permits, which involves a lot of driving, to care for the animals, often with their young child.
Recent recognition at the British Farming Awards has given them a boost, but as Samantha explains, their real dream is to secure their own rental farm.
“We have no farm base at all. We don’t even have a farm lease anywhere,” she said.
“We only have grazing licenses in west Dorset, so we just drive around, checking and moving sheep.
“We’ve been very lucky with local support from the farming community,” the young family shares.
Grazing licenses are short-term agreements that allow livestock owners to graze their animals on another person’s land.
The couple made deals with several permanent pasture owners, but they were only able to expand after securing winter cover crop grazing on arable farms.
“It helped the business grow because we had a lot more winter food,” explained Samantha.
When they started, the couple worked full-time, but recently switched to part-time.
She said: “We have to make sure one of us is always around to jump in the truck and see what the sheep are doing every day.
“We are very driven and determined to make sure that none of us have to work a second job.”
Their tenacity won them the New Farmer: Against the Odds award at the British Farming Awards in Birmingham.
“We’re absolutely blown away,” Samantha said.
“We didn’t expect to win at all because most of the time we think we’re crazy to run around like we do. The recognition has given us a boost in what has been quite an exhausting year.”
“We had a really tough lambing, the weather was terrible, we were out in the rain with little lambs for weeks.”
“We don’t think of what we do as anything special or different to others – with sheep farming everyone has the same challenges – but it’s been a very exciting few days.”
So what’s next for the Edwards family?
“Our dream would one day be to secure a good farm lease somewhere, but we don’t want to leave Dorset for family reasons – we like it here and we have connections in the farming community.
The dream would be to really get some certainty because the grazing license business is very difficult, you never know what will happen one year to the next.
Planning the sheep’s feed and all the running around in the trucks and stuff – it’s very, very difficult.”
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