How Much Money Do Shepherds Make In The Uk

I t was a coffee-table book in Huddersfield library that convinced metropolis goth Amanda Owen that her future lay with sheep. "I had been glued to All Creatures Not bad and Minor on TV, merely unfortunately discovered that I wasn't bookish enough to be a vet," she says. "I'd haunt the animal section in the library and one day picked up a cute book called Colina Shepherd total of the virtually evocative photos I could imagine – not just romantic views, but gritty pictures of the blood and the crud. I didn't realise that life even so existed."

Two decades on Owens, 39, runs a 2,000-acre sheep farm in a Yorkshire Dales village so remote that information technology'south been deserted by all inhabitants except her ain large family. Each solar day she rises at dawn to intendance for i,000 sheep and her seven children, the youngest of whom rides strapped to her body every bit she strides the wild hills rounding up her flock with her sheepdogs. All but ii of the children were born en route to the hospital because it's ii hours away over treacherous roads.

For a city girl born to a mechanic and a style model it's an extraordinary life. Each day is a battle with the elements that ofttimes brutalise this part of Yorkshire. The children rarely visit shops or cinemas and muck in with the farm work as soon equally they're old plenty to walk. "I've never done a jigsaw with my kids and sometimes that keeps me awake at dark, only lambing with them is just as bonding," she says. Despite the grinding hours, at that place is very little money in it merely Owens has never regretted that teenage resolve. "We don't often leave the farm because we discover we're ever looking for somewhere every bit proficient every bit here."

Her route in to shepherding, ordinarily the preserve of farming families, relied on a mixture of bluff and stamina. On leaving school at 18, she enrolled for an NVQ in veterinary nursing and met an agricultural worker who offered to find her work feel. "I went about farms shovelling muck and disinfecting pens," she says. "You kickoff at the bottom and meet the rough side of farming."

The filth and the toil did not deter her; information technology merely reinforced her longing for an old-fashioned colina farm rather than intensive product in industrial-sized buildings. She read up on sheep farming and plastered her bedroom walls with charts of ovine diseases and trunk parts. When she saw a shepherding job advertised that specified that no sheepdog was needed, she practical.

"Thanks to a bit of barefaced and Farmer'south Weekly I managed to convince the farmer that knew what I was talking about," she says. She was offered a seasonal job lambing on a subcontract in Wiltshire where Cumbrian farmers sent their youngest lambs to overwinter in milder climes. When they arrived to collect their animals Owens returned with them. "I wanted a more rugged landscape and since lambing starts later in the colder due north there was work for me up at that place."

She was housed in an elderly caravan in a farmyard and lent a hand on any farm that would take her. "I could so hands accept given upwardly then," she says. "I was on my own with no money working 24/7 and feeling like a skivvy considering I had no qualifications so was given all the mucky jobs."

Her prospects improved when she was given a cottage for a peppercorn rent and the runt of a litter of puppies. "It looked suspiciously similar a terrier and made no effort to help with the sheep until 1 day I was coming down the colina in the pelting with a lamb over my shoulder and I was shut to giving up because the sheep kept wandering support the hill, when of a sudden the dog started chasing the sheep and it was just a question of getting him to chase them in the right management." From and then on she endemic a working sheepdog.

One night she was sent to a remote farm to collect a tup – a male person sheep – which her employer loaned for breeding. She and the farmer bonded over the setting of a cleaved sheep leg and were married. Overnight she became mistress of a James Herriot-style farmhouse and 1,000 sheep.

Numerous courses exist on aspects of shepherding, but Owens reckons that easily-on feel is the surest way in for those without farming claret. "You lot need to become to the auctions and read all the farming papers for work opportunities, and yous need to be a jack of all trades considering there's a lot of Information technology involved in modern farming," she says. "If yous're prepared to take on anything there'll be someone who volition hire yous and considering of the different lambing seasons in the north and south you lot tin observe lambing work from Christmas to late Apr. To buy your own farm yous'd have to win the lottery merely in one case you've gained the experience and made the contacts in that location's always the chance of a tenancy."

Those lured by pastoral imagery tin can look a brutal awakening. "People come to our farm on a sunny summertime's twenty-four hour period and remember we live an idyll," she says."'But if you're trying to round up sheep in snow so deep you tin't lift your legs or carrying a hay bale a mile through iii-feet drifts or tying a sheep'south prolapse with string because you're miles from a vet it'southward a different moving picture.

"You can spend hours looking for a lost sheep then detect it drowned in a bog, because where there's livestock there's dead stock."

The compensations are the joy of working with nature in beautiful surroundings and of continuing centuries old traditions of husbandry. Owens, despite her city roots, feels she has come dwelling. Recently she decided to buy a copy of the coffee-table book that had so long agone inspired her. "I realised that my at present husband is actually in one of the photos that I'd gazed at in the library," she says. "I felt I'd come full circle."