Hey,
Just a quick apology, when I said 'playing at it' I didn't mean to infer that all small holders are some how playing at being big farmers. . . . .
I'll give you an example, there are three small farms that border where I live/work. Their previous owners were small scale farmers, nothing major, the farms are around 40-50 acres each.
Now they went up for auction, and I live in an area which is quite popular at the moment for folk who work in a city to live the good life, and move to the country, while still commuting to work.
So. . . . the auction came, and there were a few folk there with ideas of taking over one of these farms, and farming it, mostly local, or relatively local people. However, there were also others. All three farms, went for ridiculous sums of money, none of them to be farmed, just to provide a pretty back drop to someones life. . . . .
The one, where we used to run sheep, ripped most of the fences out, and said no to the sheep, because they did not want their children 'standing in sheep s**t'. . . . . they now just get the grass cut by someone (and not used for hay) and left in the field. The other has a couple of horses. The third, fenced the lot in. . . . . with deer fence. . . . but only after the 12 dogs they rescued for their country idyll had killed several sheep locally.
The three lots of owners are - two pairs of doctors and one pair of solicitors, who work in the city, sold their big town house, and used the cash to buy a pretty chunk of the countryside.
I probably sound a bit bitter haha, and maybe i've just seen some bad example. I wash;t attempting a dig at the folk on here in any way! I was just interested to see what the backgrounds of those that are 'farming' on a small scale.
There are not really any small holdings around here, just one big estate, and a few small farms as mentioned above.
Interestingly, I also do a lot of pest (mostly rabbit) control in the south of england, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire etc etc.
A lot of the places we do are big estates and farms, that are actually owned by random celebrities, such as Jeremy Clarkson, Kate Moss, Angelina Jolie, etc all kinds of odd folk. They buy up big chunks of land, usually 2000-5000 acres. . . . . but don't want to do anything with it at all, just want it to look at out of the window. Anyway, I have a friend who works as a contract shepherd, they run around 7000 ewes, and don't own an acre. They just put sheep in rich peoples fields lol.
The countryside is a funny place.