From Twickenham to tractors – with Tom Youngs

We visited Tom on a chilly day in February – a slower month in the farming calendar. Muntjac mooched among the matted bundles of bracken under the fir-wood canopy by the yard as we pulled up and a smiling face greeted us from inside the cab of a pickup. “How’re you doing, boys?”.   

Now, I could write a few cliché-riddled lines here about how down to earth and genuine Tom is, and how he’s as real as they come, and most people probably wouldn’t be too surprised. Perhaps the easiest way to summarise the visit, though, is that we’re very keen to go back. It was good fun.  

“We farm 1,950 acres now,” explained Tom as we drove from one yard to another a few minutes down the road. “Wheat, barley, oilseed rape, sugarbeet and vining peas,” he added, guessing my next question.  

When we arrived, Tony, the third full-time member of staff at Sankence Farm in addition to Tom and his cousin George, was busy calibrating the drill. “If it stays dry, we’re hoping to get the first of the spring barley in the ground tomorrow,” Tom explained as he filled a few feed bags with nuts for the pigs. 

You’d be forgiven for wondering if someone who’d dedicated much of their life to professional sport might be a little green when it comes to skilled practical jobs on the farm, but it quickly became clear that Tom knew what he was doing. “I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to retire from rugby and turn to something else I love,” he said. “It’s another chapter that I’m really enjoying, but farming has always been there for me, and for a long time it was my release from rugby. Now it’s the other way round.”

En route to fetch a plough from yard number three, Tom reflected on some of his earliest memories. “We had about 500 ewes when I was growing up, and as kids we’d often help move the sheep about on the stubble turnips. A standard Sunday for us was going to mini rugby before sorting the sheep out and then heading home for a hot bath and a roast dinner.  

“And everyone remembers their first tractor job... I got mine when I was 11 years old, rolling some peas.”  

A grin crossed his face when I asked if, when growing up, his brother Ben was involved to the same extent. “I swear Ben purposely caused damage so that he’d never get asked to do a job again – I’m sure that was his tactic,” he laughed. “We’re very different when it comes to farming.” 

Back at the yard where we’d met Tom earlier that morning, two women in jodhpurs were adding their day’s worth of mucking out spoils to the manure pile. A few hundred yards away, through a gap in the trees, we could just see the holiday cottage Tom had been describing to us, perched by the lake.  

“We’ve gone pretty big with the diversification,” Tom explained. “We’ve got 25 self-storage containers, a 26-stable livery yard, and we have the holiday let by the lake. We’re looking at the possibility of putting glamping pods around there, too.” 

Inevitably, the discussion soon moved to how farming has changed over years, since the mini-rugby days of Tom’s youth. “Unfortunately we can’t just be farmers and grow food for people now,” he started. “To keep things running, a lot of farmers have had to branch out. 

“We even see the 100 or so pigs we rear in the woods, which we butcher locally and sell to farm shops, as part of our diversification. Who knows – maybe we’ll do a few Friday-night events in the summer, a bit of live music and a big old hog roast, that sort of thing...”  

From cashflow to government support, there’s no doubt that challenges abound. “Maybe now that I’m older I appreciate that a bit more,” Tom offered. “Farmers have to be resilient. We’re up against a lot of things that are out of our control. The weather is a prime example.  

“Last autumn was just horrendous because of the amount of rain we had. We were trying to drill wheat and things were getting stuck. We were trying to lift sugarbeet and making a right mess. It just rained and rained and rained. Things looked dreadful. There were so many headlands I couldn’t drill. My old man reckons it is the hardest autumn he’s had in 35 years.” 

Farming is, according to Tom, a journey of highs and lows. “There are good times, too,” he said. “Of course there are. Only last harvest we were combining wheat in glorious sunshine and hitting 12 tonnes a hectare. The combine just kept filling up and up and up. That felt pretty nice.”  

As if to illustrate the point, after an amusing 10 minutes chasing and luring Julie and Geraldine the escapee pigs back to their pen, Tom took a short call. “Just a reminder that we’ve got a big meeting tomorrow to discuss what the family farm tax means for this place,” he said, stuffing his phone back in his pocket. “Anyway, boys, I think it’s about time for a cuppa...”