Ep.34 Fred Allen “We’re in a sausage machine“

I've heard them all, so I surely won't be as daft as you think.

I do know that you run a mixed farm system and you've got 850 sows on the farm.

Take me back a bit further.

How did you get into farming to begin with?

so probably a bit of an unusual route overall so i grew up on the family farm so i'm third generation farmer my granddad built the farm that we've uh farmed now in 1956 that was just 12 acres and a couple of outbuildings my dad and uncle took over from them uh from my granddad i it my dad started a pig enterprise as part of the company my uncle was more interested in the arable so the bit by bit they saw that they grew each sector themselves my dad was more into the livestock side so that was sort of where i grew up around and growing up through the 90s and noughties i bore witness to some of the trials that he experienced.

There was huge financial pressures in the late 90s, early noughties, foot and mouth.

And although I was interested in it, I was sort of advised maybe to look at a profession elsewhere because of how tumultuous the industry was and how the sector was and how the farm had gone through these struggles and somehow just about scraped through to survive.

So I had a keen interest in environment and a keen interest in money, I suppose.

So I went off to university to do a geography degree with the ambition of going on to Australia to be a geologist in the mines out there and retire at 40, buy myself a yacht and just live the dream for the rest of my life.

Went out there with all these ambitions.

Within a couple of months of doing that, I felt the pull of agriculture was too hard not to ignore.

I wasn't really enjoying what I was doing.

I started working on farms again in Australia, then across to New Zealand, did a bit of traveling in between times.

And then in 2014, 15, I think, My dad started to experience some health issues.

It was a bit of a question mark over the future of the farm.

I thought this might be a bit of an opportunity to at least come back and help in the short term.

And I never left.

I've stayed here ever since.

And that was 12 years ago now.

And as the circumstances have kind of progressed, I've... taken on more and more responsibility and now, yeah, we were a 500 sow outdoor unit when I first came on board, managed that and now we've progressed to 850 sows indoors and we're just undergoing some development now to get us up to 1,200 sows.

So, Yeah, it's quite remarkable how much we've achieved in quite a short period of time and where we've got to.

But that's a very loose overview.

That's sort of how I've ended up where I am right today.

It's funny what you say, though.

It doesn't sound too dissimilar from a few people that I've met in that Perhaps the ambition at 18, 19 is that you will do something radically different or see the world.