Three people, twelve write-ups, and one of them left.
Every funded apprentice writes four pieces across their year — autumn, winter, spring and harvest. They are edited for length and for nothing else, and the one who dropped out wrote a final piece explaining why, which is the most useful thing on this page.
The three, so far.
Names withheld at their request, which is the arrangement from the start rather than something imposed afterwards.
The 2024 apprentice
Started in September 2024 on a mixed arable and sheep unit eleven miles from here. Wrote four pieces, the best of which is about spending a fortnight convinced she had killed a field of barley with the wrong nozzle setting. She had not. She is now employed there full time and has her own sprayer tickets.
The 2025 apprentice
A dairy unit, which is the hardest start anybody can have because it does not stop. His winter piece is four hundred words about milking at half past four in January and it is the single most-read thing in Schooling. He has moved to a larger herd on better money.
The 2026 apprentice
Left three months in. Wrote a final piece rather than disappearing: the placement was thirty-one miles away, the bus went twice a day, and no amount of funded travel makes a fourteen-hour day with four hours of it on a bus sustainable. We changed how placements are matched because of it.
What each of them got.
| Year | Tickets | Kit | Travel | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Telehandler, PA1, PA6 | Boots, waterproofs, helmet | Bus pass, £1,150 | Employed full time |
| 2025 | Telehandler, first aid | Boots, waterproofs, milking kit | Bus pass and a bicycle, £980 | Employed on a larger herd |
| 2026 | Telehandler, started PA1 | Boots, waterproofs, helmet | Bus pass, £340 used | Left in March |
What the one who left taught us.
The placement was thirty-one miles away. The bus ran at twenty past six in the morning and at six in the evening, which meant a fourteen-hour day of which four hours were travel, five days a week, for a seventeen-year-old on an apprenticeship wage.
The travel was funded. It was still impossible, and we had funded the wrong thing — we had solved the cost of the journey and not noticed the length of it. Nobody in this building asked how long the bus took, because nobody in this building takes the bus.
Placements are now matched on journey time rather than on distance, with a ninety-minute ceiling each way, and the fund will pay for a moped and its training where that is the difference. It is the single most useful thing three years of this has produced and it came from the failure rather than from the two successes.
Where their writing lives.
Apprenticeships
What an agricultural apprenticeship actually is, and what it pays.
Where it all went wrong
Six years of expensive mistakes, written down so somebody can make cheaper ones.
Starting a farm
What land costs, what tenure looks like, and the real arithmetic.
Ask Kaleb
The questions people are too embarrassed to ask anybody in person.
The apprentices, questioned.
Because they were seventeen and eighteen when they started, and because writing honestly about a placement is much harder with your name on it. It was the arrangement from the beginning.
It is part of the arrangement and they are paid for it, at a rate a freelance would get. Writing four pieces for free in exchange for a bus pass would be a different and worse relationship.
He is fine. He is doing a different apprenticeship four miles from where he lives and it is going well.
No. Anything you would like to say goes through us and we pass it on, and quite a lot of it has been passed on.
What the money did, line by line.
Three years of accounts, including the year that did not finish.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/estate/the-money/
/estate/recording/
/estate/sitemap/
