Names, the parish and small identifying details in this article have been changed or removed. The account is a composite drawn from several cases we have supported, published with thanks to the farmers who allowed us to describe what their hard year looked like from the inside.
A year that arrived all at once
The couple we will call Pat and Ellen run a third-generation dairy herd on around 140 acres in mid-Devon. Fifty-odd Holstein-Friesians, a closed herd they had built up over fifteen years, milked in a parlour that badly needed replacing but had been kept going with patches and hope. Like most family farms of that size, the margin on a good year is slim; on a bad one, it disappears.
Their bad year began in late spring. A routine TB test returned three reactors. The herd went under restrictions the same week Ellen's mother, who had helped with paperwork and childcare for years, had a serious stroke. By June — a wet June — the first cut of silage was half the yield of the year before, and the parlour finally failed in a way that could not be patched. They milked one morning into buckets before an agricultural engineer, an old school friend, came out at midnight to coax it back to life.
By September they had three more reactors, they were four months behind on the farm's overdraft interest, and Pat had stopped answering the phone to all but his closest neighbours.
The referral
We did not find Pat and Ellen. A local rural vet — one of ours, in the sense that she knew how to get in touch with us — noticed that Pat was unusually quiet on a TB retest visit, and that there were bills piling up unopened on the kitchen table. Two weeks later she called the Farming Community Network, who came out for a cup of tea and a slow conversation at the end of which the FCN volunteer mentioned that there was a small Devon charity — us — that might be able to help with something immediate.
The referrer wrote to us with the family's consent. What she described was not a long-term solvency problem — the farm was viable, and the TB restrictions would lift in time. What she described was a cash-flow crisis that was tipping into a mental-health crisis, and a winter ahead that was looking un-survivable.
What the grant paid for
Our trustees considered the application at the next available meeting, which in this case was three days after the referral arrived. The grant we made was modest — a few thousand pounds — and was aimed at three things.
- The electricity bill, which was nearly a quarter overdue and at risk of disconnection — a dairy farm cannot run on a disconnected electricity supply.
- Six weeks of emergency childcare, so that Ellen could spend time with her mother and the farm paperwork could catch up.
- A partial contribution to the milking parlour repair, paired with a signposted introduction to a regional RABI grant which later covered the rest.
"It was not the money that turned it around. It was knowing someone had read the letter and said yes before the worst week of the year arrived."
What happened next
It would be neat to say the family was out of trouble by Christmas. In reality, the TB restrictions took another five months to lift, Ellen's mother needed long-term care, and the farm's finances took most of the following year to settle. But the grant — alongside the care from the FCN volunteer, the rural vet and, later, a rural chaplain — broke the fall. They did not lose the herd. They did not lose the farm. Pat started answering the phone again.
Two years on, the parlour has been fully replaced through a combination of their own investment and a county-funded productivity grant. The herd is clear. The youngest child is at the local primary. Ellen is back on the farm accounts. None of that is a straight line drawn from our grant — but without the grant, and the wider network that flowed from it, the line would have broken.
Why this matters for how we work
This is the kind of work our fund exists for, and it is also why we insist on three things. First, that referrals come through trusted local people — a rural vet, an FCN volunteer, a minister, a neighbour — rather than through open cold application, because the people who know a family's situation best are almost never the family themselves. Second, that decisions are made quickly, because hardship does not wait. Third, that we never publish names or identifying details — because farming is proud work, and support has to come without a cost to pride.
If you are reading this and you are a farmer, a farm worker, or you are close to one in Devon who is going through a difficult stretch — please get in touch. The right first call is often the Farming Community Network on 03000 111 999. If it would be useful to us to be involved too, they will let us know.
