Island Life Magazine Ltd April/May 2017 | Page 31

Interview says, “as it allowed me to save up a bit and build up the farming side while I was still working”. He only finally left the insurance job in December last year. Building up the farming included developing the buildings and land at Duxmore Barns whilst taking on various tenancies, including 105 acres of farmland at Quarr Abbey, plus ‘various bits around the East Wight’, now totalling around 350 acres. All the land is managed grassland, for his herd of 120-140 Angus cattle and three pedigree flocks of Jacob, Suffolk and Welsh Mountain sheep. As time has gone on, the sheep have become a hobby as well as a business, and Matt c learly enjoys showing his award-winning animals, as well as taking his turn as a competition judge, which he describes as ‘great fun’. His Duxmore flock of Suffolk sheep have consistently scooped interbreed awards at top events including the Gillingham and Shaftesbury Show, and New Forest and Hampshire Show, as well as many Isle of Wight County Shows over the past decade. “It’s a lovely community on the show circuit” he says. “We’re all friends as well, so it’s a bit like a holiday when we get together.” What with the farming, a growing young family and the NFU role taking up more of his time and attention, something had to give, and in Matt’s case that was the competitive riding he’s always enjoyed. As he jokes: “Point-to-point is about 10 years and two-and-a-half stone ago for me!” A new home He and his wife Charlotte, who works in the new product development team at Liz Earle, are also excitedly planning the building of their new farmhouse at the Duxmore Barns site, which they hope to see finished next summer. It will be home to the couple along with their children, seven year-old Pip, Thea aged four and three month-old baby George. The two older children are already enjoying a similar kind of lifestyle to the one their dad experienced, with Thea having a pony, Pip a donkey and both of them loving the outdoor life, feeding calves and generally mucking in with the farming routines. So are these little Legges likely to follow dad into farming? Matt says: “I’d be happy if they did, but then equally we would support them in whatever their choice is”. As he points out, despite all the challenges, farming is certainly a more viable choice than it might have been a decade ago. “Probably if you’d asked me when I left school, I’d have said it was a very questionable career path” says Matt, “and certainly around that time I knew lots of colleagues who chose to take other paths”. Since then, though, he’s seen plenty of evidence of ‘new blood’ coming into farming, from other professional backgrounds, and reckons that this can be only a good thing. He admits that farming has traditionally been something of a closed community – partly because of the hefty capital investment needed just to get up and running. Matt aged three Matt on Jeffery in 1990 “I’d finished Uni to get the horses ready for the racing, training them out on the field, so when it all fell through I thought: ‘well, I’d better get a proper job then!’” www.visitilife.com 31