Farmer who likes to look on the bright side of life

Apr 6 2009 By Karen Dent, The Journal

Although not the eldest son, Frater took the tenancy at Abberwick when his father retired because he had taken a farm business management course at Kirkley Hall.

"Somebody once told me that your path’s all laid out in a straight line, you just put the corners in it," he muses.

Whereas his father was frugal, Stoker cheerfully admits he is the opposite.

"I got the spending money bug from my mother – she used to love spending money. I’ve always liked spending money – but on sensible things. I get a buzz out of spending money and I’ve spent plenty of it."

He has invested in a new road to Abberwick and a number of new sheds on the farms – all built with a brick cross woven into the grey breeze blocks.

"Of course somebody came along and asked if we were building a crematorium. All the buildings we’ve built here have that cross in the wall so that’s my legacy left.

"Over the hill, we planted about 200 cherry trees about 10 years ago. We plant a good 200 trees on the farms every year. At East Bolton, we set out a new project in that I planted a variety of tree in each field. We started two years ago and my plan is that each field will have a different variety of tree all round it. We have a white beam field with 200 white beams around it, one with 50 beeches around it, one with 150 chestnuts around it. Hopefully that’ll be a legacy for the years to come."

The family had always been NFU members, but Frater didn’t become more deeply involved with the union until the mid-1990s. He was vice-chairman for Northumberland during the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak and chairman the following year, and had to speak on behalf of the county at the official enquiries into what had gone wrong. Abberwick was around four miles away from the nearest case of the disease.

"What I wanted, if we had foot and mouth again, was to solve it. We had sorted out a way how to control foot and mouth with this blue boxing system which put a ring around it and stopped anybody going in and out, and that worked in my mind 90% of the time.

"I went to Holland with the BBC and we did a piece on how they did it, and they even airlifted the food into that circle; once they had closed that circle down, nobody went in and out. I thought that was tremendous.

"When Iain Anderson did the report, they put all that in, so I was quite pleased the NFU had achieved that on their farmers’ behalf."

He has always had a keen interest in politics and got to know Nick Brown well when he was Agriculture Minister at the time of the outbreak.

"I had a chat with him and liked the man straight away.

A lot of people are intrigued by my name – that was the topic of conversation – and he said, ‘you know Stoker, I know nothing about farming and I need you lads to keep me right.’ He came to Morpeth two or three times and we did that, and I always got on well with him. I think he got a bad go in the foot-and-mouth, but at the end of the day, I think that he got too close to farmers – he got too close to realising the problems of farmers, in supporting us, and I think that wasn’t altogether liked in Government.

"But I have a lot of respect for Nick Brown, I thought he was tremendous, he was the only agriculture minister who got a standing ovation at the NFU conference and I don’t think that went down too well with the Government."

Currently he is a fan of the new US president and hopes the administration will be brave enough to do things differently.

"I hope that Barack Obama will make a difference to the world and I’d like to think he would speak to people. We can all lambast these terrorists, but if we don’t speak to them, how do we know what they want? It’s a bit like the Irish set up – we’ve sorted the Irish set up by talking to the people."

Although he enjoys his NFU work and has a strong interest in current affairs, he admits home is where his heart is.

"People say to me, farming – it’s a hard life farming isn’t it? No it isn’t a hard life actually, it isn’t now because its all mechanical, the animals are all fed with machines and you never carry anything," he says.

"It’s all mechanical now and farming in that respect is probably a less laborious job than probably a lot of other jobs.

"It used to be. My father would get up at five o’clock every morning and have his cup of tea and couple of ginger snaps, then he would go out and milk the cows, and then he would come back in and he would spend that whole day working, but he would be finished at four o’clock and very rarely worked after five o’clock.

"He used to really get quite annoyed with us working after 5 o’clock, and even to this day, we never work on a Sunday.

"My father used to say if you can’t do it in six days then you should get a job that you can."

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