A new start after 60: ‘We both like gardening – so we became farmers’

‘I used to say I retired, but now I say I had a career change’ … Bob and Ann Paton. Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian

“We didn’t intend to be farmers,” Bob Paton says. In their 50s, he and his wife, Ann, envisaged “one more move”. They lived in Newcastle upon Tyne and had a checklist for their dream house: “Northumberland, stone-built, a bit of character and a reasonable garden,” Bob says.

The place they found ticked every box but one. Instead of a reasonable garden, it had six acres. As they walked the grounds, Bob turned to Ann and said: “We could turn this into a small farm.”