From Fashion To Feathers

Higher Oak Farm’s poultry business has been flying during the Covid-19 crisis. Helen Babbs ‘visits’ the father/daughter partnership via WhatsApp and discovers how the duo who both once worked in sportswear is keeping up with demand

- Helen Babbs

Amelia Robertson used to dress for the office in smart casual clothes. A dress and strappy sandals in the summer. Trousers and leather boots to cocoon her from the worst of the winter weather. Then she would commute down the motorway for 20 minutes to Runcorn where she worked as a sportswear designer for Banner, a large school uniform manufacturer.

“Mostly I was involved in CAD design on my computer, but I’d also be speaking to the factory about fabric supplies and patterns, or choosing fabric samples — all building up to a big launch each May,” Amelia reveals.

Today life is very different. When Amelia gets up she just grabs a T-shirt and joggers, pulls on her wellies and steps out of the door to her workplace — no commute involved.

“That’s it for the day — not even eye-shadow,” she laughs. In place of an office, her workspace is now the 16 acres of Higher Oak Farm, her family’s rare breed chicken farm in the village of Lymm in Cheshire.

“We sell chickens at every stage, from hatching eggs to day-old chicks, growers and laying hens. We also have a laying flock of 90 hybrids, and these ladies produce the eating eggs that we sell locally,” Amelia explains.

Amelia worked in fashion for three years after university, but as the farm business was growing she found herself at the farm for half an hour every morning, before heading to the office and then, come the evening, she would return to the farm after work, again to help out.

When a temporary bungalow was constructed on the farm in 2019 so that someone could be on hand all the time, Amelia decided that the time had come to be a full-time chicken farmer.