Jim Farquharson (Immediate Past Chairman)
Feed milling and mixing makes up a large part of
the business which Jim Farquharson runs from Bussey Stool Farm
at Tarrant Gunville near Blandford in Dorset. B and W Feeds, celebrating
its tenth birthday this year, operates four mobile mill and mixing
units across England south of the Thames from two depots in Dorset
and Oxfordshire. It also has another two
machines
under franchise in Scotland.
Jim’s roots, though, are in farming. His family
has farmed at Tarrant Gunville since 1780 and Jim still controls
1,500 acres of chalkland with its fair share of ‘Dorset
Diamonds’, the name the locals give to the ever-present
flints. The emphasis is very much on arable on the farm, an emphasis
which dominates the agricultural contracting business, Eastbury
Contracts, which Jim runs alongside B and W Feeds. And Jim brings
the arable strength to a partnership he has set up with Mike Simpson,
called Pro-Ag Services, with Mike looking after the livestock
side with his forage conservation and muck/slurry spreading equipment.
His formative years were spent at the University
of Nottingham’s agricultural faculty at Sutton Bonington
and then at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He worked
for a few years as a post-graduate exchange student on a farm
in North Dakota and then became a plumber in Minneapolis –
but, as Jim says, that’s another story. Part of that story,
though, was that he met and married wife Mary-Pat in Minneapolis.
Their son is studying pure mathematics at York University but
their daughter is following in father’s footsteps by studying
animal sciences and nutrition at Sutton Bonington.