IN my time writing about farms and interviewing farmers over the past 33 years there have been plenty of moments when farm hearts have been broken , the will and spirit bashed out of sight , by events out of anyone ’ s control .

Foot & Mouth Disease in 2021 is regarded by most as the biggest of all traumas . It saw hard , strong , resilient men and women in tears as funeral pyres of dead livestock abounded in the north of England ; Wheat trading at £ 65 / tonne in the 90s ; the milk price reaching as low as 13ppl for some just in the past decade ; pig prices scraping the floor , these were all significant too , and they were all horrendous , but the long lingering wet , dreary , incessant rain that has been prevalent since last September and indeed even further back is proving perhaps the most debilitating of all .

Guy Shelby farms at Benningholme Grange , Skirlaugh in East Yorkshire where he runs an arable operation of 1400 acres tenanted from the Crown ’ s Swine Estate and an agricultural contracting business that brings his farmed acreage overall to around 2500 acres . His brother Dave runs the farm ’ s livestock enterprise with 700-800 breeding ewes , a suckler herd and a B & B pigs operation . Guy and Dave farm in partnership , working alongside their father Chris .

Guys says that this past year has been the worst continuously bad weather he has ever known and that it has even affected him and he , like many others , consider themselves to be robust enough to cope with anything .

“ I ’ m a lucky man , because I have a great support team around me . My wife Bryony is fantastic , as are all my family and friends , but this has

probably , mentally , been the hardest year of my life . There have been days when I just didn ’ t want to get out of bed , and when I did , I ’ d be looking out of the bedroom window at water .

“ I ’ ve got 30 acres of rape left from 260 acres sown , through the weather and flea beetle . I ’ ve only been able to drill 300 acres of wheat out of 850 acres planned .

“ I have struggled to cope at times . Don ’ t get me wrong , I ’ m very good at that bit when most blokes will say are you alright and you will say yeah I am , but if I ’ m asked am I really alright the answer ’ s probably no . Like I say , I have a great support group of my wife , family and friends and I am in a Whatsapp group with farmers I was at Univeristy with , and I ’ m very good at going to the pub , but I also really feel for a lot of farmers out there that don ’ t go to the pub or don ’ t have that

support network , that have been finding it hard .

“ Hopefully the weather will have picked up by the time this magazine goes out and we ’ ll get into this summer and hopefully draw a line under it .

The Shelby family have always been mixed farmers . The family used to have a hill farm up in the Yorkshire Dales . His dad ’ s Uncle Ernest was , he says , ‘ a proper sheep wheeler and dealer ’ and bred pedigree Wensleydales .

Guy ’ s father took on a Crown Estate farm near Nottingham before they settled back in the white rose county at Benningholme near Skirlaugh in East Yorkshire .

“ All we had in Nottingham was sheep as most of the land we farmed was around the Trent . We grazed a lot of floodbanks . Benningholme Grange then came up on the Swine Estate ,

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Benningholme Grange Farm