The £20 mistake that changed our farm forever

The £20 mistake that changed our farm forever. We didn’t set out to change anything. It was one of those small, practical decisions you make without thinking too much about it.

The sort you forget almost immediately.

Except this one didn’t forget us.

It started with a goat called Mary.

She cost £20.

That’s the bit people usually laugh at when we tell the story now, because it sounds like the kind of thing you say right before everything goes wrong. But at the time, it genuinely just felt like we were rehoming a goat. Nothing dramatic. Nothing life-changing. Just… a goat.

What we didn’t fully appreciate is that goats don’t really do “solo living”. One goat on its own is basically a daily complaint in livestock form. So very quickly, Mary needed a friend. Because apparently we don’t make small decisions here, we just make the first one and let it quietly spiral.

We told ourselves there was a sensible reason for it all. The goats would help at lambing time, especially with orphaned lambs. Very practical. Very farm-appropriate. It sounded responsible when we said it out loud. In reality, it mostly involved goats standing nearby looking offended while lambs ignored them completely. But we rolled with it, because that’s farming, you adjust the story as you go.

After a while, we had milk. More milk than we had any real plan for. At first it felt quite wholesome, very “look at us, self-sufficient farm life.” Then it became a bit more urgent.

Why is everything in the freezer full of goat milk? 

Then: we might need a second freezer.

Then eventually: we are the problem.

So naturally, we did what any sensible people would do in that situation… we started trying to use it.

We tried butter first. It looked like butter’s distant cousin who had never quite figured life out. It behaved like it was still deciding what it wanted to be. It spread aggressively, which is never really what you want from butter.

Ice cream came next, which was more of a philosophical experiment than a food. It changed texture depending on its mood. Sometimes frozen, sometimes not, always questionable. We ate it anyway, because once you’ve committed to homemade goat dairy chaos, you don’t really get to back out gracefully.

Eventually, we moved on from dairy optimism to something slightly more useful: soap.

There wasn’t a big plan for it. No branding exercise, no “this is the start of a business” moment. Just a freezer full of milk and the creeping realisation that we probably needed a different approach. So we tried making soap. And for the first time, something actually worked.

Around the same time, Ollie had been struggling with dermatitis on his hands from farm work. Nothing we tried really made much difference long term. Then he started using the soap we were making. And it just… settled. No drama, no big announcement, just slowly improved. So we kept going.

And that was it, really.

What started with a £20 goat turned into more goats, more milk, then experiments, then soap, then markets, and eventually Herd & Hive. Not because we planned it, but because we kept solving the next small problem in front of us.

And Mary is still here.

She’s about ten now.

Fully retired, although she absolutely does not behave like it. We don’t milk her anymore. That job has long since passed on to the younger goats, but Mary still very much considers herself part of operations. Actually, “part of operations” is generous. She considers herself operations manager.

She spends most of her time supervising. If something new arrives on the farm, Mary is there first. If a gate is left open, she’s already halfway through it before you’ve noticed. If there’s feed being delivered, she’s effectively directing traffic.

She also has a habit of inserting herself into situations that don’t require her input at all. Moving sheep? Mary’s there. Checking lambs? Mary’s already decided how it should be done.

We joke that she teaches the younger ones how to be goats, but it’s not really a joke. She does. She’s very particular about it. There’s a right way, a wrong way, and whatever the youngsters were just about to try before she intervened.

And the strange thing is… everyone listens.

We might feed them and look after them, but Mary runs that side of the farm. Completely. No discussion.

Sometimes I look at her now, ten years on from that £20 decision, and it’s mad to think she was ever just “a goat we rehomed”.

She’s not that anymore.

She’s the one who stayed.

People often ask how we planned all this.

We didn’t.

We just bought a goat for £20. And kept going. And somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, a business appeared.

And Mary? She’s still running the place like she always has.