Christine Broom on Milk Quotas and Sheep

The Government brought them in in 1984 when they said that you could only produce so much milk on certain size farms, and of course if you had say ten cows that more than would have given the quota, you had to get rid of them because they wouldn’t pay you for the extra milk, so you had to try and find something else to do, so that’s why I bought these first sheep.

I knew nothing about sheep. I bought them off a friend of ours.

I bought 20 really old ewes and he said, “Well they’ll do you one year” and I think I paid him £20 each for them.

I kept them a year. They all had twins and triplets and I think the lambs all made, in those days, £30 or £40 each, so I had quite a few hundred pound and then I sold the old ewes a year later for £25 so I made £5 on each of the ewes plus all the lambs I’d had, so that was an extra supplement to the milk quotas, and then, as I say, we got rid of the cows and the sheep increased, so I had some commercial sheep.