Hit me with the truth.

[Woolless]

As I'm sure @unlacedgecko and @Tim W already know, Michael Blanche makes a podcast called The Pasture Pod. Whether you're into pasture or not, it's just a great, positive, inspiring view into the worlds of some excellent farmers. Well worth a listen.

Plus one. Having listened to a couple, I'm now going back and listening to the lot.

 

[Ysgythan]

My long story short. I Grew up on a dairy farm that belonged to my grandad. He retired when I was early teens and I consider them the best days of my life. I have 2 children of my own now and I would love for them to have a sense of freedom I had. I'm thinking of renting land and making a start on my dream with a handful of sheep. I'm from the east Midlands, Leicester area.
Does anyone have any advice, no matter how harsh ?.

yolo

 

[Estate fencing.]

My bit of advise is not lamb for a couple of years, lambing is really the only difficult part of sheep IME and a lambing where you don't know what you are doing will put you off and make you despondent. Also if you have a job taking all your holiday to lamb the sheep is probably not going to the marriage very much good.

What I did to get started was buy ewe lambs in the autumn run them dry for 12 months and sell back out as ewes, its a good way to get started and as long a you keep them covered for flystrike, footvax and Heptivac them there really not much problems your going to have with them.

As a contract shepherd what I did for someone that really wanted to have some sheep (but knew nothing about sheep) was they bought 100 ewe lambs of me and I looked at the and did all the work on the for 12 months then sold them. The first year I kept all the profit plus made a bit buying the back. Over the next 5 years they have taken on the checking and feeding and I take less out of them. This year I only sell them the sheep, buy them back at the end and shear them. It seems to have worked well for them, they made no money out them for the first couple of years but gained experience and still enjoyed owning there own stock safe in the knowledge that I would sort any problems that might occur.