A young farmer has revealed how her family was forced to reinvent their farm after a difficult lambing season, leading them to switch to goats and produce their own cheese and soap.
During Sunday's episode of BBC's Countryfile, host Adam Henson visited 27-year-old Georgia Hunter and her father Frank at their farm near Ravenstonedale in the Westmorland Dales. The family keeps a herd of 60 goats, plus replacements.
Lambing crisis
Georgia explained that the family faced a "crisis" during lambing season. "We were having quite a hard lambing time, weren't we? The mothers didn't really have any milk. The lambs didn't have any energy, did they? And they were Texel crosses, so they were meant to be milky, but they turned out they weren't very milky. So, it was just a bit of a crisis, really, wasn't it?" she said.
Frank added: "The goat milk was better quality than the milk replacers that we could find. They were bright, they were bouncing, just the same as the rest of the flock that was suckling their mothers."
Shift to goats
After comparing profits from sheep and goats, Frank decided to reshape the farm, cutting the sheep flock from 500 to 20 and selling goat's milk to local cheese producers. Georgia began helping on the farm at age 18, stepping up when her father fell ill.
Georgia also opened up about mental health struggles, including a breakdown that left her with a stutter. She credited therapy, doctors, and support from Young Farmers for her recovery. "If I didn't have that, I don't really know where I'd be," she said.
Make or break moment
The family faced another challenge when cheesemakers stopped buying their milk. Frank recalled: "It came after one cheesemaker had said, 'We don't want your milk tomorrow.' There was 1,000 litres of milk sat there. And what do you do with that?"
Countryfile is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
