Boston Park Farm, Doncaster: How a family with six daughters grew their maize maze into a Yorkshire farm attraction with 100,000 visitors a year

David’s roar of joviality is uncannily similar to the ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’ of someone very well-known around Christmastime.

“Our visitors to the farm can come and have tea with Santa,” says David. “He comes around to all the children because he’s been helping Mrs Santa and needs a rest. From what I’m told they see him first when he’s going down the slide and then, after tea, all the children go on a tractor and trailer ride with him around to his grotto, tell him what they would like, have their picture taken and receive a little present.”

This has been happening every year since 2012 and David tells of how farming life all started changing at Boston Park Farm around 1998 and has led to the family welcoming nearly 100,000 visitors each year.

“We took some major decisions around 1998-99 when my brother Ken retired. We looked at our assets and came up with a livery and a visitor centre. We started a maize maze and we gradually expanded as a place to visit.

“What we’ve all created, myself, my wife Mandy and our daughters, has created work for four of them and what we have done energises me. It does that to me every morning, seeing the girls arrive, them busying about and visitors coming. I have no plans to retire. I’m energised by helping them.

“We’ve just won an award titled Best Party Provider in Doncaster and runners up to Yorkshire Wildlife Park for best place to visit in the area too. We are quite content with what we do. We’re not trying to compete other much bigger league farm attractions than us. Our target audience is children under the age of 10 years old who come mainly with their parents, grandparents and guardians.”

David moved to Boston Park Farm from Thorpe Audlin near Wentbridge in 1975. “That was another big decision, to rent 480 acres here. I’d gone from having 10 acres growing vegetables and keeping chicken and pigs, standing on the market at Pontefract, to taking on a much bigger farm. Ken and I joined together, with him farming at Loversall. We had 600 acres in total.

“When Ken retired we decided the acreage we were farming wasn’t enough to be able to afford all the machinery you need for the crops we were growing. Not every farm can grow to 2000-3000 acres, so we looked at diversifying. We started the first maize maze in Yorkshire in 2000 and a horse livery business in 2005.

“Myself, Mandy and two of our six daughters, Lucy and Ruth are all now partners in the farm. Lucy’s the decision maker, although she’ll say it’s her dad. She’s the one with the ticket for spraying. She can do the agronomy as well as the adviser does. Lucy came back in 2006 and runs the farm and livery business; Ruth came back in 2011 after having been out in Canada. She’s general manager for the visitor centre.

“Amy and Mary gave up school teaching last year and now run our educational side of the farm visits including the Little Farmers groups for pre-school children; Mini Farmers for toddlers; Baby Farmers for those under a year old; and then we also have After School Big Farmers and Home Educated Farmers. Helen, our eldest, is up in Durham; and Jane is in Skipton. They are both involved when it comes to brainstorming ideas.” David says the farm is still growing crops and has livestock.

“We grow 120 acres of maize for an anaerobic digester next door; 120 acres of feed wheat, and 120 acres of grass, of which 80 acres has reverted to natural pasture through stewardship schemes. We let 80 acres out for carrots and sugar beet and have another 40 acres in environmental stuff like wild bird cover and bumble bee mix. The environmental payments have underpinned the rent in the past.

“We buy calves in. People like ‘baby’ anything so I borrow sows from a neighbour when they are just about to give birth, two or three sows that visitors then see with their baby piglets, then we give them back when weaned. I will also buy a couple of calves every two or three weeks, always baby calves on the bottle.

“We have a flock of around 60 ewes that we lamb, and we run lambing events during February half term, and we also have pigmy goats, alpacas, donkeys, rabbits and guinea pigs.”

David’s first love has always been ploughing. He and his brother Ken have run the Society of Ploughmen since 1971, and in 2016, just shy of his 70th birthday David achieved his dream.

“It’s a beautiful thing to do is ploughing. People can tell me all the facts and figures they want about looking after the soil, but 50 years ago I was direct drilling and packed in with it because it needed a plough through it and what’s happening today is people who are entirely min-till are getting full of blackgrass and other weeds and are turning around to buy a plough or bring in a ploughman. We min-till some fields, to come in maize.

“Quality ploughing is what matters. I’ve always been a tractor ploughman and I’ve also always loved match ploughing. I remember Ken was ploughing at the Yorkshire Championship at Pontefract in 1955 and a guy called Hugh Barr came over from Northern Ireland. He had the World Ploughing Trophy with him – The Golden Plough. I was 9 years old and I thought, one day that’s for me.

“I tried and tried. I’d finish fourth, seventh or eighth, then in 2016, at age 69, 60 years later. I got the Gold Medal. It was unbelievable and the only thing missing was dad not being there to see it.

“You can usually look at your plot and see whether it looks right, I just thought there was nothing more I could have done. That’s about as good as it gets.” Life is pretty much that way now for David.

“When we get the whole gang together it’s surprising just how much that energises me. All I really need to manage now is to be here at the same time as Santa one day.”