Send a question. The good ones get answered properly.

Contract farming and share farming are the two routes that do not require capital. Both mean farming somebody else’s ground for a share of the output, and both are covered properly in Start Your Own Farm. The one thing to avoid is any arrangement that accidentally creates a tenancy.

Yes. And the combine is worse, because it runs for about three weeks and sits in a shed for eleven months. Sharing or contracting is almost always the right answer for anybody under a few hundred acres.

Agri-environment scheme income, comfortably. It is now around thirty per cent of average English farm business income and it arrives whatever the weather does, which after 2025 is not a small thing.

Because they are different businesses. Barley leaves a farm at £150 to £200 a tonne. As beer it is worth twenty to forty times that. The margin lives downstream, and a farm that does not own the downstream is selling raw material into a market that has already priced it.

If you can, yes — but understand that it will teach you agronomy far better than it teaches you accounts, and the accounts are what will decide whether you are still farming in ten years.

Buying machinery. It feels like progress, it is enormously expensive, and almost all of it could have been contracted for a fraction of the cost until the acreage justified it.

There are no farm tours. The planning permission does not allow it. The shop is open Tuesday to Sunday and you can see a good deal of the ground from the car park.

The good questions, yes, on camera. The volume is considerable so most do not get answered individually, which we would rather say plainly than imply otherwise.

Full refund within fourteen days of starting, no explanation required.

No. Every course starts from the assumption that you have never held a soil auger, because most people have not.