10/01/2026
Something people don’t often stop to think about is what it actually takes, every single day, to put food on the table.
Family farms don’t ever really switch off. There isn’t a day where everyone is off. There isn’t a moment where the whole team down tools and says “we’ll deal with it tomorrow”, because tomorrow still needs feeding, bedding, checking, caring for, regardless of weekends, birthdays, holidays or plans.
That constant reality shapes everything. Today, for example, Mia is finally getting her own bedroom. A big milestone when she’s shared with Lucy her whole life. It means beds and wardrobes and an IKEA trip. Lovely, normal life stuff. Except even something that simple has to be planned around the farm.
Lucy heads one way to a friend’s birthday party. I head another way for furniture. Rob stays behind to feed. Because someone has to. Always. The animals don’t pause so families can all go out together.
From the outside it can look like we’re never all in the same place, or that Rob misses a lot, and he does. We all do. Trips with wider family, days out, events, even just going somewhere together as a unit. Often one of us goes alone, or not at all, because the farm comes first.
Not because we don’t value family time. But because we value responsibility. Between me, Rob, Beth and Nat we rotate it so that someone can have a day off if they want one. Someone always covers. In theory, everyone gets the chance. In reality?
Most of the time they still turn up anyway. Because that’s the mindset you develop when lives depend on you and food production doesn’t stop.
We work it this way so the kids can still have a normal childhood. Parties, friends, bedrooms of their own. Even when it means we’re stretched thin and spread out to make it happen.
Same team.
Different players.
And every role, the one feeding, the one driving, the one missing out, is part of the same bigger picture.
So when you sit down to eat, just remember there’s a family somewhere that didn’t all get the day off. A farm where someone stayed behind. A rotation quietly happening in the background so food keeps coming, day after day.
That’s not exceptional farming.
That’s just family farming.
