Half Term, Full Cottages: Diversification in Real Time

As this week’s Field Notes goes live, I’m away with my own family for half term.  This is a post written between packing up wellies and locating missing jumpers. We’re staying, fittingly, in a farm holiday let by the coast. It’s a busman’s holiday of sorts for an agricultural lawyer, but it’s also a useful reminder of how central diversification has become to so many modern farm businesses (and one of my favourite places).

School holidays always bring a different rhythm. For farming families, the school run pauses and children reappear in the yard. For diversified farms, half term often means something else entirely: full occupancy in converted barns, back-to-back bookings in glamping pods, busy farm shops and children peeking over gates asking whether they can feed the chickens.

Over the past decade, diversification has shifted from “nice to have” to essential risk management. Holiday accommodation, on-farm events, pick-your-own enterprises, educational visits and seasonal attractions are no longer sidelines - they are increasingly core income streams. And half term is often when those enterprises are tested in practice.

Staying in a farm holiday cottage this week, I get to see the detail from the guest’s perspective - a welcome basket with eggs from the farm, carefully thought-out safety signage, the information folder explaining where we can and cannot wander (with and without our dog). Behind the scenes sits a great deal of planning, investment and, inevitably, regulation.

Half term provides a timely prompt to sense-check the foundations of any diversified enterprise:

• Planning permission: Has temporary use quietly become a bit more permanent? Are occupancy conditions and change-of-use consents being complied with?

• Health and safety: Welcoming guests or visitors increases your obligations. Risk assessments should be live documents, particularly where children are concerned.

• Insurance: Standard farm cover may not extend automatically to holiday accommodation or public access.

• Tax and structure: Diversification income can affect VAT treatment, business property relief and longer-term succession planning.

Done well, diversification strengthens rather than distracts from the core farming business. It can smooth volatile income, bring new customers onto the holding and, perhaps most importantly, reconnect the public with food production and rural life.

Watching my own children this week - muddy boots lined up by the door of someone else’s rather lovely cottage, the children’s sheer delight when the free range chickens make their way into the play area, the fun of seeing our (very) elderly collie living her best life down on the beach then flopped by the fire - I’m reminded that farms offer something increasingly rare: space, authenticity and a chance to make your own stories. Those assets are powerful. Harnessed carefully, and underpinned by sound legal advice, they can help secure the resilience of the farm for the next generation.

Half term may only last a week. The strategic decisions behind a diversified enterprise, however, shape the farm for decades.

Usual Field Notes service will resume next week! Check back weekly for more from Field Notes, Charles Russell Speechlys’ weekly agricultural law and policy blog.