Wendy Houston describes herself as a “real-life, living and breathing” farmer. It’s a role she’s held for the last 20 years, juggling it with child-rearing and family life.
Husband, Andrew, runs a farm machinery business, MPS Agri Ltd at Otley, making specialist equipment for the pig industry, and last year, the couple scooped Suffolk Agricultural Association’s coveted Best Alternative Land Enterprise (BALE) award for their diversification efforts.
Wendy’s main focus is the family farm, S E Kent & Son at Swilland, north of Ipswich.
“It’s pretty challenging sometimes,” she admits.
As a youngster, she decided she “didn’t want to have anything to do with farming”, and instead studied psychology at university. She was working for Shell in Aberdeen, poised to join a graduate training scheme, when she had her epiphany at the age of 22.
“I decided it wasn’t really for me,” she said. Office life, she found, was restrictive and, being inside, always the same.
“I went home - I wanted to be involved in the family farm.”
Her late father, David, was sceptical, and she had to fight to earn her place, against a sense that ‘girls don’t farm’. She had a brother and a sister, but neither chose to adopt farming as a career.
“I persevered and I made myself useful,” says Wendy, now 42. It made for an “interesting” education, but she did win her father over, eventually.
“I was fine actually and I think once I had started he was very pleased,” she says. “In the latter years he just let me get on with it. If I got in a muddle he would be on hand to help me - it worked well.”
She took three days’ maternity leave for her two children. “Having a year off was not an option” she says. However, because she works for herself, she can build in flexibility so that she gets to see her children perform in the school play or take part in activities.
Today she runs an 1100 acre arable farm, growing wheat, barley, oilseed rape, sugar beet and beans, and a pig farm. The team consists of two on the arable side, one in the office, and four pig workers. Her mother, Ann, does the accounts.
She has two daughters, aged eight and five, and wants to ensure that “when their times come there are options for them”.
“When I started there weren’t any options. You either did it, or you didn’t,” she says.
“We had a really good pig manager at the time and a really good guy on the arable side and they really taught me everything I needed to know.
“I haven’t done badly. There are things that I still feel that I don’t necessarily know that I might have learnt if I had been to agricultural college but having said that, there are other things that I have learnt.”
She describes her younger self as “pretty determined” and “pretty bloody-minded” and feels that among her strengths are a strong grip of the business side, and of process.
“A lot of the daily issues on the farm revolve around problem-solving, she explains.
“I have always said I have got the same number of fingers and toes as anyone else and if they can do it, I can do it,” she says.
“I would have earnt a lot more money doing something else. For a lot of the first 10 years I was at home the pig industry was on its knees and the profitability was just non-existent and it was a real struggle - that was pretty hard.”
She’s keen to see more girls entering careers in farming. “We are missing out on 50% of the population,” she says.
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