I grew up on a family farm. My granny was always keen to get me into agriculture from a young age – when I was five she bought me a couple of sheep. I was really keen to work on my parents' arable farm and we expanded upon that.
Hardly any of my friends are farmers. It's quite an unusual profession for young people. I went to Reading University for three years and made some new contacts there. One day we had a lecture on diversification, and we were thinking about different things we could do to increase farm income and make the whole system more efficient.
I discovered back on the farm that we had two redundant 1960s barns, and nothing was being done with them. So we did them up and started producing free range turkeys for Christmas. It worked so well that the next year I bought another shed on another farm.
It's a big operation. Today we turn over about 30,000 Christmas free range turkeys for major supermarkets. We've doubled the size of the farm and increased the amount of land farmed by 500%. And I've just won the Farmers' Weekly Young Farmer of the Year award.
There's too many turkeys to get attached to. If you just had 20, you would give them names. But I've got thousands of them. You appreciate them on the farm, but I wouldn't say I grow very attached to them. None of them survive Christmas – they all go. In fact, they'll all be gone by the end of this week.
The turkeys are kept in a very natural environment. They hatch in August in a cosy building with very little feather coverage. They are very well looked after – as they should be. Turkeys need good access to free range facilities, and plenty of food.
As they grow bigger they develop a good coverage of feathers and the temperature drops gradually. We move them to a large, airy, cooler barn with an outdoor range for them to roam in. In early December they are ready to be weighed and prepared for the processing factory.
We eat one our own turkeys on Christmas Day. Luckily, there are no vegetarians in the family we have a big family turkey. They are a top quality breed with a slightly gamey flavour and lots of meat on the breast, which makes them great for carving at Christmas.
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