`It was just so disheartening'

Farmer Who Quit

IT WAS the news that Britain's livestock farmers had spent three years awaiting, but it came too late for Ian Dance.

The prospect that the European Union's beef export ban may be lifted in three weeks' time is irrelevant to him now: this born-and-bred cattleman has already thrown in the towel.

Mr Dance, 49, has spent all his life on Yantlet Farm on the Isle of Grain, that mysterious and often misty stretch of the north Kent marshes between the rivers Thames and Medway where Dickens set Great Expectations.

It is a bleak landscape, but Mr Dance, and his father before him, had managed to make an adequate living raising beef steers and heifers on 1,000 acres of the marshes with a herd of 120 South Devon suckler cows. "Not big money by any means," said Mr Dance, "but comfortable."

All that changed after the export ban was imposed in 1996. "We went in one year from making our highest-ever profit, pounds 39,000, to a loss of pounds 9,000, which was our first," Mr Dance said. "And that was after I laid off one of my two employees."

As the farm-gate price of beef fell by a quarter, and then more, it became clear that the business was simply uneconomic, even after Mr Dance's wife, Jacqueline, went back to work as a vet. "We were working but we weren't making a living," he said. "Everything we did, we knew we wouldn't make a penny from, and in the meantime, our capital was being eroded. It was just so disheartening."

Eventually the Dances took the decision to get out of farming, and last autumn held a farm sale in which everything went: the tractors, the fork- lift trucks, the hay balers, and all the animals. They even managed to sell the 390 acres of marsh they owned - the rest was tenanted - to a Hong Kong millionaire who wanted the land for wildfowling.

They are off to Australia where they will have "some land, and a few cattle about us" but no more. "I've learnt there's more to life than farming," said Mr Dance. "I've no regrets."