Meet the couple with 900 sheep but no farm

Sam and Samantha Edwards dream of having their own farm tenancy

In 2020, Sam and Samantha Edwards embarked on a hobby involving a handful of ewes in pony paddocks near their home in west Dorset.

Now, just four years on, they are running a successful livestock business with 900 ewes - all despite not having a farm tenancy.

Instead, they rely on temporary grazing licences, which involves a lot of driving around to tend to the animals, often with their toddler in tow.

Recent recognition at the British Farming Awards has given them a boost but, as Samantha explains, their real dream is to secure a tenancy of their own.

The growing livestock business relies on grazing licences

"We don't have a farm base at all. We don't even have a farm business tenancy anywhere," she said.

"We are just on grazing licences across west Dorset so it's a lot of driving around, checking, moving sheep.

"It has grown organically. We have been very lucky with the local support from the farming community."

Grazing licences are short-term agreements that allow livestock owners to graze their animals on another person's land.

The couple, who live in Cerne Abbas, struck deals with several owners of permanent pasture land, but were only able to expand their operation after securing grazing of winter cover crops on arable farms.

"That helped the business to grow because we had a lot more winter food," explained Samantha.

When they started out the couple both had full-time jobs but have recently gone part-time.

She said: "We have to make sure one of us is always around to jump in the truck and sort out whatever the sheep might have done each day.

"We are very driven and determined to make it work to a point where neither of us have to work a second job so much.

"We don't get the opportunity to go away, hardly at all."

Sam and Samantha say it has been a "gruelling year"

Their tenacity saw them pick up the New Entrant Award: Against the Odds at the British Farming Awards ceremony in Birmingham.

"We are absolutely gobsmacked," said Samantha.

"We didn't expect to win it at all because a lot of the time we think we are raving mad for running around like we do.

"To have the recognition has been such a boost because it's been quite a gruelling year.

"We had really hard lambing, the weather has been atrocious, we were out in the rain with baby lambs for weeks on end.

"We don't consider what we are doing as anything special or different to anyone else - with sheep farming, everybody has the same challenges - but it's been a very exciting few days."

So what next for the Edwards family?

"Our dream one day would be to secure a proper farm tenancy somewhere but we don't want to leave Dorset for family reasons - we love it here and we've got our farming community connections.

"The dream would be to actually get some security because working off the grazing licences is very hard, you never know what's going to happen one year to the next.

"Planning the sheep feed and all the running around in the trucks and things - it's a lot."