Smallholder training in Devon at South Yeo Farm West

"Best weekend ever.  Thank you so much for being so helpful, flexible and friendly.  We absolutely loved it." 

   

You've been  thinking about it for years, discussing it forever, and watching programmes like My Dream Farm and River Cottage with envy.  What you really want to do is leap out of your armchair, get your hands truly dirty, and decide once and for all if smallholding and increasing self-sufficiency is genuinely the life for you.  Successful smallholding requires you to master many trades, make many choices and face numerous decisions, and people have huge numbers of questions about it all (and the learning never stops). What could really make a difference is coming on a training day that gives you a real flavour of the life, and an understanding of what's involved day to day. 

"I must say again how much we loved spending time with you. It was a great weekend which we cant stop telling our friends about." SM, Devon

So what we've done is create from scratch the kind of training we wish we'd had access to twenty years ago; practical, realistic, thoroughly informative, with answers to lots and lots of questions: 

There's no doubt about it - coming on one of our courses can transform your life - at least that's what participants tell us:

  • "I can honestly say I am having a ball. It has given me a new lease of life." AM, Bristol
  • "We were so enthused and inspired by our weekend with you both, that we have gone for an 11 acre smallholding!!" J+SH, Woking
  • "We... have sold our place and are moving to a 8 acre smallholding... 5 miles from the beach." CH, Devon
  • "Our weekend in Devon confirmed for us that we really want to pursue our smallholding/self-sufficiency dream." J&VH, London
Our style of training:"We feel so lucky to have found this course and meet such lovely hosts who are happy to share secrets of smallholding and are so down to earth"
Our courses are designed to be lively, interactive sessions, with lots of time spent outside experiencing it for real on the farm (rain or no rain), so that we combine theory with practice and send you away with a real sense of what you can do next.   And because this is a working farm, there won't be courses during April - we're too busy lambing.  We keep groups small - a maximum of eight for the smallholder and livestock days, and just four for the DIY website day - so that you get our full attention.  Sitting in the farmhouse kitchen munching our homegrown produce over lunch and tea is the ideal time for dealing with any questions that may not have been answered; recipes and preserving techniques are swapped, life's dreams discussed, and we find that groups frequently exchange contact details to keep in touch. 

Your trainers: "It's the best course I've ever been on - and I've been on a lot of courses."
It's important that you know that we run the farm ourselves, with only the occasional bit of contract help (for winter hedgelaying, bumping in lines of fence posts and summer shearing), so we do everything else, every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  As well as running the farm and the courses with Andrew, Debbie is also a professional trainer specialising in the arts sector and Andrew has delivered plenty of software training in his time. We’ve been doing this smallholding/farming-on-a-small-scale lark together for nearly two decades and before that worked in our spare time on a farm for a number of years, so have managed to gather quite a bit of knowledge along the way.  Our Living with Livestock course is co-delivered with farmer and writer Paula Wolton and her son Olly at organic Locks Park Farm.

The livestock: We have a particular interest in native and rare traditional breeds and run two flocks of Welsh Mountain Badger Face sheep, both the Torwen and Torddu.  Our pigs are the Yeoman herd of pedigree Berkshires, and we breed geese, Aylesbury ducks and Black Indian Runner ducks.  For a touch of the exotic, our llama acts as guard for the sheep. These stalwarts are frequently supplemented, depending on the time of year and our foibles, by Norfolk Black turkeys, guinea fowl, and chickens of various kinds.  Locks Park Farm has a stunning herd of organic Devon Ruby cattle and Whiteface Dartmoor sheep. For more information about our livestock, have a look at our farm website.

New courses in development and bespoke training: From 2011 we will be delivering an intermediate level smallholding course for those of you with a bit of experience wanting to spread your wings, get more ambitious with your range of smallholding activity and breed your own stock.  If this interests you, do get in touch.   We are also considering developing days on practical skills such as fencing, building your own poultry/duck hut, practical woodworking for smallholders and more, so let us know if that interests you.  And if you want something particular that you can't find elsewhere, if we have the skill and the knowledge we can create a course specially; we are always happy to tailormake a course for you, so do contact us to discuss, and if we can help, we will.