The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Fife family’s history shows changes in farming life
VERY FEW farms stay in the hands of the same family for 100 years, but one such is Kenly Green at Boarhills.
This famed and fertile East Neuk farm has been home to the Roger family since 1913, and quite remarkably has had only two resident farmers-in-chief: Frank W Roger until 1969, and the present incumbent, his grandson Frank.
As would be expected the changes over the century have been quite remarkable — but, fortunately, they have not been lost in the mists of time.
Back in February 1969, at about the time of the generational change, Frank Sr spoke to East Fife JAC and with typical directness entitled his talk My Life as a Farmer by Frank W Roger.
Luckily his grand-daughter Louise has a verbatim copy — and what a story it is, going back as it does to the turn of the last century and a truly bygone era.
Brought up at Balgove just on the western outskirts of St Andrews, and apparently a rather reluctant pupil at Madras College, his ambitions were clearly to be a farmer.
One of his first jobs as a boy was to herd sheep on the St Andrews golf links. When the shepherd was away at the harvest he had sole responsibility for driving his flock over the railway every day to graze the links.
“They used to be allowed to graze right up to the Martyrs’ Monument, and my job was to see they didn’t get into any of the gardens,” he told his JAC audience.
At that time his father also farmed Cassindonald, about four miles from Balgove, and when young Frank was needed there to help at threshing or for other jobs he rode there on horseback.
“We had good horses which my father rode at Brunshiels races, and I loved the exercise,” he added.
Brunshiels races were apparently the precursor to the Fife Hunt point-to-point.
Meantime he joined the ranks of Dr Wilson’s agricultural class at St Andrews University.
Before long, however, he was farming on his own.
In 1913 his father took the chance to buy the 400-acre farm of Kenly Green — and Frank, at the tender age of 20, was tasked with running it. There were seven men on the farm and six women, with all the motive power coming from 4½ pairs of horses.
An early improvement was the installation of an oil engine to drive the mill.
Potatoes were — as they still are — grown at Kenly Green, with the produce driven to St Andrews and then carried by Norwegian sailing ships to the Tyne.
The farm was run on a strict seven-course rotation of oats after grass, followed by potatoes, wheat, turnips, under-sown barley and then back into two years’ grass.
Prices for all agricultural produce had been very high but after the bad harvest of 1922 they slumped disastrously, with many farmers going bankrupt.
In 1923 Frank was able to buy nearby Peikie and then in 1933 Boarhills farm, later to be farmed by his youngest son Bill.
Meantime, however, there had been a landmark event in Fife with the opening of the sugar beet factory at Cupar. Frank Roger embraced the crop from the start and was to be associated with it from thence forward.
Advised by a Danish fieldsman in the first years, he grew the crop on-the-flat on 22-inch rows and managed to produce 12 tons per acre.
“This year I had 14 tons per acre against a factory average of 12½ tons so, with all our knowledge, we are not that much further forward,” he told his 1969 audience.
In the first year there were 12 acres of sugar beet, but by the time of the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War, the farm grew just over 100 acres of the labourintensive crop.
The first tractor arrived in 1928, but the farm and its satellites still had 21 working horses.
The first combine, one of eight delivered to Fife farmers, arrived in 1944.
Frank Roger told the Young Farmers: “I remember at the time there was a debate in this club on whether the combine was better than the binder, and on a vote the binder won. It just shows how wrong some votes can go!”
The Second World War brought about a change in working hours. From 1913 until 1945 the hours had been from 7am to noon and then 2pm to 6pm, six days a week. There was a 10-minute break in the morning and the same in the afternoon, and after the end of the First World War there was no requirement to work on Saturday afternoons except at harvest time.
After 1945 the two-hour lunch break, necessary to rest the horses, was cut back to one hour and the working hours reduced.
Livestock were always a crucial part of Frank Roger’s business, with a keen awareness of the need to keep up fertility even on such good coastal land.
Between the wars he bought Canadian store cattle at Merklands wharf in Glasgow, although he noted that these could be a “bit quick”.
Otherwise the mainstay was Irish store cattle, with a plentiful supply on offer every Tuesday at Cupar market.
Until the 1950s he went to St Boswells to buy Oxford Down store lambs but then, with demand shifting towards leaner carcases, he changed his allegiance and instead travelled north to Thurso in search of Cheviots.
In all, Frank W Roger’s farming life, as described in his own words to East Fife JAC that February night in 1969, was a fascinating one.
Innovation and enthusiasm were his watchwords — and, 100 years on, the tradition carries on to this day at Kenly Green and the other Roger farms at Boarhills and Belliston.
Last Saturday evening the present Frank Roger and his family hosted a party for 180 guests, all of whom had been associated with Kenly Green one way or another over the years. The guests dined in the potato store; the Challenger crawler tractor and self-propelled potato harvester were at rest next door.
How things change in a century.