60 WOLD FARM FEB / MAR 2022 • farmers-mart . co . uk
NO TILL AND STABILISERS ARE THE MIX ON THE WOLDS
Chris Berry talks with Paul Temple of Wold Farm
EAST Riding farmer Paul Temple makes no bones about how much he enjoys the profession he is in and how much agriculture has given him . Paul is the third generation to farm at Wold Farm in the rolling Yorkshire Wolds hills between Driffield and Langtoft .
Paul ’ s father Bruce pulls up for a chat with Paul as we ’ re talking about how the farm business still comes under the name HS Temple & Son of which he was the son to his father and Paul ’ s grandfather Hubert Simpson Temple .
Times have changed over the decades and what was once a dairy farm up until 1980 is now a 900-acre arable and livestock enterprise harvesting winter wheat and winter barley and with a herd of 240 Stabiliser suckler cows that sees the farm with around 550 cattle at its peak each year .
“ I absolutely love the act of farming ,’” says Paul . “ I ’ ve been fortunate to have been able to undertake a lot of things off
eastern . claas-dealer . co . uk the farm too , but I also count myself very lucky to be farming . I count my blessings every day .
“ I have always liked the livestock side , including when we were producing milk , but pulling out of dairying in retrospect actually did us a favour as summer grass and drought were always a problem .
“ I know exactly when we stopped milking not out of some kind of nostalgia , but because we used to record how much was in the tank on a calendar on the wall and on November 21 , 1980 there was no entry . That calendar remained hung on the wall the next 20 years so the date is firmly embedded in my memory that the day prior was our last day of milking .
“ We went out on what people will remember as an outgoers scheme and the intention was to come back in , but the quota system cut off that opportunity . We applied but were only offered quota for 40 cows .
“ The Wolds shifted over into being very much about arable winter crops as that was the way of making money , but we have always had cattle too .
Paul says the Stabiliser herd that now forms his beef enterprise has been his favoured livestock operation for a number of years .
“ At the peak of the headage payments we used to fatten just short of 1000 head , but once the single farm payment came in and headage was gone it didn ’ t make any sense to be chasing numbers .
“ Richard Fuller , then of Givendale , was a transformative person in the suckler beef industry through the new Stabiliser breed and clearly laid out his case why these animals would work for farmers like me and he had all of the technical information to back it up .