Andrew Brown, 62, whose family farmed sheep and crops for over 300 years, has transitioned his primary business to holiday lets and indoor cricket training at Fairchilds Lodge in Rutland, East Midlands. The shift, made in 2020, was driven by soaring costs for shepherding and pesticides that made traditional farming unprofitable.
“I was speaking to a cricket coach as I do play myself from time to time, and we began discussing the shortage of indoor cricket training facilities, mainly due to the size of the nets making it difficult for sports centres to dedicate so much space to a relatively small number of people,” Brown said. “That’s when I had the idea of using a barn that had once been used for lambing. With distribution costs soaring it wasn’t profitable to keep sheep anymore so this seemed a perfect solution and it has been going really well.”
From Sheep to Sports: The Rutland Cricket Centre
In 2020, The Rutland Cricket Centre opened with three indoor lanes, repurposing a former lambing barn. The facility is now run by Tom Flowers Cricket Coaching (TFCC), which acquired the tenancy and transformed it into an ECB-standard indoor cricket venue. The lanes are available to book from £25 per hour.
Brown also operates two barns converted into holiday lets, each accommodating 11 people with a hot tub. The barns cost £350 per night per barn and can be booked individually or together for groups up to 22. They are popular with hen dos and stag parties, with activities such as bucking broncos, life drawing, and bungee running arranged on-site.
Economic Pressures on UK Farming
Brown cited rising costs as the main reason for leaving sheep farming. “The only way I could make sheep profitable was to increase my stock to 1,000, and with that many I would need to employ a shepherd which would eat up the profit,” he said. He also noted that fertiliser prices rose from £300 to £500 per ton due to Middle East tensions, and fuel costs made distributing wheat from Rutland as expensive as importing from Canada.
“It’s the job of the government to make sure there is food for the country and they are the ones making it harder and harder to do so,” Brown said. “We should be at least 80% self-sufficient in the UK but instead we are less than 60% and at the mercy of the whims of other nations.”
Diversification Trend Among Farmers
Tom Flowers, coach and founder of TFCC, noted that many farmers have approached him about repurposing barns into cricket training venues. “As an independent cricket coaching company, the knock-on effects of Covid meant many of our regular hire venues closed their doors to us, with little pathway or willingness for us to return. In many ways, it proved to be perfect timing — with farmers increasingly needing to diversify, and TFCC urgently requiring a permanent indoor training base,” he said.
Flowers added that the consultancy package launched by his company has supported similar start-ups across Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, and beyond. “There are now several comparable projects operating across the UK, but we remain incredibly proud to have been among the first pioneers of the concept in the UK when we launched back in 2020.”
Environmental and Policy Challenges
Brown, an environmentalist, agreed with the ban on rapeseed seed treatment to protect bees but criticised the resulting imports. “All that has happened is that we now import our rapeseed from countries that haven’t banned it. By importing these products we are exporting environmental problems,” he said.
He has since sold all his sheep and now focuses on the cricket centre and holiday lets, which are profitable. “Both businesses are working because the farm environment is a perfect base for both,” Brown said. “We have the space in the barn to devote to the nets and the accommodation is in a rural, private location where groups of up to 22 can come along and make as much noise as they like because we are in the middle of nowhere.”
Brown concluded: “I’m a businessman and need to make money and thanks to successive governments farming no longer ticks that box.”
