Farmer who likes to look on the bright side of life

Apr 6 2009 By Karen Dent, The Journal

FROM building a business up from nothing to championing Northumberland’s farmers, Karen Dent hears about Stoker Frater’s dream of leaving a lasting legacy on the land.

STOKER Frater is about as far from the stereotype of the whingeing farmer as you could imagine.

Jovial and smiling, the 58-year-old reckons farmers currently have more cause for contentment than complaint. A keen writer, he’s currently penning his autobiography, which is titled Who said There was No Money in Farming?

"People say there’s no money in agriculture, well to me that’s a fallacy. I think there is any amount of money in agriculture if you are prepared to work for it – like any other business," he says.

"Richard Branson and all these people, they didn’t get their money from doing nothing did they? They’re up at five in the morning, they’re doing this, they’re doing that, they’ve got the worry, and that’s how they’ve made their business work.

"In this current recession, we’re in a bit of a dilemma because we’re probably the only industry that hasn’t felt much of it, but we haven’t got to be brash and big headed and say ‘we’re doing all right Jack’.

"We have to say we appreciate people are losing their jobs, but we can still provide you a kilo of mince for £6 which is a cheap meal."

Known as one of the faces of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) in Northumberland, Frater has served as the union’s county chairman, vice chairman and has been the county’s NFU council delegate for the last five years.

"The majority of farmers to me are hard working, middle class people, who make quite a decent living out of farming. What we need as farmers is to get rid of this stereotype, the poor whingeing farmer. You can’t blame somebody else all the time for your woes."

Born and bred on Abberwick Farm, which is set in stunning scenery just outside of Alnwick, Frater farms in partnership with his brother William and his middle son Paul. They also run an agricultural contracting business. Married to Anne, the Fraters’ other two sons have also inherited their father’s entrepreneurial streak – eldest son Mark runs a mini-digger hire firm and the youngest, Richard, has a stationery business in Alnwick.

The Fraters are tenant farmers – Abberwick and the family’s other two farms, East Bolton and Titlington Hall, which are under organic conversion – belong to the Duke of Northumberland.

He said: "I started here with nothing, they are all tenanted farms, I don’t own any farms at all. Really this one was the biggest hole in Northumberland when my father had it.

"To be fair to him he had a different sort of aspect on life: his view was that because it was the Duke of Northumberland’s farm, then you did nothing on it. My view is that it’s my farm for the next three generations."

His father, who didn’t marry until he was 47, took on Abberwick in 1904 and had four sons.

"There were seven of us in the house because my uncle lived in, and we would sit around the little coal fire, and if you added up what we ate in a week, it was nothing compared to what people do now," says Frater, who is named after his father’s twin brother and reckons he is the only Stoker Frater in the world.

A grammar school boy, whose mother bought him a pony when he passed the 11-plus and won a place at the Duke’s School in Alnwick, Frater never intended to be a farmer. He worked in a couple of jobs away from the farm – including a gravel works office – "I hated every minute of it," he says – and ended up back at Abberwick when their farm worker moved to another job.

He said: "We didn’t have a tipping trailer or anything – everyone else had tipping trailers – and we were still forking muck on to trailers and forking it off again.

"I always remember my biggest incentive; we went to a farm stock sale and my father always used to go and look at the barrels of oil and things like that to see if he could get them cheap.

"One of our neighbours from around here – he says he never said it, and I’ve told him he did – he said: ‘here they come, the wheelbarrow farmers from Abberwick’ – and that really stirred me up.

"But I’d like to think now they borrow my wheelbarrows, we’ve passed them. One of the chaps who said that, he once rang me up and said: ‘Can I borrow...’ and I said ‘you mean my wheelbarrow?’ I said I always remember you saying that at that farm stock sale – and actually, you did me the world of good because if anything was an incentive to get on, that was."