Episode 2 The Farm Fixer

Small family farms are in trouble.

This hasn't seen any action for a while, has it?

Business Consultant Nick Hewer is going back

to his Northern Irish roots

to help them diversify and make radical changes

before they go under.

What can you do with 17 acres?

But are the farmers ready for his advice?

I'm not a farming guru with all the answers,

but having observed many companies over more than 40 years,

what I can offer is a great big dollop of common sense.

This series follows eight local farms embarking

on a long-term fight for survival.

You're not turning bookings down, are you?

-There will be tough decisions.

-That source will pump for ever and a day.

And they're going to sell it!

But doing nothing is not an option.

End of a long day and, for me, a depressing day.

OK.

This week, Nick is on his way to see 23-year-old Charlie Cole.

He is desperate to work on the family farm

on the north coast near Ballycastle.

But right now, there isn't enough money to support him.

I'm not looking to make £1 million. There's only 50 acres here.

We're limited by that.

I just need enough money to live and bring up a family here.

It's hard. There are so many people whose children

want to do it because it's life for them,

but they can't afford to.

I must say that I'm in a slightly sceptical mood today.

We're off to see Charlie Cole,

a young man back at the family farm trying to find a role for himself.

He's come up with seaweed and goats.

Charlie's money-making plan is to harvest seaweed

off the north coast and sell it to a family friend in Scotland.

His other idea is to sell goat meat.

Both ideas are unusual and the latest of many.

He first of all wanted to do a boar farm.

Lovely idea, but quite expensive outlay.

He bought £100-worth of bees there

and doesn't have a clue how to beekeep.

It's a fun idea. It was quite entertaining watching him get stung.

He doesn't even own a bee suit.

I'm Nick. Are you Charlie?

-Pleased to meet you.

-How are you? Look, brothers.

-I'm Freddie.

-Sandy.

-How do you do? And mum?

-Yes, Millie mum.

-How do you do?

-Would you like a cup of tea?

-I'd kill for a cup of tea.

For Nick's initial visit,

he's accompanied by his dog Jasmine.

Nick's got eight months to whip Charlie's ideas into shape.

By then it's hoped the farm will start making money.

For the last seven years, it's done little more than provide food.

We have pigs, we have sheep and that's all we eat.

We have chickens and ducks. We also eat those. We have a vegetable patch.

That's us pretty self sufficient.

When I was a kid, I remember some stories, Alice In Wonderland,

Cabbages And Kings, walruses taking to oysters or something.

I've never heard of kid goats and seaweed before. Is that a dream?

Is that Alice In Wonderland?

A dream? Hopefully, it's very much in the pipeline.

We're very close to the north coast here

which has fantastic seaweed resources

which are underutilised probably.

The idea would be to pick it, bring it back here and process it

and I'd look at having a processing shed here.

Then sell it on, probably wholesale but for a tidy profit.

-And you expect to sell how much a month in pounds?

-£3,000.

-£3,000 a month?

-Yup.

-3 x 12, £36,000. Your profit on that would be...?

-£11,000.

-11 on 36. That's knocking around the 30% mark.

-It's not a bad return, is it?

-It's not a bad return considering we're also paying

-ourselves for man hours as well.

-How many days a month can you harvest?

That gives you four days at each low tide so it's about eight days in a month.

-Lying around for the rest of the time?

-Well, I'm not going on holiday.

The plan is for the rest of the time, to use the money to reinvest

and the time, into other business ideas.

So one gap in the market is with goats.

There's a lot of dairy farms with goats

and all the kids are surplus to that requirement.

-They're disposed of.

-The boys?

-The boys.

The idea is to take them on and fatten them up for two months

on milk-fed diet and that way, you get a very tasty meat, much like veal.

-No kidding.

-Exactly.

One thing's for sure. Charlie's really personable. Not enough.

I think he hops from one idea to the other. I think he's a dilettante.

'He's suddenly spotted a opportunity that's got low entry costs.

'Whoops, he's off. Has he really drilled down into this project?'

I'm not sure that he has, but I'm going to find out.

So, Millie, Charlie's home.

It's the old problem, a smallish farm, three sons coming up.

Is it big enough to sustain it as it stands?

As it stands at the moment, no.

Let's talk about the goats. Give me a two-month cost of the feeding.

Two-month cost, I think it works out as £50 a goat.

Fine. Who's eating goat?

Well, unfortunately, I haven't narrowed down an exact market.

I don't have a guaranteed buyer.

There's quite a lot of "thinking". I think this and I think that.

Would you admit to me, be honest,

-that you haven't drilled down deep enough yet?

-I've not.

I've got a lot of numbers floating round in my head.

All we've really got at the minute, Charlie, forgive me...

-Is an idea...

-Is a great idea about getting something for nothing.

Seaweed. Tell me more about this alleged buyer.

The buyer is based in Scotland. She's a family friend.

I'll offer her first refusal on my harvesting.

It's a bit rich if she says, yeah, I'll take all you've got for X pounds

a kilo and you've got another buyer who'll take everything for 2X.

CHARLIE LAUGHS

-This happens. Who's giving you permission to rip the seaweed off the shore?

-Well,

that's the one flaw in that plan.

We have to agree a harvesting licence with the Crown Estates

and so that's the one flaw in that grand idea.

We don't know how much that will cost us.

Or for how long they'll grant the licence.

-Exactly.

-What worries me is that you've gone so far

but it's dribbled off into the sand and it's a bit of a mystery.

There's no question that you're a young guy, enthusiastic,

educated, bags of charm, but you're a dilettante.

You dip in and out of things. You bought a swarm of bees on a whim.

In a nutshell, don't you dare think you're in business

until you've researched every aspect.

I don't even know dilettante means.

I presume it means jumping from one thing to the next.

-But I haven't jumped in on anything yet.

-Yet.

Nick's plan is to thoroughly research both ideas

before any money is invested.

They're starting with the goats.

Roy Colvin is a dairy goat farmer

and spokesperson for the Northern Ireland Goat Club.

If Charlie's idea meets with his approval, then Nick will be a lot happier.

There's a lot of dairy herds in Northern Ireland

and most of the boy kids coming out of that are a waste product.

It's feeding up your waste stock on the milk and fattening them up.

I understand the goats are normally done on a two-month cycle.

-Is that a realistic time scale?

-Two months could be tight.

Your animals are coming out of a dairy herd.

If there's no boar genes in the male kid to start off with,

it doesn't have that natural instinct to bulk out.

To muscle up which means that the bones are covered in skin.

It takes nearly the two months to then beef out.

If you bring in 50 kids, no matter who well you care for them,

you're going to come up against some form of sickness or problems.

Out of those 50, you'll do well if you have 40 alive.

This is one of my own kids, Charlie, from home.

What size would a two-month kid...?

Oh, a two-month kid would be about there.

-OK, so a lot smaller?

-Yeah.

The more I hear about this goat business, the less I like it. Too many pitfalls.

Let's hope the seaweed business is easier.

The next stop is Ballintoy Harbour.

Nick's brought along seaweed expert Professor Matt Dring to find out what seaweed is available

and whether harvesting is environmentally sustainable.

It's a nice bunch of dulse. That's extensively used in Ireland.

-Let's try some.

-I think it's always best fresh.

-Uncooked?

-Uncooked, yes.

-Promise?

-Nice and salty, of course.

-It's all right.

-This stuff is what's called Irish moss.

That's the basis of carrageen

which is a gelling substance.

Here we have some pepper dulse. This is probably the prime product.

It only comes in very small batches and it's very difficult to find.

But it tastes delicious and the price we can get for this is far higher.

It is. Isn't that amazing!

So what we're looking at here is seaweed, but,

to the experienced eye, we're looking at different types of seaweed.

Each one with a particular application, perhaps.

People used to make greater use of it, in the 1850s.

In the famine, certainly there was a considerable use made of Irish moss.

The younger men don't want to do this any more.

It's the older guys that did all this.

-Too much like hard work?

-Hard work. It means getting up early in the morning.

You can imagine, when it's pouring with rain. It's a difficult thing.

These days, the youngsters don't want to do that.

We have to discuss tis more with the scientists

and the Environment Agency to work out sustainable harvest rates.

At the moment, we're looking at a two-month cycle for the dulse.

It's possible that harvesting it does encourage

the growth in the same way that cutting a lawn encourages the grass.

I started today thinking "What sort of madcap scheme have I stumbled on?"

As the day has progressed, I think there's a business here.

BUT harvesting it's one thing.

Marketing it at a profit is quite another.

It's now over a month since Nick's visit. Charlie's been working At his

uncle's farm in England. He urgently needs cash to survive but it means

Nick's plans are on hold.

Unfortunately, being over here, it makes meeting people quite difficult.

I'm working every day, ten-hour days so trying to fit it in is difficult.

With Charlie distracted, Nick's beginning to worry about the lack of progress.

So you've sneaked off to England, have you?

-When are you back?

-I'm coming back next Monday.

-What about the goats?

Have you done any more research?

I'm not sure whether the milk is the way forward

so I'm thinking we fatten them up to five or six months.

-Do a trial, Charlie. Do a trial.

-Do a trial?

-Can I worry about the seaweed?

A harvesting licence, I haven't got yet.

Right, we've still got to get a licence, Charlie because,

without that, we really don't have a business at all.

-OK.

-What about products? Let's start planning ahead a bit.

I'm going to see you in about a month

or so and I've got to challenge for you, Charlie.

I'd like to see a list of ten ideas you might have for seaweed products

and I want you to pitch them to me

because as long as you have the list, you can begin to work towards it.

-Towards it.

-Rather than always being a wholesaler.

-Do you understand that, Charlie?

-Yeah. That is the aim.

It's now winter on the North Coast.

Nick is back to look at Charlie's product ideas.

It's the first time he's been pitched to on a bed sheet.

Welcome to the launch of Broughgammon - forward thinking farming.

That's what we've come up with for the title for the farm we think.

SeaCrop is the name we've come up with for the seaweed part

of the business.

-I like that.

-We've been sitting around brainstorming

and we've come up with a few ideas.

Foraging tours and classes. Seaweed bath packages.

You have your muslin bag which means you can drop it into the bath,

it releases the goodness.

All the alginates come out of the seaweed

and you moisturise yourself in the bath.

How much would this retail for?

Well, the prices range between £11, about 15 euros.

That's what we're looking at.

Unfortunately, our knowledge of soap-making isn't great,

but we tried it yesterday with some molten soap bars and seaweed granules.

-It doesn't smell great.

-You're right about that one.

CHARLIE LAUGHS

Most of what we sell, will be sold as...

This is to our wholesale marketers. We'd be looking at milling it down.

This is our attempt at bath salts so you can smell that.

I think that's a pretty refreshing scent.

Encouraged by the product ideas,

Nick's told Charlie to forge ahead

with the seaweed licence application.

The first thing Charlie needs to do is carry out

an environmental impact assessment.

I have to go down and analyse the biological matter on the beach

and work out the quantities there are before I can create a harvesting report.

I enjoy it. I'd rather be outside than anywhere else.

There's a lot to see when you're down here. It's not just seaweed.

You're not just looking at the floor.

There's other stuff going on around you.

The report will take months to compile, so Nick's decided

to go back to the goats' meat idea.

Today leading Northern Irish chefs have been invited to the Belfast Cookery School.

Nick's asked top chef Paul Rankin to prepare three dishes

and introduce them to goat meat.

I imagine it's more tasty but similar to lamb.

It certainly looks similar to lamb.

Whack it in the oven. That's going on take about an hour and a half.

If today goes well, Nick will launch Charlie to a whole new market.

If it goes badly, it will kill the goat meat idea off for good.

Hi, Paul.

-Good morning.

-How are you?

I'm very well, thanks.

Good to see you. I brought the brave Charlie Cole who's determined to

change the eating habits of the nation.

You are one of the most experienced chefs in the country.

How often have you done this before?

-I've never cooked with goat before.

-Never? Really?

So what I'm wondering is, is the taste milder?

In which case, I think it's a very acceptable potentially

commercial meat.

If it's stronger and more gamey

then I think it starts to throw up problems with the public.

-I think lamb's your big competition.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

What really interested me in setting this up today is that

it's almost impossible to find goat in Northern Ireland.

It's an underdeveloped market and when we started inviting people

to come here today, there was a rush of acceptances. Right?

There's a lot of interest.

Interest, combined with a lack of supply, could be

a magic combination.

But only if it tastes as good or better than more well-known meats

like lamb.

The other chefs have arrived.

It's time for the hard sell.

Thank you all for coming today.

Just a little background, basically. I've been looking

at goat farming for about a year now and I wanted to

see if there was space to market it in Northern Ireland.

Good, well, thank you, Charlie.

Now what we've got to do is to try it, enjoy it, believe in it,

promote it, goat for longer life.

Feels a bit tough, actually.

Dinner is served.

OK, number one, girls.

All Nick and Charlie can do now is wait anxiously for the verdict.

You'd think it would be a hard sell but I think there's definitely

potential to push it.

Lamb's expensive.

I'm finding the taste quite mild, I think it's delicious.

I think that it's, it's not just an alternative, to lamb,

I prefer the texture to it than lamb.

To my mind, I thought it would be gamey, very rich,

very, almost like mutton but that was incredible.

-Really, really good.

-So what do you think of the taste of it?

-Very nice.

-Yeah?

-It's actually quite tender too.

It's really, really hard to get goat's meat,

I've been getting it from France,

which is incredibly expensive and I would use it every week.

I've given him my card and everything.

Well, if proof were needed, we've seen it here today.

There is a market.

-This market, it's for the taking.

-Yeah.

-It's for the taking, OK?

-Yeah.

It been a month since the tasting.

Finding a ready market for goat meat has given Charlie

the confidence to get a herd of 26 goats.

The goats were free but with no income,

there's still no money for accommodation.

So Charlie has found an alternative.

This is the nursery section here.

Basically, it was two bedrooms,

we stripped them out and built these nursery pens.

But most of these have now taken to the trough,

so we're ready to move them out of the nursery stage and into the

kitchen stage as we call it because it's in the kitchen in the caravan.

It will take five months before Charlie is ready

to sell goat's meat.

So Nick has decided to continue developing markets for seaweed.

Nick's arranged some key business pitches.

It's a massive opportunity and Nick needs to make sure Charlie is ready.

-So give me confidence, Charlie.

-Give you confidence?

-Are you giving me confidence? I think I'm the one to answer it.

-I...

-I'm not sure.

-I'm confident.

You'll be able to discuss with them knowledgeably unit cost,

the competitors, what the benefits are.

Yeah? All that kind of stuff.

Promise me you'll have all this worked out by the time you

walk into that room.

I've gone to a lot of trouble lining up some really good pitches

for Charlie and if he bitches up, as it were...

Wanders in, gets all vague, I'll be bloody furious.

It's early spring.

Charlie's goats have outgrown the caravans and moved into a barn.

On the seaweed side, Charlie is finishing

his survey for The Environment Agency.

Getting his licence is now a formality.

So basically what we're doing is we're going along and we are looking at bits of red dulse.

And we click on the clicker every time we see one.

Except I've broken my clicker, so it's not working.

HE LAUGHS

We felt this sort of stood out but it is much more traditional.

There is now just a month to go until the pitches.

Charlie is preparing some prototype packaging

for the seaweed bath soaks.

That one I felt was quite sort of, erm, it doesn't really

grab your eye.

It's been a busy couple of months but Charlie knows the pitches

Nick has arranged are the opportunity of a lifetime.

I mean, I am quite nervous. I don't know how, what they're going to be

looking for from just a small-time farmer, really.

It's going to be quite a difficult market to sell to, I think.

Nick has brought Charlie to London.

Today he will be pitching seaweed bath soaks

to one of the most prestigious department stores in the world.

It's probably a little bit too early

to be knocking on the door of Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly,

but let's see how he gets on.

Let's see if he can sell them the concept, the product,

and most importantly Charlie as a businessman.

This whole floor is devoted only to women's beauty

and accessory products.

I mean, look at the size of it.

And yet, there are no seaweed products and that tells me

-maybe there's an opportunity for you.

-Yeah.

Thank you very much for having us here today.

I've come from our small family farm Broughgammon, on the North Antrim coast.

We are looking at ways of diversifying,

bringing in a bit more money, and sustaining three boys

who are all eager to set up their own little business ideas from home.

And our first brainchild is this seaweed harvesting operation

which we are currently trying to set up.

And seaweed is growing sort of across the markets.

It's used as a vegetable, it's used in health and beauty products,

and one idea we've come up with is our seaweed soak, bath soak.

Erm, so we've got, a little bit of salt falling out but this is it

and the bag?

You put this in the bath and it will then expand.

It grows by about five times.

And this will be floating in the bath with you?

Floats in the bath or you can cut it

and let it out for the full experience.

OK. I'm just going to...

-And at the moment we just have that pure seaweed smell.

-Erm...

Well it's, it's not an aromatherapy sort of thing,

it's more sort of grass therapy.

It's the idea of the salt water. The fact that the vitamins

and the proteins inside it stimulate things like the thyroid gland,

encourage weight loss, and it's sort of that side of the market.

I'm concerned. As we've said, it's a whole luxury market.

And we are asking our customers to sort of sit in the bath,

with quite a large bag of seaweed.

What was the price point on this? The cost price?

I mean, the cost price for us to produce that is looking at about £7.50, I think.

I think, at the moment, that is

quite a high price point for the product.

-We've got to get it right with the margins.

-Yeah.

I think it also needs a lot more work doing on it in terms of a range.

Obviously, we're a very luxury customer.

Looking for things that are a little bit exclusive and I think at this

moment in time the product wasn't quite ready for us, but I think

we can have given him some advice in terms of what he should do next.

Well, that was the first pitch and it couldn't have been

more difficult because that is absolutely top of the tree.

But here are my observations.

The pitch was a bit of a ramble to be quite honest, in future

I think you've got to write down the bullet points,

memorise them and then deliver them one after the other.

Listen, I think they liked you.

They get the concept, when you eventually got to it.

In other words, they've left the door open. What more could you ask for?

Fortnum & Mason may have been a long shot.

But Nick's next pitch for Charlie has real potential.

Green Angel are a Dublin-based company specialising

in seaweed products.

They're growing fast and Nick knows they're on the lookout

for reliable wholesale suppliers.

This opportunity, combined with the client in Scotland,

could guarantee Charlie's future on the farm.

Here we go again, Charlie,

you just remember what we talked about last week.

No rambling, yeah? Bullet points.

They're here to buy and you're here to sell.

Come out of here with an order. Start the business today.

I come from sort of Broughgammon Farm which is our

family farm up on the north coast of Antrim.

At the moment we've got approval from the Crown Estates,

we've probably got a nine-year lease with them, with first refusal at the end of it.

We are at the moment going through NIEA approval

so, our Environment Agency and we are also going for Foods Standards Agency

-approval, so everything will be food safe.

-That's interesting, good.

-Would our seaweeds cost the same amount?

-Uh, no.

I mean something like pepper dulse which is probably the smallest

seaweed there is but the most sought after

for its flavour, that would be £25 per kilogram, whereas

something like dulse we'd be looking at about 10, £12 a kilogram.

Would you be able to put it into some kind of bag, do you think?

For us, bagging shouldn't be a problem.

We've looked at doing it ourselves.

We retail to around 500 pharmacies.

And if we start exporting, which is where we want to go...

We would be able to provide a competitive package

in comparison to a lot of the other producers.

Who would literally pick it and then look for the immediate service.

Right, so what you're saying is,

that you're really going to do this more professionally?

Obviously, if we were sort of negotiating a contract then

we'd be more sure of what our overheads were going to be

and we could then tie it down to a more competitive price.

So do you feel, once we've tied down our costs,

would you be happy to sort of go forward and discuss

an actual contract and do business together?

I think we may be one step away from a deal.

Thank you very much.

You see what happens when you tighten up your game?

Wishy-washy at Fortnum's, this was good.

They've actually said you're one step away from a deal.

-It couldn't get much better than that, could it?

-Yeah.

Anyway, come on, your mum's got goat for dinner.

-And you're bringing the wine.

-Come on!

While Millie gets busy preparing tonight's dinner,

Nick is up at the shed meeting the rest of Charlie's goats.

You start at one end and run to the other. The entire lot will follow you from one end to the other.

I hope you're not in here playing games with them? LAUGHS

We're basically, at the moment conducting a little trial with them.

We're killing one off every month to see how much it weighs

-and what the actual flavour of the meat tastes like.

-Yeah.

Obviously, the younger, more tender, more flavoursome.

But not as much weight.

The price per kilo would be high but the amount of kilos would be low.

Whereas if we leave them to five months...

-you're finding the sweet spot?

-Exactly.

-Yeah.

I went into the stable, as it were, where they are,

and his, suddenly, his whole attitude changes.

-You can feel he's enthusiastic.

-Yeah. He is.

-Which is good.

-I mean, he's worked very hard at it. They look at him as dad.

-Right.

So it's going to be very interesting to see what he had to take them to slaughter.

LAUGHTER

As well as Charlie's mum and dad, family friend Tara is also here.

-Here's a lot to celebrate.

-Charlie, don't cut my fingers off!

LAUGHTER

Today, Charlie found a new wholesale client for the seaweed.

Fortnum & Mason are open to helping him develop products,

and the Scottish client is waiting to buy seaweed

for their range of seaweed seasonings.

-It's very good, isn't it?

-You taste the seaweed through it.

It's very delicate, isn't it? Hmmm? Huh?

Not only that, but they are celebrating with

Charlie's own hand-reared goat, which he got for free

and for which he already has a market.

Well, here's a toast to you, Charlie.

When I first met you I thought, hello,

we've got a dilettante here.

Shopping and hopping around, but you've come good.

You've come good on the goat. You've come good on the seaweed.

Brilliant. I'm really proud of you. I'm sure your parents are proud too.

-Cheers.

-Thank you very much.

-Here's to Broughgammon and Charlie.

To Broughgammon.

When Charlie left college he was determined

to have a future on the family farm.

He hasn't sat around wondering what to do, moaning and whining, he's got

off his backside and he's researched the sort of markets

that he could go into.

And now, he's brought those products pretty much through to fruition,

he's gone out and he's found customers.

I'm not saying that he's up and running now but I tell you what,

I know where he's going.

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