Fed up of city life? Up sticks and get back to the land

Do you yearn for a different way of life, away from the noise, stress and often exorbitant cost of urban living? Do you want your children to grow up with more space to explore, a chance to climb trees and get muddy fingernails? Could you, would you, up sticks and go and live in the sticks?

If you are considering it, you wouldn’t be the only one. Last year saw the biggest exodus from our cities to the countryside in a decade and up to 30 per cent of those leaving were in the 20-29 year old age group.

However, one of the age-old challenges facing those living in the countryside is the ability to find work locally. But perhaps an advantage of this era of low job security is an increased willingness to become more self-sufficient when it comes to making a living. Certainly, if the last few months I have spent travelling around various rural counties of Britain are anything to go by, there is plenty of evidence of real entrepreneurship and innovation going on throughout our countryside.

The new series of Back to the Land starts in Cornwall. A favourite holiday destination for many, its popularity has come at a cost for those who are born and raised there. Despite all that money brought in by tourism every summer, it is Britain’s poorest county. Jobs, other than seasonal ones, are few and far between, but living costs and property prices are so high few locals can afford to live there.

After graduating from Exeter University with a first class degree in Renewable Energy Engineering, Caro Warwick-Evans, like many of the people she grew up with in Cornwall, had to leave the county to find work elsewhere. She returned home to recuperate after a serious car accident and wanted to stay, but the problem remained of how to make a living. She joined forces with Tim Van Berkel, an old friend from university and together they started to dream up ideas for a sustainable, ethical business that would allow them to stay in Cornwall. They set about thinking what resources Cornwall had beyond tourism that were, as yet, untapped. Both of them are surfers and it was their love and knowledge of Cornwall’s coastline that gave them their brainwave. They’d harvest and sell seaweed.

I first met them on a blustery September day, down at the pretty harbour of Coverack. They had been out harvesting seaweed that morning and I helped them carry up tubs of freshly harvested ‘sea spaghetti’ that they had been free diving for just off shore. The Cornish Seaweed Company is a low-tech operation, requiring a small – slightly leaky – inflatable boat with an outboard engine, wetsuits, masks, fins and a pair of scissors each. As they warmed up over coffee in a local café I asked them why they thought of seaweed as the basis of their business plan. Was it, I asked, something that was part of the Cornish culinary tradition, like it is in Wales or Ireland? They both laughed. “No!” they said in chorus. “So,” I said, slowly processing this, “you decided to start a business entirely based on selling something that, as far as you knew, no one in Cornwall ate or knew they wanted?” They nodded. I looked at them with a mixture of disbelief and admiration. Because five years on from that initial madcap idea, the business is not only still going, it is expanding.

It employs local people and on my last visit to them earlier this year, Tim was embarking on something truly ground-breaking for both their business and for Cornwall. He set off on a boat, in violent swell, to a sheltered bay where he is attempting to become one of the first people in the UK to cultivate seaweed. I watched from the beach with Caro, as Tim battled with the waves to string out the ropes which would be the anchors for his seaweed crop. It felt like a momentous occasion, that I was witnessing something that in years to come could be the basis of a whole new industry in the UK. And yet this pioneering enterprise only started because two brave souls with an aptitude for hard work and a willingness to take a risk, had wanted nothing more than to find a way to live in the place they love.

And this is what I found so uplifting about making this series. The drive and desire to start the businesses I visited came not from dreams of great wealth. Success for many of these rural entrepreneurs is much more about lifestyle and legacy. Some of the businesses I came across had been started by a new generation of farmers who have often been forced to come up with new ways of making their family’s farm viable again and in doing so have given a whole new lease of life to British farming.

Rural Britain, far from being the unsophisticated backwater it is often portrayed as, is full of enterprise, innovation – and balls

Some of the smaller enterprises, like the one set up by friends Rebecca (Becca) Stewart and Mariam (Maz) Parish, started around a kitchen table. Their business, The Garden Gate Flower Company, taps into the old Cornish tradition of flower growing and their mutual love of gardening, started with just ￡500 worth of seed and less than an acre of land. Social media was the key to helping them make contacts within Cornwall’s wedding market and now they grow, pick and arrange the flowers for 25 weddings a year.

Stuart Woodman’s one-man brewery business, Woodmans Wild Ale, came from a passion for home-brewing combined with an in-depth knowledge of wild ingredients which allows him to make and sell a unique ale. When Tanya married farmer Roger Olver, he had long-since sold his dairy herd and was making a living as a contractor. “You can’t live on a farm without livestock!” said Tanya and so when a chef at their local restaurant happened to mention he was finding it hard to source really good quality duck, they spotted an opportunity and launched the Cornish Duck Company. Tanya and Roger now breed, raise and sell 10,000 ducks a year.

But don’t make the mistake that the people whose businesses we feature have had it easy. Far from it, as they have been honest and generous enough to share with me. Because coming up with a business idea is just the beginning of a very long journey, that is often fraught with difficulties that are impossible to predict or to mitigate against. And setting up a business in a rural area can add a whole raft of other challenges, as I know only too well.

When I set up my rural skills business in partnership with farmers Tim and Sarah Stephens, we had no phone line to the farm, no mobile reception and no broadband. It took a year to get a phone line, we still have no mobile signal and we rely on a satellite for very limited broadband access. And, like many of the businesses I encounter over the series, we had no experience of running a business, of financial planning, of the pros and cons of investing. Nor did we have the expertise or resources for marketing. So I was really able to appreciate the hard work, grit and determination that all the people I met had put in to make their dreams a reality. And they prove, that rural Britain, far from being the unsophisticated backwater it is often portrayed as, is full of enterprise, innovation – and balls.

The new series of Back to the Land starts on Tuesday at 7pm on BBC2