Dairy Cows & Duck Races - the life & times of a young farmer

Description

As a city boy, all Philip Dixon wanted to be in life was a farmer, but achieving that ambition would be a lot less straightforward than he had anticipated! Starting work on a farm at the age of fifteen, Philip finds himself handling some highly temperamental bulls, meeting some very `witchy' women and encountering mysterious country ways. Later he gets married, raises a family, acquires his own farm and, along the way, becomes part of the Round Table team that invented the charity plastic duck race! Enjoy Philip's story as he makes progress in his farming career in the north east of England from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, and meets some remarkable characters, many of whom belong to an age all but lost to us. Philip's story will, at times, have you laughing out loud and weeping tears of sympathy, and will lift your spirits as you read how he overcomes all life's setbacks to make plans for a brave new future.

Philip Dixon's formative years were spent around the banks of the River Tyne, in the north of England and later on farms in the area in the 1950s and 1960s. He describes himself as "first and foremost a dairy farmer" and has spent much of his working life farming and managing dairies in England and France, and has also owned and run a chambre d'hote in France. Besides farming, Philip has renovated houses, appeared on television and radio and had articles written about him in Farmers Weekly. He has four children of his own and is stepfather to three more, all of whom are now adults. When he wrote this book, he was working in a special needs school, which he describes as an incredibly rewarding experience. He and Heather now live in Dorset.