Farms not always just for farming

Otago Daily Times

29-07-2025

Lancashire agribusinessman Olly Harrison makes more money from outside income than from his cropping business, Tim Cronshaw writes.
United Kingdom's farming YouTuber Olly Harrison has developed 14 different income streams, but the "bleak" truth is off-farm businesses are the only ones making a profit.
The agri-businessman has a large YouTube following of nearly 150,000 subscribers on the online video sharing platform.
Among his many income earners are his OllyBlogsAgricontractfarmer channel, cropping, dog walking fields, a pet hotel, chipping tree waste for biomass, sunflower mazes and office and holiday rentals.
The charismatic farmer often had an audience in fits of laughter as he took them through his many businesses during a speech via video link at a Foundation for Arable Research (FAR) conference at Lincoln University.
Mr Harrison said the future of agriculture was in a difficult place in the UK, particularly in the cereal sector, as the economics did not stack up.
Fertiliser and chemical costs are up and the price of wheat at about $337 a tonne is at a three- or four-year low.
"We either have to sell it better or stop growing it or carry on what I've been doing for the last 10 years thinking the next year is going to be a better year ... It is very much crunch time at the moment. The government incentive for sustainable farming is sort of propping the farm up for three years."
Only YouTube and other outside income had allowed him to expand the farm.
"The percentage of the turnover, I would say it's around 50/50 [farm versus off-farm income] and we are still farming a considerable acreage and turning over lots of cash.
"Basically the income is 50/50 in turnover, but the profits are 100% definitely from the diversification."
The Government's Sustainable Farm Initiative (SFI) scheme had worked well for him, but new applicants were no longer being accepted and it was looking "bleak" he said.
"Diversification seems to be the only way at the moment."
Some of his business ventures had been more successful than others — such as buying three motor homes during Covid-19 to rent out.
"They were a little bit of a hassle because people kept crashing them ... I think anything involving not many staff is good because staff can be hard work.
"We have dog walking fields and I know that sounds pretty strange, but we have fields fenced off with deer netting and you hire them by the hour and people pay £10 ($NZ22) to let the dog run around off the lead. That is by far the most profitable bit of diversification because it paid for the land in six months that it's on, but you do have to deal with the public, and that can be hard work."
Since leaving school at 16 after struggling with dyslexia, he has built up a farm to about 600ha.
He grows about 320ha acres of wheat and a lot of barley, 60ha in spring beans as well as grass, sunflowers and oil seed rape — a difficult crop to grow now because of seed dressing restrictions.
Spring flowers are also sown, mainly for wild bird food seed as part of a SFI incentive on 400ha at about $585 an acre.
After checking the SFI guidelines, he began double cropping this about five years ago, harvesting barley two to three weeks earlier in June and barley again in October.
"I thought I would push the boundaries a bit with this and drill a crop immediately after harvest if we harvest early and broadcast it into the standing crop and let the birds harvest it in the winter, and then I would drill winter wheat as soon as I possibly can."
When his SFI agreement ends in 18 months he plans to harvest some of the crops himself for a blend to sell in garden centres and perhaps by mail order on a subscription-based model.
"Because if you get someone on subscription, it's harder not to buy it than it is to buy it. I've seen a few people do it with eggs and veg boxes so I just thought I like combines and I like growing cereals, so why can't it work for cereals? And that's probably my next venture."
Energy options also appeal to him.
On the farm, he tries to use no tillage as much as possible, putting crops in with a 12m drill on a combine followed by a 36m sprayer.
Branching off into business outside of farming began in 2006, when he borrowed money to convert old brick buildings, formerly housing cattle, into office space.
Mr Harrison said the development had provided regular income for the past 20 years at the urban fringe property near Liverpool, and this had been much needed over "turbulent times" for crop prices.
Solar panels installed on the top of south-facing grain store sheds from 2015 means they are self-sufficient in electricity, with surplus power sold back to the grid.
He said a big part of the business was recycling tree waste provided from city gardeners and tree surgeons, which kept them busy over winter.
"They have nowhere to put that tree waste so they bring it to us and we process it and it used to go to power stations, but now we use a lot of it ourselves in a biomass boiler we use then to dry our own grain."
A commercial grain store used to be filled with oilseed rape, but the crop has become so difficult to grow in the UK a replacement crop will need to be found the storage may move into imported animal feeds coming from the Liverpool port.
Another business set up with an ex-girlfriend about eight years ago made great use of sandstone barns as a small animal hotel.
Little used now, he still considers it a good business option after a cheap renovation kitted it out with rabbit hutches and animal runs for holidaymakers housing pets at $33 a day.
"Talk about a fool and their money easily parted — one person actually brought a pigeon while they were away and that was around for about six months and [cost them] $4500 for this pigeon with a broken wing. It was a very good business because there were lots of people for cats and dogs, but no-one was really specialising in small animals like hamsters, guinea pigs and predominantly rabbits."
By accident, the innovative farmer invented a seed sock to clean a seed drill without putting all the contents on a floor.
His neighbour makes Bouncy Castles and he got him to make a 3m-square sheet with a hole in the middle to act as a spout from offcuts.
Farmers seeing the sock on his YouTube channel made inquiries about buying one, which spawned a manufacturing business with another company distributing them.
Mr Harrison gains income from merchandise sales on his YouTube channel after a company approached him to manufacture, sell and distribute sales.
But he ended up getting too many order requests and updates himself, so he brought it in-house and today it turns over $225,000 a year.
At a nearby farm he rented for about 12 years, he noticed a digger doing test holes and learned it was for sale for $2.7 million for 30ha. So he arranged finance to buy the property, including a house and full set of farm buildings.
"But I didn't know what to do with it and I wasn't sure what to do with the buildings and didn't want to borrow more money to convert them into offices — which do really well because we are so close to the city — so while I was finding my feet randomly this girl turned up in the yard to put her horse somewhere while she was at university at vet school."
Realising vet intakes were mostly women, often with horses, he drew up plans to convert them into stables and rent the farmhouse as student accommodation.
When Covid-19 arrived halfway through developing the stables, he changed tack as there was a huge demand for holiday lets, so he upped the specs for the living quarters, and after putting in a hot tub it "absolutely flew" when they put it on Airbnb.
Another opportunistic tumble into business was after a visit to Ukraine before the Russian conflict, when he marvelled at the miles and miles of snowy-white fields from the window of a train. A translator told him it was even better when sunflower crops were in flower.
That spring he replaced a 2ha field of wheat chewed out by rabbits with sunflowers after going to the garden centre. He showed photos on social media and a friend's wife suffering from cancer asked for a bunch; he worked out there would have been value in the flowers if they were not so busy harvesting grain.
In a brainwave, he wondered if the public might buy unharvested plots of sunflowers so birds could feed on them over winter — well before the taxpayer-funded SFI was introduced.
Realising they were more likely to give him money if it was for charity, he started a JustGiving fundraiser page.
"I needed a charity so I Googled the words sunflower, charity and Liverpool and what pops up is the Liverpool Sunflower Cancer Charity. That was brilliant, as I had just been with someone that has got cancer."
Overnight, after going live, the page raised $13,500.
After thinking the sunflower fields would make a good maze, the next year he tried to grow 8ha, but drought left them tatty and another attempt was thwarted by pigeons and slugs.
When the BBC contacted him asking if they could film David Attenborough in a sea of sunflowers for a Green Planet programme in 2020, he put in such a good crop that he was finally able to put a good maze in, with half the profits going to a local children's charity and the other half to him.
The sunflower maze ended up being a "roaring success", making $225,000.
Raising money for charity became addictive, and after seeing a tractor with Christmas lights he organised a convoy to make money for a local children's hospital.
The police were unimpressed when the 40 to 50 expected tractors turned out to be so many that some of the procession heading into Liverpool had not left the farm yard by the time the first tractor was several kilometres down the road.
More than $115,000 was raised, and the fundraiser has been repeated every year since.
In much the same fashion, his entry into posting daily on YouTube started when the local newspaper came to film him from a distance during Covid-19 and asked him to take some footage from his phone while explaining what he was doing on a tractor while rolling wheat.
He put the same video on Instagram and Facebook and when it was well received, did another small video the next day and each day after.
School teachers approached him asking if they could use it for online learning and he put them on YouTube and sent a link.
The channel has grown to just under 150,000 subscribers, with daily posts candidly showing the successes and failures, often with his trademark humour.
The farmer's 1500-plus videos have been watched more than 77 million times, with his content resonating with farming enthusiasts and urban people curious about rural life.
About a year later he ended up rescuing a young man from a flooded car with his tractor during a big flood and it was widely shared.
When it was being watched 9000 times a day, he opted to monetise the page, and after waking up the next morning it had earned $3.40.
"To me it was like free money."
His earnings steadily increased to the stage he calculated the income could cover finance for a new sprayer.
More classic tractors followed, which are used on the farm and make the videos more interesting.
While looking for a second-hand combine, he was deeply shaken when a friend struggling with depression took his own life.
"A mate of mine who was doing a Nuffield scholarship in New Zealand actually told me people were well looked after out there and milk tank drivers [were] trained to spot signs of depression, so we ran a few workshops to try and educate farmers in our local area about mental health and talking about things."
When the Claas Lexion combine harvester arrived he told this story to the guy servicing it, who had also lost a good mate to depression.
"I said 'this is ridiculous, we need to do something about it' and said 'why don't we drive a combine from John o' Groats to Land's End?'."
About seven years passed before they took on the 1500km challenge in four and a-half days, raising $240,000 for charity.
His charitable contributions to date total more than $1 million.
Mr Harrison was named the International Agricultural Influencer for YouTube by the German Agricultural Society, and recognised by the National Farmers' Union as a Community Farming Hero.
He has promised to leave a farm to each of his three children.
That was complicated in the UK government's Budget last October, when it decided to introduce a 20% tax on agricultural land and business assets on death.
"That basically means any farm trying to pass on to the next generation, you have to find 20% of what the whole land is worth — all the buildings, all the livestock, all the inputs, all the stuff in the shed and the field.
"As you know with farming there is not 20% around very easily, especially if you have just lost a member of the family at the same time, so it's pretty scandalous and not really possible to do, and there's been an uproar."
Thousands of irate farmers staged a mass protest in London.
Mr Harrison was among lobby group members who happened to be at the Ducati motorbike factory on the way to attend an agricultural show in Italy.
Concerned about the farmers' potential reactions, they quickly contacted police — via Zoom from the Ducati headquarters — who accommodated their requests for a gathering point and stage where protesters could listen to speakers, and provided access to Whitehall Rd.
"We came out of this broom cupboard in Italy thinking 'we can't believe we've just shut central London down for the day in a week's time' and that's what we did."
Celebrity farmer Jeremy Clarkson was part of the day, attended by about 45,000 farmers, with donations to a food bank reminding the public that farmers are valuable food producers.
"The YouTube income has allowed me to expand the farm and it's been great and also allowed me to have bit of a voice when it comes to getting people together and lobbying the government for something that will work better."