One farm, one family, 350 years

Luson Farm is still the Toms family home today

Farming families are facing tough choices about their future, especially those whose whole history is working the land. In the era of agribusiness and farming frailty there are still those who can trace their presence on their farm back centuries.

The Toms family's roots run deep in Devon - back to the 1600s at least.

Nicholas Toms has been researching the family tree and he reckons they have been in that part of Britain for much longer, "since the dawn of time".

Parish records and oath rolls have revealed that the family has farmed Luson and the surrounding area since 1813.

Luson is close to the small town of Ivybridge, in the South Hams area of Devon right on the edge of Dartmoor.

An ancestor called Philip Moysey Toms was an estate manager for the Bastards, an ancient family that also has a long history in Britain.

(The family has) been lucky that there have not been too many male heirs Nicholas Toms Farming: A family tradition Farming: Where it's at

Philip was clearly a versatile sort - he also acted as an election agent in 1830 for Edmund Pollexfen Bastard. A list helpfully records all of the local registered electors at that time - and the price needed to guarantee their vote.

Other ancestors include John Toms, a midshipman who served alongside Horatio Nelson.

Henry Toms, another recruit to the Royal Navy, travelled on one of the various search parties for the Franklin expedition of 1845 that disappeared in the Canadian Arctic.

In pictures: Bygone farming In pictures: Family life

Luson Farm was originally approximately 420 acres back in the 1800s and its size has fluctuated over the years as circumstances dictated. It is now 160 acres.

Nicholas's father, Nick Toms, reckons that years ago, 160 acres would have been considered quite sizeable but not now: "Farmers have moved off the land over the years, other farmers or companies, institutions, have taken over the farms and amalgamated them, then sold them off to be run as one big unit."

Changing priorities

Staffing levels has also varied. Back in Philip Moysey Toms' time, he had a household of eight - two apprentices, two domestic servants and four farm labourers - recruited from the surrounding areas of Ermington and Nodbury.

A family tree shows the generations of Toms who have farmed Luson Farm in Devon Enlarge Image

Nowadays, the Toms family do all the farm management themselves.

There has been a farmhouse at Luson since the mid-1600s and it was once owned by the Prideaux family, once a large and important local dynasty in the south-west of England.

Work on the farm back then would have been mostly mixed - some beef cattle, a milking herd and a fair amount of arable and crop growing too.

Nowadays, Luson Farm's land is given over to grass, on which 110 animals - suckler cows - are reared. Some are a traditional local breed, South Devons, and others have been cross-bred with Limousins.

Nicholas Toms reckons that one of the family's biggest challenges and achievements down the centuries has been to keep the farm together.

"In that respect, I suppose, they have been lucky that there have not been too many male heirs. My father was an only child, his father was a single male heir, and so it managed to escape breaking up like a lot of family farms do... Although it has come very close to the wire a couple of times."