Farmers have been encouraged to diversify away from traditional agriculture for years now and in the latest edition of Land Business, two pioneering farmers tell how they have come close to taking the ultimate step: giving up farming altogether. These days, Stuart Beare and John Morley dedicate most of their working lives to farming people instead.

They do so in very different ways, according to a report in Land Business, a publication circulated to 14,000 landowners and their advisers.

Mr Beare “farms” at Tullys Farm in West Sussex, where he is the third generation of his family to do so. But of the dairy enterprise that his grandfather built up or the arable and pick-your-own set up that his father developed after the war, there is only modest sign. Mr Beare, however, is clearly doing something right because his farm attracts around 450,000 visitors a year.

They come for the coffee shop, which is open all day, and for the comprehensive farm shop that sells an impressively wide range of largely locally grown produce. But, most of all, they come for the large scale leisure spectaculars that Mr Beare and his team stage throughout the year.

Right now they are preparing for the huge Maize Maze and Adventure Park, which is open throughout the school summer holidays and draws visitors in their thousands. Then it’s on to the Halloween Spooktacular, where the Haunted Hayride is a massive draw, and later in the year, the Christmas Festival, complete with a gift market held in a farmyard covered by a large marquee.

Mr Beare admits he prefers not to be first to try out a new idea but second and he prides himself on spotting a good idea and working out how to do it better. Tullys’ Maize Maze, for example, grown for the first time in 1998, wasn’t the first in Britain; it was the second. He also likes to make regular visits to North America where leisure-based farm ventures are more established.

“Halloween is a huge thing over there and we were fortunate enough to start our own Halloween Festival in 1994, just before it got began to get big over here too,” he explains.

Tullys hasn’t grown a combinable crop since 2002 but Mr Beare points out that they haven’t abandoned farming altogether and still grow 30 acres of pick-your-own crops for summer visitors.

“Thanks to the Maize Maze and Adventure Park, they are more popular than ever.”

Enjoying similar popularity, albeit in a rather different way, is John Morley, who until April 2001 ran an intensive dairy unit at Cross Butts Farm, on the outskirts of Whitby, North Yorkshire. Then Foot and Mouth Disease arrived at a neighbouring farm and Mr Morley’s milking herd and followers – some 270 cattle in all – were slaughtered as part of the disease control measures. The day the cattle were killed on the farm was one of the worst days of his life, he admits.

An early attempt at restocking in the autumn of that year failed to flourish and Mr Morley and his wife, Sue, began to wonder whether their future lay away from farming. Mrs Morley was already running a small but successful bed and breakfast venture from their farmhouse but with an old range of long redundant stone buildings lying empty, the couple began to consider whether the bed and breakfast venture might be profitably expanded?

Two years, a huge amount of work and a £700,000 building project later (the latter part-financed with the help of a £200,000 grant from the English Rural Development Programme) the answer turned out to be yes. Having constantly upgraded their plans throughout the planning and building process, it wasn’t a bed and breakfast operation that opened for business in 2004 it was the Cross Butts Country Hotel and Restaurant.

The new hotel has proved an immediate hit with visitors and locals alike, with 26 weddings booked in for this year and bookings already arriving for 2007.

It had been expected the hotel would generate four new jobs, but two years after opening, the Morleys now employ between 25-50 people, with up to eight chefs working in the increasingly busy kitchen which takes particular pride in using local produce whenever it can.

With his three grown-up children on the full-time staff and the venture recently valued at over £2 million, Mr Morley is delighted with the career switch from dairy farmer to hotelier.

“It’s taking up every minute of my time but every time I look round, I know it’s worth it.”