Phil Haughton arrived at Windmill Hill City Farm in 1981 and was Farm Manager running staff as well as Youth Training Scheme workers. Here he recalls his role at the Farm, and how he hoped to teach local children about life on a farm and where their meat came from (even if it was guinea pig!)
When I arrived it was very much a kind of Pet’s Corner, as far as the animals were concerned. There were lots of chickens and ducks and geese and rabbits, goats and a couple of pigs…sort of not-very-farmy, so my remit was to change it more into a demonstration farm and teach kids about farming.
So I did that and it went really well. We created some paddocks, over beyond the sports pitch. It was literally just rough concrete underneath. Dave Beasant had lots of contacts with people and he got these hauliers who just came in and started dumping all this soil.
The Farm had chickens to lay eggs on a more commercial basis, only kind of 30 or so but we rotated them round this plot and used them as chicken tractors – the chickens would go in and graze it and chew it all down, and scratch around until it was almost bare, then we’d move on to the next bit of lush green, and we’d plant something on that and kind of moved them round in circles.
A lot of the butchery was done on site where the cafe now stands. Phil and the Farm felt it was important for children to understand the process involved in food production, that animals had been reared with respect and learn where their food came from.
I was trying to change it from a pet’s corner, to a farm – this was about food production.
This local pet shop, when I wasn’t here one day, dumped 13 large male guinea pigs here, and I said “Okaaay, fine. They’re meat!” Went down like a storm, it was very funny! So I set to killing these creatures and chopping them up and making them to sell for meat. And at first the kids were absolutely outraged, absolutely, they couldn’t believe what was going on! Calling me all the names under the sun! But they became more and more curious and actually kind of wanted to watch everything, and got more and more involved, and they were fine. But they went home and told their parents, and their parents were anything but fine – so we got all this hate mail, well I got all this hate mail. Yeah, crazy, crazy times like that.
The Farm also ran courses teaching people how to kill a chicken and pluck a chicken and gut a chicken and chop it up, and [get it] ready for your table and stuff like that. Very hands on stuff!
Then there was quite a lot of Pakistani origin families around who had allotments here and they used to grow fantastic coriander. Amazing coriander! But anyway, they wanted Halal meat, and so they would say can you sell me these chickens and so I can take them away and do them Halal. And I said you can’t take them away, but you can do it here, with me seeing you do it, so that it’s I know that its being done humanely. So yeah they would come back every couple of months, ‘Have you got a couple of chickens for us?’ and they’d pay for them obviously, but they would kill them there and then in the Halal style and do their little bit of ritual that went with it, the little worship that went with it, they have a set way of doing it. So that was interesting!
The Farm also had an on-site dairy built behind the original cafe. Goats and later cows were used to produce milk, yoghurt and cheese which were then sold in the Farm shop.
We made cheese out of goat’s milk, and yogurt out of goat’s milk. And then we bought a lovely little calf, and we kept the calf and had the calf killed. That was a, that was a difficult day for all of us, because we’d got really attached to this beautiful Jersey cow, with great big blue eyes and long eyelashes, and he just looked so so valiant, and he was an absolute darling, he really was, we all loved him to bits. I can’t remember what we called him, but yes we did and he was eaten. That was a sad day, when he went to the abattoir.
[Interview with Phil Haughton by Ruth Dean. Images from the Windmill Hill City Farm Archives]
