I’ve always said farming saved me as a person. Without it, I think I’d have been someone else completely – someone I wouldn’t like very much if I met him.

My mum and dad split up when I was 12 years old, and it was a tricky divorce. I felt like I was in the middle of it. I stepped up at a very young age.

Maybe I grew up too quickly. I’m 25 years old, but I’ve got two kids and a 40- year-old mind. But if the farming bug didn’t catch hold of me the way it did, I think I’d probably have been a complete a**hole.

I was lucky to have a great role model: my grandpa, my mum’s dad, Michael Smith. I looked up to Gramp like I’ve never looked up to anyone else. He passed away in 2021, but I think everything I do – even now – is to please and impress him.

He worked incredibly hard. He was a plasterer, he was also in the fire service, and he ran charities, and he’d help on a farm during the Christmas period. He never stopped. He was always there to provide and make sure none of his family had to worry. So, when I went out farming, for me to see his face and hear him say, ‘Well done, Kaleb!’, that meant more to me than anything.

Chicken-powered career

It all started just as I reached my teens. For my 13th birthday, my mum bought me three chickens. I soon realised I could make some money out of selling the eggs.

I started selling the eggs locally around Chipping Norton. I worked out that I could sell an egg for 25p and my profits were around 10p an egg. Within two months, I had about 450 chickens. I remember my mum saying: ‘I didn’t expect this, Kaleb’.

After selling lots of eggs and saving some money, at the age of 14 – f*** knows why I did this, but I always say, you learn from your mistakes – I bought three sheep. Everyone knows my opinion on sheep. Well, this was where it all began. It made sense to me because I figured, while I was on my egg round on a Saturday, I could take some fresh lamb with me and offer it to my customers. And it sold well. Then, at the age of 15, I bought my first tractor.

The thing is, I’m not from a farming background. My dad, as I mentioned in a previous chapter, is a carpenter and my mum’s a dog groomer.

It’s incredibly hard for someone with a non-farming background to get into farming, and from my 13th birthday that was all I ever wanted to do.

So, I thought the next best thing to me or my mum or dad having a farm would be for me to have a tractor, and to be a contractor and work on other people’s farms. I could still do the thing that I loved the most, only I’d hire myself out.

I was so excited to buy my first tractor. It cost me £5,500 that I’d saved up. And I swear, I ended up paying almost that in repair bills every month. That thing was a complete lemon. It’s as if somebody at the factory said, let’s make one that breaks down all the time, just to mix things up a bit.

Eggucation, eggucation

Bear in mind that, while I was doing all this – setting up my own business and running the egg round – I was working full-time on a dairy farm as well. I don’t like admitting this, but I did drop out of school a little bit. And by a little bit, I mean a lot. And by a lot, I mean almost completely. During Year 9. Okay and Year 8. Yeah and some of Year 7.

I did go back to school in Year 10, as part of a negotiation, because the school kept fining my mum.

I said to Mum: ‘Just relax, I’ll pay the fine. I’m earning loads of money. I’ll budget for it.’

So, I kept paying the fines. But the school got onto us, and brought us in and said: ‘Look, we can’t have this, come on.’ And I said: ‘I know we can’t. You’re costing me £50 a week. That’s £200 a month, £2,400 a year.’

They said: ‘Kaleb, you were never that good at maths before.’ I told them: ‘I’m learning plenty on the farm and by running my own business.’

Anyway, we agreed that I would come back for Year 10 and Year 11 and do my GCSEs. I went back in Year 10 and chose my subjects, but I worked out that everything I was going to do would be recapped again in Year 11 and I would sit an exam on it.

In the end, I always went in on a Friday, because I’d worked out that my best egg customer base was my teachers, and I could earn more money selling the eggs over six hours in school than I could in six hours on the farm. So, I’d go in and deliver 17 dozen eggs to my teachers. Nobody can ever say school didn’t teach me anything.

This piece is extracted from the recently released – It’s a Farming Thing by Kaleb Cooper (Quercus), which is in bookshops now, €24.99.