Farmer Focus: Focus on debt repayment after flat-out growth

It’s been five years and it’s time to pass the baton on and bring in some fresh blood. We hope you have enjoyed reading about us.

The farming business has changed substantially during this time.

We have enjoyed a period of considerable growth – the business had no arable, 200 ewes and no dairy sheep in 2014. We have now got the farm to a size we are happy with.

See also: How a resilient sheep dairy farm overcame multiple setbacks

About the author

Rob and Jo Hodgkins

Livestock Farmer Focus writer

Rob and Jo Hodgkins run 2,300 ewes across 210ha of grass and have 566ha of arable in Hertfordshire, producing lambs for Tesco and breeding sheep through Kaiapoi Romneys. Subsidy-free sheep farming means ewes must be functional, lamb outdoors and produce lambs on forage alone.

Read more articles by Rob and Jo Hodgkins

With unprecedented financial headwinds coming, we feel now is a good time to start consolidating some of the gains. We want to let the farm’s infrastructure and cashflow catch up with its current size.

The farm will need to continue to adapt and evolve in the coming years. As input prices rise, borrowing levels will have to increase to keep track.

However, tenant businesses like ours, with limited equity in land or property, will always struggle to convince the bank to carry on backing them.

So, we very much see property and land purchases in the future as a way to try to protect ourselves and keep farming.

Again, without equity, buying land is going to be tricky, and the business must be in the best of health, showing it is capable of substantial levels of debt repayment.

Our mindset will change from exciting flat-out growth. A new tempo will certainly be welcome.

Our dairy sheep have recovered very well from the drought earlier in the year and are now comfortably sitting at a body condition score of 3-3.5.

We aim to lamb these early in March and hope to start milking five weeks later.

The few weeks of milking we managed this year threw up a lot of lessons and tweaks on the dairy site itself. We plan a big session in February to get the second side of the parlour operational.

Next year will be the start of a new genetic programme for us.

The variability of randomly selected dairy ewes is likely to be huge and it will take us five to 10 years to identify and breed a tough, resilient ewe producing two litres of milk a day.