Deer, pheasants, cattle roam in a farmers’ fantasy

Press, 12 June 1987, Page 19

Deer, pheasants, cattle roam in a farmers’ fantasy

By

HUGH STRINGLEMAN

Right next door to England’s answer to Disneyland, Alton Towers, lies an 1800 ha estate of tranquility in which red deer, highland cattle, sheep and pheasants coexist in a corporate farming venture. J. C. Bamford Excavators, Ltd, has poured money into Wootton Farms in past decades with top-of-the-line fencing, farm buildings, machinery and stock. The founder, Mr Joseph Bamford, and his son Mr Anthony Bamford, have spared no expense to make Wootton Farms- a showpiece and the development is by no means complete. Mr Peter Gray, the current president of the British Deer Farmers’ Association and man in charge of Wootton Farms, said recently that it was a delight to him to work for a large estate being built up rather than wound down, as was the case with his last employer, the Duke of Roxborough.

Deer numbers at Wootton Farms are expanding rapidly as Peter Gray seeks to. back his “tremendous faith in the future of farm venison.” About 250 red deer hinds are calving this northern spring/summer but 350 will go to the stag next September.

Such herd growth parallels the British Deer Farmers’ Association it-, self, which has expanded by 25 per cent annually for the last two or three years. It now has 430 members, of whom 180 are- farmers.

Although he wasn’t there to ask, one imagines that this sort of growth appeals to Joseph Bamford, the man who turned 50 shillings into a private company with a £l5O million ($430 million) annual turnover in just 40 years. He handed company control over to son Anthony 10 years ago and lives in retirement

abroad. In 1945 Joseph Bamford parted company with the family agricultural machinery company and rented a garage in Uttoxeter, in Britain’s East Midlands, and bought a second-hand welding plant for 50 shillings, only to find that the garage didn’t have electricity because of wartime restrictions on new supplies. Undeterred he built a farm trailer from war scrap and took it to the local

farmers’ market day for sale. Three weeks later someone offered him £45 ($130) and a trade-in cart, which was only half the price Bamford had on model number one. He took the trade-in cart back to the rented garage, repaired and painted it and returned to the market to make a further £45 and achieve his original price objective.

He never looked back. Within a couple of years J. C. Bamford had established a factory in nearby Rocester, employed several workers and launched the first of his world-renowned back hoe loaders in a distinct yellow livery. J.C.B. now has 17 per cent of the world market in these earthmoving machines, including the market leadership in 56 countries.

It exports 60 per cent of its production of 7500 machines annually and employes 1700 people on a 73 ha factory site at Rocester, near Wootton Farms. Until Alton Towers developed to be the largest

tourist attraction in Britain, drawing thousands of people daily, the J.C.B. plant was the biggest thing in the district and Wootton Farms is probably the largest estate in the East Midlands. Peter Gray explained that 10 farm workers, a

forester and several game-keeping staff look after ’an 1800 ha estate with 420 ha of cropping, 1600 breeding ewes, 600 cattle and 500 deer. If that sounds a little over-staffed, remember that several classes of stock are kept inside for the winter months and that quite a lot of the activity of the estate staff involves entertainment of J.C.B. clients who seem especially keen on winter pheasant shooting. Asked if he had any constraints on farm management, Peter Gray replied, “Only the gamekeeper.” It is a traditional rivalry on British estates and as Peter says he is lucky to work for one that doesn’t have to count the pennies because death duties have crumbled the pounds. Not that J.C.B. deer run wild and are shot at — they ■ are safely tucked away behind Cyclone deer netting and are being weighed, recorded and single-sire mated. The important pheasants are kept to the higher, unimproved bracken country and encouraged to breed to numbers rivaling even the rabbits, which are in plague proportions. Myxomatosis has obviously lost its influence and poisoning is impossible with so much valuable feathered and furry livestock.

Wootton Farms is a fanners’ wonderland. . The pheasants and the rabbits rush in and out of the feet of large herds of deer and cattle. The hardy highland section of the cattle herd resemble yaks, with 20 or 30 cen-timetre-long fibre, and the calves look as though they have escaped over the fence from the fantasy section of Alton Towers, or Jim Henson’s latest Muppet movie. The sheep are the very hairy, piebald crosses so beloved of British hill farmers — actually Scottish blackface, Leicester, Suffolk crosses — and they are all housed in winter when they help dispose of 3000 tonnes of silage made annually on Wootton Farms. The deer calves are inside very elaborate sheds from September through May, while adult deer are outside all year round.

Magnificent stone or concrete barns, many of them new, can contain upon inspection large numbers of Friesian cross steers and bulls being intensively fattened on silage.

The central section of Wootton Farms has been extensively landscaped and planted out. It contains 20ha of lakes, falling one to another, with foreshore areas planted in oaks, chestnuts and thousands of rhodedendrons.

The estate is crisscrossed with sealed roads and dominated by Wootton Lodge, a massive stately pile- which is inadequately described by the English desire for understatement, when a House is probably two storeys, 20 or 30 rooms and two or three centuries old, a Lodge is larger and older and a Hall just a notch below a Castle. Wootton Lodge has a brooding air which must have seemed just right to a former inhabitant, Oswald Mosley, in the days before J.C.B. swallowed up 25 farms to carve out an estate. But it is not the rolling pastures, extensive woodlands or lakes which are the most dream-like feature of Wootton Farms for the farming visitor but the miles and miles of the most substantial and expensive five-rail, steel bar fencing ever seen on a farm. The fencing would not be out of place around a botanic gardens or public park. Each post every two metres or so is set in concrete and all the steel has a copper content to slow rusting. Untold kilometres of perimeter and internal division fencing must contain thousands of tonnes of steel, and have cost millions of pounds. For the deer, Peter Gray has added a special

sort of clip on extension to the top steel rail which carries two or three wires and hot outriggers down below. But new fencing within the deer unit is standard netting and a new set of deer yards under construction is modelled on the Mt Somers farm of Mr Mark Acland, which Peter visited earlier this year. He is keen on New Zealand livestock technology and has commissioned sheep yards to a Kiwi plan. For Peter the keen rugby follower, however, the All Black’s quar-ter-final victory in the World Cup might have dampened his enthusaism for things Kiwi. He calls himself an argumentative little Scot and his performance in front of a video-taped replay of the first round draw between Scotland and France certainly bore that out. Another special challenge to his disputatious nature is the J.C.B. test track, where engineers are regularly encouraged to see if they can kill a back hoe loader. This is right in the middle of Peter Gray’s farming operations and disrupts somewhat the pasture and the livestock. But these little irritants, such as the pheasants, must be endured for the pleasure of managing one of the most unusual and beautiful farms in Britain.