Chris Berry

Fitness and wellness are where a North Yorkshire farming couple is looking to expand its business enterprise beyond its arable and livestock roots, and they are the latest to join the world’s fastest growing sport of padel.

This in-person event is organised by the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster.

Just getting on with life. It sounds easy when you put it like that, but when Sarah Leach says it, from Ringstone Royd Farm in Barkisland, that simple statement doesn’t tell the half of what she went through eight years ago when her father Bob passed away, and how this young lady has rebuilt her life and established a great farming business.

We’re just a fortnight away from the traditional curtain-up of the summer show season that starts its five-month show calendar across our three Ridings with the 215th Otley Show, the oldest one-day agricultural show in the country, on Saturday May 16.

Making your farm work the way in which you’d like it to, is the direction in which a couple, who are new to farming but not quite new, are looking to take Eastfield Farm, between Bainton and Lund, with their new venture The Wolds Project.

Diversification on farms, particularly in gorgeous Swaledale, have been around since before government intervention began making life harder with greater controls on how they farm and an early diversification enterprise, Usha Gap Campsite, has become one of nearly every Dales walker’s favourite destinations in its near century of having started.

The earth moves every day for one of North Yorkshire’s newest farmers and it’s a good job it does because even with 200 acres, an increasing beef cattle enterprise and his arable acreage there’s a mortgage to be paid and little assistance available and Marcus Sutton of Crosby Grange Farm, Thornton-le-Moor knows that he has his work cut out if he ever wants to be just a farmer, which he wouldn’t be without his earthworks business.

Novelist Maria Frankland’s move into psychological thrillers has, at last, brought rewards and recognition and she tells Chris Berry that being a self-publisher can work.

Driving the combine may well be a thing of the past for one North Yorkshire farmer but combining his time between assisting his nephews in the family arable farming concern at Eddlethorpe, while building a reputation for his sheep at Menethorpe is what drives him today.

Crime thriller author Wes Markin talks of his love of North Yorkshire and especially Whitby. Chris Berry caught up with the million-selling writer, who is based near Harrogate.