Essex boy to start again on
Colin Fletcher was four generations away from farming and living in Essex when he leased seven acres and he was still at school.
Breeding pigs and grazing horses aren't usual pastimes for a school boy, but one paid for the other, and Colin had a dozen pedigree pigs on the go. However, it all came to an end with a blast of e-coli which left him with vet bills and little else, and nearly put him off farming for good.
When he finished school, he entered the building trade, plastering and carpentry and general work, which were to stand him in good stead later on.
Colin came to Ireland with a friend in 1976, to West Cork, which was then encountering its first wave of 'blow-ins' many of them gifted amateurs who put the region on the map in terms of food production and tourism.
He had forty quid and an old van, and bought a one and half acre site in Dunmanus for £1,000 and began to build a house.
These were the golden days of the West Cork hippie scene, but Colin says that wasn't really his thing.
He preferred to spend his time with local people, and he took up work with a local builder, along with constructing his own house.
He and Jane, who married in Cork, lived at Dunmanus for over 10 years and had their two children there.
Jane baked and sold her bread and Colin worked locally, as well as fishing and taking cattle out to the offshore islands.
Working in farms, laying yards and building sheds, kept him in touch with local agriculture, and when the opportunity to buy a farm in Ballydehob came up, they took a chance and went to the auction.
The holding at Gurteenroe came with 50 acres and a derelict farmhouse, both land and house in need of a lot of hard work.
But the farm was only one and a half miles from Ballydehob village, and with two small children and one car, this made a lot of sense.
They bought the farm for the maximum they could afford, £34,000, and moved in 1988. That winter, Colin stopped working and put all his energy into getting the house right; meanwhile, the family lived in a caravan.
The following spring, they moved in and purchased six heifers to graze the neglected fields. The heifers didn't work too well either.
"We got pure rubbish", says Colin, "but we got them cheap, a few months later we picked up some good pedigree heifers and went on from there."
Buying an old David Brown, the couple began to clear and drain the land and while they don't spray, they use nitrogen to give the grass that extra push.
"We re-seeded all the farm and reclaimed land that had never seen grass on it before", says Colin.
The couple used a pragmatic approach to farming that saw them adopt a self-sufficient lifestyle, but without the associated zealotry.
They bred their own dairy stock, using top quality AI straws, and sold off their bull calves, beef production wasn't profitable at all for them, says Colin and neither were sheep, which they tried in the early days.
Instead, they concentrated on milking and, from an initial allocation of just 3,300 gallons, they purchased extra quota in restructuring and leased more wherever they could.
They also got some through the hardship scheme and today, they are milking up to 26,800 gallons, but they feel that their ambitions were thwarted by the system and that any expansion was out of their reach unless they borrowed heavily.
"We have some old fashioned ideas. If we couldn't afford it, we couldn't have it."
However, they did manage to farm full-time and raise their family, growing their own vegetables and keeping animals for the freezer.
They also had an easy run disease-wise.
According to Colin, there has been no brucellosis in his area and only one animal has gone down with TB.
He feels that not keeping the animals too tight, allowing them plenty of grazing and feeding them well are good preventatives.
His milk is in the top 2% in the country, he says, and his cattle now graze 100 acres.
However, with the kids in college and not likely to take on a farm, the Fletchers are now selling 50 acres and the four-bedroomed farmhouse.
The couple will build a new home on the remaining land and will concentrate on drystock, and they may even get some time off.
Stephen O'Keeffe of James Lyons O'Keefe is in charge of the sale and he's inviting offers of 495,000 for the farm of 50 acres and 15,000 gallons of quota, which is ring-fenced.
