This Life Claire Pollock

Top-quality produce and a talent for hard work have seen this farmer’s daughter join the rest of her family in making Ardross Farm Shop one of the best in the country

- Gillian Welsh

Is anyone actually going to come to our farm to buy some beef?” This was the first question Claire Pollock asked when her parents told her about their idea to open a shop. It was fifteen years ago and money was tight for the Pollocks. Tenant farming wasn’t lucrative, and they had three university-bound daughters who, they kept reminding them, were getting more expensive to keep. Fiona and Rob had to think hard to fix things. Would Fiona go back out to work? Should they do more contracting? Could they come up with a business plan? After weeks of deliberating late into the night, their idea was ready.

“Eventually, Dad phoned Mum to tell her he had taken one of the animals to the butcher and it would be back in three weeks, so we’d better get busy and make a shop,” explains the highly motivated Claire, who, at the helm of this buoyant east-coast business, is an accounts and finance graduate. “I always said I would have nothing to do with farming or the shop. I wanted a nine-to-five job with a good wage at the end of it. But it wasn’t long until I decided farming was in my blood and that it was time for me to come back.”