From finance to farming
Jan McCourt spent 15 years working in the City. He now runs Northfield Farm, a multi-award-winning meat producer in Rutland.
There was never a Road To Damascus moment when I thought, “That’s it!” Yes, I’d hankered after getting out of London but after so long in the City I’d resolved that I would work my butt off for ten more years and then go. Within days of making that decision, though, the axe fell and I was made redundant from my job as a syndicate manager at Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. I was 37 and considered over the hill.
Banking was fulfilling at times but mostly frustrating. I met some amazingly talented and decent people and once or twice I was involved in deals that really made a difference but you never got the sense that you were creating anything. There are some facets of the industry that are linked to the benefit of the end user or to genuinely good causes. Sadly, most of it isn’t.
The hours used to be monstrous. When I worked for a Japanese investment bank, I had to get in really early to speak to them in Tokyo, then come in and do a full day’s work and then stay late to talk to some big American corporate. If you were really unlucky you’d still be in the office to take Tokyo’s calls the following day.
We already had a smallholding in the Fens. I had bought it specifically because it was in a place where I was least likely to meet anyone from my weekday life. That proved to be my weekend college course in farming. By 1994, though, we had decided to try and centralise our life a bit more and find somewhere a bit more accessible, a bit softer. I ended up buying Northfield Farm at an auction in a pub in Oakham. At the drop of a hammer I had my home and my new business, even though I didn’t have a real vision for the place. Redundancy soon helped focus the mind, however.
Running the farm has been a 15-year struggle, to be honest. Most sane people would have given up. We started in the midst of mad cow disease and then we had foot and mouth. There’s a constant debt mountain, unwilling banks and then I also went through a divorce. Then to compound matters, I was crushed by a tractor three years ago. My pelvis was smashed, my hip broken and I had all manner of internal damage. It was pretty much as close as you can get to not being here. It’s taken me two years to recover but when you go through something like that you ask yourself questions like “Am I happy?” and the answer is an unequivocal yes.
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