The Farmers Mart Apr-May 2020 - Issue 68 | Page 54

54 GLEDHILL FARM
APR/MAY 2020 • farmers-mart.co.uk
ALPACAS AT GLEDHILL FARM -
DIVERSIFICATION, DELIVERING
JOY TO THE COMMUNITY
In a brief sunny interlude between the showers, rain, snow and wind of
February, I had the privilege of meeting up with members of the Griffiths
family - Steve, Fiona and Katie, who run Stepping Out Alpaca Trekking.
“The Eight Boys”, as Fiona refers to the Alpaca’s, are the integral part
of yet another delightful farm diversification project/business.
STEVE Griffiths is the third generation on
Gledhill Farm in Almondbury,
Huddersfield. Set in eighty acres, Steve
has worked on the farm since leaving
school at sixteen. His father and grand-
father were committed dairy farmers
and enjoyed the times when farmers
got, by and large, a good fair price for
their milk, and although a hard life, it
was rewarding. As we know all too well,
as time progressed, milk prices fluctu-
ated wildly, and it became increasingly
difficult to make a small dairy herd pay.
So the family took the decision in 1997
to change to beef, which proved a good
decision, with beef prices more stable
than milk. However, Steve has always
been a thinker and one to look forward,
and as time went on it was easy to see
that to make a really good living from
beef, he needed to increase the herd size
and therefore would need more land,
and thereby was the problem. Gledhill
Farm now being in a semi-rural location,
extra land was very hard to come by, so
something else needed to be added into
the business to create more revenue. So
in 2010, Steve converted some of the barn
space to stables, the idea being to start
doing Horse Livery.
Little did Steve know, but this was
the catalyst that was to change his life
dramatically. Enter the hard-working,
bubbly Fiona! Fiona was a local girl and
had always been not very far away from
Steve, she had always had horses from
the age of eleven and enjoyed working
with them. Fiona wasn’t from farming
stock, just hard-working parents. She
herself was fully trained in health and
beauty, a Reiki practitioner, as well as a
qualified personal trainer, so a bit of a
workhorse (pardon the pun) to say the
least.
Running a beef herd and livery stable
is somewhat of a juggling act with time.
Learning that Steve now had stables,
Fiona offered to help get the livery side
up and running and brought some horses
with her. It was an instant success and
they ended up building 30 stables in all.
The rest, as they say, is history. Steve
had been married before and had three
children; Fiona had also been married
before and she had four, so that made
one big family! Nine years on, most of
their kids have grown up and moved on.
Fiona’s daughter Katie works with them
on the farm; his youngest Isaac (22) still
lives at home and eldest son Jordan helps
with all the landscaping and conversion
work on the farm.
As many a farmer will testify to,
keeping cattle is very demanding as
no matter how careful you are, getting
squashed, butted and kicked is just part
of the job. Fiona said to me she could
remember a number of occasions where
she had seen Steve kicked out of a barn
or over a fence - Ouch! Also, keeping
a beef herd in this semi-rural location
means they have people walking across
the property and annoyingly some of the
nearby residents are somewhat unruly,
knocking fences down, letting cattle out
and even removing stiles would you
believe, just so that walking across was
easier!