Bill Hale bought Furrow Farm in 1931 with a loan from the bank and a Fordson tractor that cost £120. His ledgers are still in the farm office, written in pencil: every bag of seed, every calf and every bill paid.
Four generations on, we still farm the same chalk, still keep Herefords and still argue about when to start harvest.
What has changed
The machines are the obvious difference. Bill farmed four hundred acres with two men and that Fordson. We farm twelve hundred with a combine that would not fit in his barn. The dairy he started closed in 1962, the year the first combine arrived, and the cows that replaced it were beef.
Bill’s son Robert bought the first combine in 1962 and, thirty years later, the drill that started our contracting work. His wife, Margaret, kept the books for forty years and planted the beech hedge by the house that is now taller than the barn.
“Grandad wrote down everything. We still do, we just use a laptop and lose it less often.”
Some things have changed for the better. There are longer hedges now than in the 1970s, when many were grubbed out, and more birds on the farm than there have been in living memory.
The down above Long Lane, much as Bill would have seen it.
What has not
The chalk is the same, thin and white under the plough. The weather is just as stubborn. The Herefords are descended from Bill’s first bull. And harvest still starts with somebody standing in a field, rubbing ears of corn between their palms and saying it is nearly ready.
Will and Joanna took over in 2019, Sam runs the cattle, and the next generation is already asking to drive the tractor. We mean to hand the farm on in better heart than we found it. Bill would have wanted the ledgers kept up, too.
Every generation has had a bad harvest, a hard winter and at least one argument about the price of a tractor. The ledgers show all of it, and we read them more often than you might think.
