About Us
This independent consultancy is focussed exclusively on Care Farming and therefore offers the highest level of commitment and options to service users and their managers.
The business was formed by Stephen Sellers specifically to fill the gap between service user manager and farmer, by answering initial questions, making the link happen and aiming to maximise the potential of the Care Farming enterprise. Stephen will work with you on your organisation’s commitments on choice, independence, other targets including risk assessments and also as necessary with Valuing People, Direct Payments or any other government drives.
Stephen Sellers has researched and visited many farms and rural sites, some devoted entirely to the concept of care and others where the care element is just one of several different agricultural and non-agricultural enterprises on the farm.
His advice draws on the practical issues highlighted by those involved in Care Farming of whatever level in the UK and Holland, the latter country being the leading European developer of the ‘care on farm’ concept.
Stephen is a member of the National Farmers Union, Country Land & Business Association and the Federation of Small Businesses.
Summarised CV of Stephen Sellers
Key specialities:
- knowledge of the breadth of Care Farming options
- farmer contacts
- communication with farmers and their advisers
- farm diversification knowledge
- farm tax issues
- wide contacts with professionals advising farmers and landowners
Background:
As a farmer’s son, Stephen gained wide farming knowledge living on a mixed enterprise family farm up to the age of 21.
He subsequently obtained an accountancy qualification and then attended Harper Adams Agricultural College in Shropshire gaining a diploma in Agricultural Marketing & Business Administration.
His accountancy professional career included managerial roles in the principal agricultural offices of Grant Thornton and Ernst & Young in Hampshire. He then set up his own accountancy practice exclusively for farmers in 1991, selling it in 2008 to provide time to focus his services solely on the expansion of Care Farming in the South of England.
His business career in agriculture has also included the founding in 1991 of a successful publishing business selling a machinery spare parts directory to farmers and machinery dealers nationally, which he sold in 1994.
Stephen has lived in Hampshire for 24 years and is married with 3 grown up children − one a music therapist and another a teacher. His hobbies include restoration of an organic smallholding for nature conservation, pigs, hens and fruit.