Our Story

The Full Story

Four friends who love animals! Pete, Steve, Danny and Jon with Jacky as our weekend helper.

​

We started off by helping Pete look after his pigs and cows when he was recovering from knee surgery and it really went from there. We loved helping out and thought we should be more involved, so we bought some turkeys and housed them down Cuckoo Lane in the Vale (hence our name) with the intention of having babies to sell. During 2021 we bought Debbie to fatten up for our freezers, but she was such a character that we decided to keep her instead and then took delivery of five Oxford Sandy and Black sows in January 2022 and five babies.

​

Sadly, one of the sows became ill so we were left with four; Bernard was purchased in February 2022 as he was heading to slaughter and we put him in with Lulu. We thought we were being clever by having a breeding plan in mind, but Bernard got bored with Lulu after two days, escaped and made his way into the field with the other sows! The breeding plan was out of the window pretty quick.

​

The sows now have their own enclosures and for Bernard we made an escape proof enclosure. They are smart animals though and we are sure he is devising a way of escaping to the sows again!

​

We feel extremely lucky; we have a fantastic landlord who put most of the infrastructure on the land already and he lets us get on with it. Apart from Pete who is retired, we all have day jobs (and Jacky is at school) so the weekends farming and learning new skills is something we look forward to all week. 

​

Most of our photos are taken by us, but we were very fortunate to welcome award winning photographer Caitlin Chescoe to the farm in April 2022 to take some pictures. The one of the five of us on the Homepage was taken by Caitlin and we love it.

​

We are also thankful to the people who deliver apples to us, like Jo, Paul and Linda as well as many others. Thank you everyone. 

​

​