"Jim Webster" wrote in message

Hamish Macbeth wrote in message
...
"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...
we would basically take the capital as the money we would get if we
cashed everything in. Value of house, land, livestock, machinery,
quota, feed and fertiliser in hand.
Fair enough, but I think you need to add to the cash return of the
bussiness the lifestyle value of living on a farm.
what cash value to you place on being on call 24hrs a day, living
within 200yds of a slurry pit and silage pit.

Someone really ought to market a deodorant for some of those country
smells :)

Also care has to be made not to double count the investment return.

If you had bought your farm on a loan and a capitol deposit then
repaid the loan out of the business returns then
you either have to compare the return on capitol on the original
deposit or count the growth in value and the loan paid off as part
of the return on capitol.

Also from the lifestyle aspects. Possibly not so significant in
cumbria, but what would it cost to rent a property like your
farmhouse if it was freestanding and not part of farm?

Actually all you have to do is look at the council tax band which does
contain an element of deduction for being part of a farm, but this is
often not enough to drop it a band.

If you start comparing different jobs I think you need to standback
and look at the lifestyle that an activity supports rather than a
single metric such as income as defined by the inland revenue.

which part of the life style to you crave. Working outdoors whatever
the weather,

Has a certain attraction - I tend not to see more than 30 minutes daylight
per day Mon-Fri for 3 months of the year.

the 24 hrs on call,

That's a real bugger. One in six is bad enough.

no weekends off,

I could live with that - _providing_ there were some sheep to be taken from
one valley to another. On foot, of course.

no paid holidays,

Counts for a lot of self-employed/contractors. 45% of the people working
where I do are in this 'boat' (although the agency staff now do get 'paid
leave', this was achieved by dropping the hourly rate by a commensurable
%age which was accrued to give an 'average' day's pay when they took a day
off).

no sick leave.

Ditto.

No street lighting, roads poorly maintained, poor
electricity supply, poor telephone connection,

From a certain PoV, the lack of street lighting is something I don't think
I'd miss. Less light pollution, more stars and other celestial objects to be
seen (assuming the clouds don't make an appearance).

As an aside, how 'bad' is your electric supply? I have fairly regular
brown-outs (enough to bring down a PC) and I've had a few total outages over
the past six months.

The poor telephone is a bugger for modems, though. I could live with a poor
telephone connection on my desk at work, though ;)

the fact that if you
want to go anywhere at all there is no viable public transport and
you have to have a car.

This is true of a many places outside major cities. Even between cities -
the last petrol shortage forced one of my collegues onto the train.
Stoke-on-Trent to Manchester. The connection is OK if you are going between
the major station(s), but the minor outside the city centres are poo - it
was taking him 2.5 hours each way for a 30 mile journey.

(AFAIA, Return On Average Capitol Employed is useful for comparing
performance of companies in the same or similar sectors. It isn't
particularly good for comparing 'chalk with cheese'.)

--
Yesterday is history,
Tomorrow is mystery,
The only time we really have is now,
Which is why it is called the present.