Your experience of living next to a farm..

[meagain3]

We’ve viewed a gorgeous house we love but it’s next to a farm..

pros/cons of living next to one?

Cockerel crowing from about 4.30am
Cows mooing in the night when the bull joins them
Tractors taking priority on the lane at all times
The odd wedding and event which has no council permissions
Hunt a couple of times per year
Horse flies

despite all of the above, we love it.

Spraying of fertiliser / pesticide can be an issue. We live next to a field where cattle and sheep graze. The field is sprayed a couple of times a year - no warnings given - and cars, windows etc get covered. Also bird scarers can be noisy. Also noise if they harvest into the night.

Massive swarms of flies come into the house from the cows (including horse flies which are horrible). Smells. Farmers shouting at the beast and the dogs, clanging, revving etc. I hate it when they spray the fields with chemicals and shit. It lingers! And fire smoke, diesel fumes etc

There always seems to be loose sheep wandering about around here too. I don't intervene any more unless it's dangerous because they are Impossibly stupid and hard to catch 😅

Bonuses; I'd rather have cockerels and cows waking me up than neighbours playing music or shouting, I guess?? Can look outside and see green instead of grey? The animals can be very cute too, lambs and calves (until they become a group of lairy bullocks trying to get into the garden to lick the washing, lick the dog, lick me 😅)

Tractores on the lanes, noisy machinery late at night/early morning in the summer farmyard smells and flies

Lived near a pig farm, think a pasture away. It stunk in summer with lots of huge bluebottles.

We're on a large plot (a few acres) surrounded by arable farmland with large grainstores. There are early starts sometimes, but nothing that bothers us and it's not all day every day. Fairly quiet over winter, and busy for a couple of weeks at harvest time.

Sheep farm here - not close enough to bother us with noise or flies as we're separated by our own fields. Our animals are probably just as noisy anyway.
No annoying neighbours, beautiful views of open countryside. Love it!

We live next to arable fields. Grain crops and sugar beet. Its fine but be aware:

Spraying - we just shut the windows
Harvesting - when its ready, its ready, late night/ early morning/ Sunday, they go when they can go.
The root crops are a noisy harvest.
Grain crops mean mice, our cat is in heaven.
Hedging and verges being trimmed and fences being replaced now and again.
Massive and dangerous machinery operating.

We love it, its fascinating to watch.

We see pheasant, partridge, rabbits and hares in the field plus birds of prey. The sound of the wind swishing ripe crops is a delight.

Also:
keep an eye on planning for housing or solar farm, and hope it doesn’t change to pigs, poultry or cattle.

Muck spreading is done on arable fields so it can ponk for a bit.

Noisy and stinks during certain cycles. Not for me.

Hugely noisy if it’s arable/vegetables. 160db bird scarers right next to houses running constantly for months, last year we had one firing four times every six minutes from 11pm through until 8am for a fortnight, plus others from different directions during the day. In the winter the daytime ones run for several months without respite and there is also shooting in the same fields.

Harvesting is just a dull droning sound I don’t personally find a bother, and that is only a few nights a year so it isn’t a problem at all.

It wouldn’t bother me being near to a purely livestock farm, but I’d never buy another house next to arable land again.

My experience was bloody awful, but most of it's already been covered here. To add:

Death-wish farmers bolting around single track country lanes on tractors at 30-40mph - they don't care if oncoming traffic can't see them, if it's foggy or pissing down with rain

Local roads being chewed up by heavy machinery and not repaired

Really aggressive farm dogs

Building works happening when it suits them - til it's dark, all weekend, Christmas Eve, etc

I think a great deal depends on what sort of farmers you end up living next to. There are considerate farmers and there are DGAS farmers.

Someone mentioned shooting parties. Outside our lounge window at 8am on a Sunday. Then members helping themselves to our garden/drive to fetch dead prey.

When people talk about flies (we were on a dairy farm), for us, that was for 11 months of the year, and if you're unlucky, they'll be coming up through the pipework, through extractor fans, out of the dishwasher, crawling through gaps in windows. I cannot emphasise enough how awful life is when you cannot keep the fuckers off you or food that you are making. It was impossible to operate in our house without a series of fly nets, and I remember one particular occasion I had to get my partner to stand next to me whilst I made sandwiches to swat away flies. It didn't work, one of the fuckers still got on the bread. I live on a river now and we get a pretty high level of creepy crawlies and flying things, but they don't have a patch on how rage-inducing farm flies are. I imagine they'll be lower in number on a farm with no animals.

Except to ask - do you know they don't rent any of those fields out at certain times of the year for lambs? Because some do.

I wouldn’t live next to an arable farm - pesticide exposure. Especially if you have DC?

I lived near an abattoir for many years (in a residential area!) and my children grew up there (school backs onto it). There’s nothing sadder than seeing lorries full of cows or sheep with their sad little eyes peering out at you on the school run. Also I camped near a farm that was also a kennel and got absolutely no sleep from the nighttime howling 😂 but at least you’d know if one was there. Could it ever be sold for housing?

Also what if you’re neighbour is Jeremy Clarkson?

I live next to a wheat, potato and onion farm. We see a few tractors, loads of wildlife (foxes, badgers, hares and really interesting birds). As previous posters have said the combine can be out pretty late getting the harvest in but it’s quite cool to watch. Most of the time the fields are empty. No smells, although I tend to close the windows when they’re spraying. I love it personally.

You are incredibly unlucky then because the rest of us have to put up with crows pulling out our plants and pigeons shredding them literally down to stumps because we legally have to turn the bangers off between 10pm and 7.30 am which are the times the birds are most active.
Thousands of pounds worth of damage and only one of the reasons over 50% of uk veg farmers won’t be starting again next year

What did farmers do before crow scaring technology existed?

I do sympathise, but at the same time, I'm not particularly fond of the b'stard things going off from 4.45am at the moment. Just because rules are put in place doesn't mean farmers actually follow them.

That said, it tends to be an intense flurry for about 20 minutes and then it just stops.

@KievLoverTwo I can’t speak for other areas but DH said that his Dad had crows for about 2 years long before he was born and they tied loads of binbags up on sticks and shot a few here and there and it seemed to work. After that there were no crows here for decades. Now I don’t imagine that they got rid of them with binbags there’s been something more attractive elsewhere but that’s something I can vouch for as they only reappeared in the last 4-5 years and are scared of nothing. As a random aside I do actually like crows, jackdaws etc in the garden but not destroying the crops.
We get very strict monitoring here (NI) and were threatened with prosecution 2 years ago about a bird scarer during anti social hours and they were really aggressive about it. Problem was it wasn’t our bloody banger it was someone renting neighbours field but because we were the ones normally associated with growing veg we had a hell of a job convincing the council of this.
Pigeons will sometimes respond to wee plastic eagles or owls with budgie bells tied on long string to swoop over the crops but if they get in at all when the plants are small the damage is colossal. We also make random scarecrows with the kids but crows have been known to sit on them!

That should be fine.

If it were a pig farm - based on family experience - I'd advise against.

Ah, I see. After posting this, I did wonder whether farmers could plant 'distraction' crops that they don't really mind losing, a little bit away from the actual, important crops.

The corvid numbers in our tiny little garden this year has been absolutely insane. And in the area generally.

It seems the government are between a rock and a hard place. Where we are now, there isn't even a farm within eyesight - wasn't aware of one at viewing. But, suddenly, in February, the crow scarers started going off during the day, and it's a bit jarring when it sounds like a shotgun and it's going off 15 times a bloody hour. Fortunately, the day noise rate calmed down an awful lot.

They're legislating themselves into higher food prices and putting people out of business.

There has to be another way, surely?

A silent scarer that puffs out a dark cloud?

Clutching at straws here. The no solution solution isn't a solution for bloody anybody!

We lived very rurally for a few years in a former farmhouse surrounded by arable land on all sides. It was only a problem at harvest time with huge dust clouds and when they sprayed pesticides (they did let us know in advance)

One year the field behind had beans as a rotation crop and there were thousands of tiny beetles for a couple of months , and our dog had an allergic reaction and was on medication.

We loved where we lived and none of the above was enough to spoil it, but DH and I had grown up in the countryside and had experience of living with those things. If you go in expecting the reality of living near a farm I am sure it wouldn’t be a problem.

We were aware of bird scarers in the distance where we lived, but it didn’t bother us.

@meagain3 arable effectively then. Flies at certain times of year, and smells from muck spreading. Farms round us are increasingly using human excrement (treated) on the land and it is way worse as a smell than more traditional slurry. We often have to keep windows closed for a few days during the summer. Early starts and late finishes during harvesting. Crop spraying.

It’ll be beautiful!
I live next to, in part a cattle farm -I love to see the cows when they come to the fields near our house even though they are unbelievably loud!