As I got older I became able to show calves, and then moved onto showing cows, milking them and operating machinery.
After leaving school at 16 I went onto a two year Y.T.S. scheme, working on an estate near home where I gained more experience with livestock and machinery. At 18 I attended Sparsholt College obtaining an N.C.A. I then moved to Glastonbury in Somerset with my father where I worked for several Agricultural Contractors silaging, baling, drilling, maize harvesting and generally gaining more experience.

After nine years of this I realised it was at home with the Jerseys I really wanted to be so I moved back home to the farm in 1999. I worked at home on the family farm on a part time basis whilst working for another agricultural contractor.
It was during 2001 that my mother decided to sell the cows and the main of the young stock, and so this made me more determined to farm in my own right as I did not want my grandfathers herd name to disappear. I was then offered a small dairy unit to rent at Longdown Activity Farm from Bryan and Dawn Pass, to which I still thank them for today.

I bought two in-milk cows from my mother with the sale of my drum kit. The drum kit raised me £900 the cows were £450 each! I moved to Longdown in the summer of 2003 with the two cows Hiltonbury Yarrow and Hiltonbury Yuletide (Yarrows head being the current herd logo), I then purchased eight more Hiltonbury bred heifers from my mother to calve later that summer.

These ten Jerseys ran with the 35 Holsteins for around 18 months which were already in situ on the farm.
After 18 months at Longdown, Uplands Farm came up for rent with Hampshire County Council, where I secured a Farm Business Tenancy.

I installed a milk vending machine in 2016 where customers could bottle their own milk. I was one of the first farms to install a milk vending machine in Hampshire and sell direct to the public from the farm gate. Its is still very successful to date!

I have always been very much into the breeding and showing of the cows and have more recently ventured out to some of the larger shows with a great deal of help from my late father Gordon who was responsible for the main of the halter training and preparation work (you got the blame if it went wrong Dad!!) It has always been a goal of mine to take our homebred cows to another level within the show ring as we have only ever competed locally before.

In 2019 we relocated to Attwoods Drove Farm, Compton, Winchester with my partner Shaleen, who I later married making her a very proud Mrs Neagle!

Myself my wife and my step daughter cova have achieved so much since moving to Attwoods we have installed a brand new milking parlour, installed an ice cream and pasteurising room with all facilities, had lots of great events for the public and Cova passed her tractor test which is fantastic.

I am lucky Cova shares my passion for the farm as we do everything together on a daily basis, we both do all the farm duties, the welfare of the cattle, all our own field work, so we can produce our own feed for our cattle, the growing of our maize, silage, haylage, hay, straw etc. I am not sure how we do all this with just the three of us but we do!!

Having to diversify due to the dairy industry, Shaleen opened a small farm shop when we moved to Attwoods and started to produce her own traditional jersey ice cream on the farm, which I must say her recipe is amazing and is very popular with the locals. She sells all our own raw and pasteurised jersey milk, our jersey fudge, home reared beef and raw cow’s milk soap alongside other locally produced items.

Our farm shop is a traditional farm shop where not only is it on our working farm but the produce we sell in the shop is mostly made here on the farm by us from our own jersey herd of cows and we are very proud of what we do as there are not many proper farm shops around now a days.

We are very passionate about producing good quality food for our customers and most importantly at reasonable prices and our customers knowing where their food has come from. This has thankfully made our shop very popular on the map which is great for us seeing how hard the dairy industry has become.

We are all very enthusiastic about what we do considering how hard this industry is, but what keeps driving us on is our amazing herd of girls as we love our cows and our fantastic customers and the local community who love visiting our farm for events and visiting our farm shop.

We get amazing feedback about our produce and that makes us so proud of what we do!

By the way I have since bought another drum kit! (I just don`t get time to play it).