Offers around £450,000

Transport Boxes from 4ft to 7ft, either manual or hydraulic tip to suit tractors from 15 H/P to 140 H/P.

Handy every day around smallholdings farms stables etc (nearly as good as a front loader)!

From £250 plus VAT.

Delivery available nationwide

The villa was bought in 2006 and fully renovated and refurbished to a high standard with new PVC windows through out, new bathrooms, new internal doors, new kitchens and tiling. Since September 2007 the villa has been mainly let out on long term lets with a few holiday lets in between.

The ground floor apartment has a large double bedroom, separate shower room and kitchen/living area.

The upper apartment is accessed by sturdy wide, metal steps but would still be unsuitable for those with difficulty climbing stairs

There is a large balcony running the length of the apartment with lovely views over the garden and fields.

The upper apartment has a large open plan dining and living area with kitchen box and open fire. There is a spacious bedroom with en-suite wet room.

The ground apartment leads out onto a large terrace, covered with vines and there is a shed/barn at the back of the house for storage and also a barn at the bottom of the garden. The garden has numerous fruit trees – peaches, apricots, apple, cherries and has been landscaped with paths, patio, grass and bushes. Internet and satellite TV and a landline is possible. The plot is securely fenced and dog proof.

The village is a decent size with 2 or 3 shops, a small cafe and bar, post office and regular buses to Stara Zagora (15km) and Chirpan (25km). The villa itself is very quiet as the plots on either side are just vegetable gardens visited by their owners to tend the gardens as required.

Stara Zagora has everything you need from large supermarkets to DIY stores, shopping malls and cinema complexes. There are many mineral spa resorts in the area and it is ideal for hiking.

The property would make an ideal holiday home as is very secure and can just be locked up when no one is there and the garden is easy maintenance. Or it could be continued as a successful long term let and you would be looking at around 150E/mth long term let.

Price: Offers around 22,000 Euros

This has now been done and along with this change, Gofarmer has also reduced the yearly subscription amount from £45 to just £24.99 and removed the first year introductory offer.

Solicitor David Kirwan, head of the agricultural unit at North West law firm Kirwans, has seen a rise in RSPCA and trading standards prosecutions for administration offences.

Mr Kirwan said: “Farming administration has grown so much that it is now a business in itself. Unfortunately the risks are so high that farmers and animal breeders cannot afford to ignore their responsibilities.”

“Huge fines can easily result from what may appear as relatively minor breaches of rules. In the long term we need to re-evaluate with a view to bringing back some common sense and ending what some farmers see as persecution. Over the short term, however, farmers must dedicate time to conforming with obligations.”

“I have sympathy for farmers because for thousands of years their forefathers have farmed animals – they are not cruel to them because if they are cruel the animals will not grow. I don’t think the British people, the farmers, the pet lovers, have changed so why has the administration changed so significantly?”

“Any reasonable person will accept that administration is an essential part of any business but it should not be so overwhelming that it threatens the business.”

“Modern day farmers face tough economic conditions and I am convinced that for some enterprises it is administrative pressures that are the difference between survival and failure.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has acknowledged the growing burden on farmers and livestock keepers by bringing ten administrative services online under one website to slash time spent on paperwork.

Farmers are regularly caught out and handed costly fines by the courts. Last week a farmer who breached rules designed to stop the spread of cattle diseases was fined £16,000 and ordered to pay £2,000 costs, three years after being fined £14,000 with £6,000 costs for a similar offence.

From January onwards farmers who keep over 350 chickens will have to ensure these chickens are kept in ‘improved’ cages. The chickens must be given access to litter or gravel on the floor of the cage in order to be able to scrat around and peck as they would naturally. The cages will also need to have a minimum of around 800 sq cm of floor spare (nearly double what was the required space before this new directive) and the hens must be able to nest and perch.

Unfortunately the cost of implementing these welfare changes has meant that many UK egg and chicken producers have opted not to carry on in poultry farming and thus there is now a glut of ex-battery chickens needing new homes or they will face certain slaughter. There are a number of rescue efforts and organisations across the UK currently looking for new homes for some of these battery chickens.

The sheep appeared to have huddled together for protection at first and were then sprayed with bullets. The unknown gang then took 23 dead lambs, leaving other dead sheep scattered around the field. Its thought the raid was to supply the illegal meat trade which has increased in recent years with higher food prices. Mr Phipps commented that the gang appeared to know exactly what they were doing and took the largest lambs and aimed at the neck of the sheep so as to cause as little damage as possible the rest of the carcass where the meat is taken from. Its thought the gang had been watching the sheep and already picked their target as a blue van was spotted in the area a week earlier. The gang also appeared to have used silencers as no shots were heard and they also cleared up all cartridge cases and shut the gate after their murderous spree.

In the past year alone there have been over 1,000 reported incidents of farm animals being stolen from farms but the thefts are not restricted to sheep; pigs, cattle and bees have also been taken. The cost to farmers alone has been over £5 million according to the NFU Mutual, the main farm insurance firm. There has also been an increase in the illegal killing of swans and taking fish from rivers and lakes.

There is a concern that such illegally killed fish and meat will find its way into the food chain. In the past stolen animals have been tracked to hastily fabricated slaughter houses in old farm buildings and rental industrial units. The animals are slaughtered with no thought for animal welfare or health and hygiene issues. Anyone in the catering industry, butchers or shoppers are being warned to stay away from meat being sold from the back of vans or in door to door sales, especially if being sold at cheap prices.

Monkey Kingdom, the company behind the reality TV series, aim to place farmers between the age of 20 and 30 into constructed reality scenarios (so not really reality at all!). It is to be based in Devon and meant to air later this year.

However, the Devon Federation of Young Farmers is concerned that the show will simply stereotype farmers and look for farmers who speak a certain way and have certain opinions.

Executive producer for the proposed series, Sarah Dillistone, said that they wanted to fine real characters of the countryside to show that rural living is anything but boring! The producers apparently want born and bred country folk who live and work in the farming community and intends to film them ‘frolicking in the the fields and boozing it up” – so very true to reality then!

And I have had all urls (website addresses) for the search categories and sub-categories optimised for the search engines so instead of the web address just reading http://www.gofarmer.com/search?search.php it now reads http://www.gofarmer.com/search?livestock-for-sale for example. This should really help with the website’s Google rankings and thus organic traffic from search engines.

The website was then running very slow and at times not loading at all. After discussions with the website host and having a programmer look at it, the problem was traced back to a script running to track how well sponsor adverts performed. This has been removed and replaced and all seems to be working fine now.

An advert is running in each issue of HomeFarmer magazine and another about to start in Smallholder magazine. I also intend to do more regular online promotion.