At Bradfield Young Farmers, we like to have fun and enjoy ourselves but also learn about the countryside, the people who live and work in it. We actively develop skills through hands-on experience and competitions.
Meetings are every Wednesday evening and based at Milehouse Farm, Theale. We make use of the surrounding area and facilities.
Take a look at our most recent annual news report (below) for an idea of the range of activities we get up to, but please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to know more.
- Don’t worry about the age range of members (10 – 28 yrs) – we all get on!
- All members have a say in what we do so all suggestions are welcome.
- Members are supported by adult Club Leaders who along with Senior members are DBS checked.
- Membership includes extensive YFC insurance for all activities and we have qualified first aiders present at our meetings.
If you’ve got any questions about Bradfield YFC, please ask one of our committee, they’ll be only too pleased to help you.
You can keep up to date with Bradfield YFC via Facebook.
To find out lots more about Bradfield YFC and YFC in general, read our bi-monthly newsletters (click here) and recent Yearbooks (click here).
Bradfield & District YFC 2024/25 News
By Charlie Plank, Club Leader
What another amazing year in Bradfield YFC!
We kicked off with our traditional “welcome back” meeting at the beginning of September. It is always great to see how many members come back after the summer break; bounding into Milehouse, wanting to tell you all about their summer holidays, and catching up with their fellow members. For this reason, this meeting is always a little hectic; we have so much information to pass on – about the new membership year, Newbury Show, the club programme – it is never easy to get them to sit down and be quiet for long!
Thankfully, we didn’t have the show classes to run this year, which meant that Sarah Jones was back on board to help out with club meetings, which has been great!
We were kept very busy leading up to Christmas with weekly Club meetings which included, amongst many others: a sports night at Amners Farm (thank you to the Webber family), making their own sausages adding all sorts of tasty ingredients, a messy games night at Milehouse Farm and the County Quiz. This year, we had one team enter (a senior team), who came second by just one point!
In addition to our busy club meetings before Christmas, our Junior Reading and Speaking teams were working hard to prepare for the County competitions in early January – thank you to Wendy Webber for training them.
We were also organising our 80th Celebration; an afternoon tea party held at The Long Gallery at Englefield House, by kind permission of Sir Richard Benyon (more on that later).
Christmas soon came and went, and we kick-started the new year with the County Public Speaking & Interview competitions. Well done to everyone for taking part, particularly our Junior Reading and Speaking teams and our Senior Member of the Year entry, Josh Plank, who all went on to compete in the South East Area qualifiers. The Junior Reading Team continued to represent Berkshire at the National Final – a very daunting prospect for our three under 14 members – but they did so well and we’re so proud of them for what they achieved.
The club was now back in full swing for the Spring term, with member meetings happening every Wednesday evening and committee meetings the first Monday of every month. We soon turned our minds to the Club Pre-Show and Show Class entries.
Simon and I were very conscious that we had a lot of new, young members, some without a YFC background, meaning the show classes were brand new to them. There is a lot to explain and parents needed to be onboard too, so we held our first ever Parents’ Night. We told them all about the show weekend and took the opportunity to explain how the club ran too. It was a really useful night, with lots of fundraising and programme ideas and lots of offers of help.
Many of our new members were keen to learn more about stockjudging, so to get ready for Pre-Show, we spent some time on learning about how to judge the animal and reason-giving. Other spring meetings included an Easter Egg Hunt and our Annual Bingo night.
Pre-show was at Henwick Farm this year. A lot of our members were competing for the first time, in stock judging, cooking and fencing – they all took to it like a duck to water and had a great day, definitely helped by the BBQ (and sunny weather!) that Shefford YFC had put on for everyone!
As always, we helped at the Bradfield May Fayre; not just doing our usual tea, coffee and home-made cakes but putting on a BBQ too. It was hard work, but a great success and a brilliant opportunity to promote the club.
Members were busy getting their show classes ready, practicing for the practical classes and preparing our float: Milehouse looked like an artist’s studio with painted cardboard (and paint!) everywhere!
Come show day we were ready! Black & Gold running all over the place and parents helping assemble the float. The atmosphere and team work was electric and the sun was shining (our Club Chairman, Hannah, even got sunburnt again)! It’s a long day, but it goes by so quickly. Sadly, we didn’t win the overall cup this year, but it really didn’t matter – seeing all the members just having so much fun taking part, supporting each other and working as a team is what makes the day.
After a very busy year, we started to slow down after the Show. We had our annual water fight visit to Bucklebury Ford, which still had water in it, even after our hot summer. Finally, we closed the year with our Club BBQ at Green Farm (by kind permission of Chris & Wendy Webber) with all members and their families celebrating everything that Bradfield had achieved this year. Simon and Ian were on BBQ duties making sure we were all well fed.
I would like to end my report by saying a massive thank you to all the members, parents, advisory committee and our Vice Presidents for all their help and support over the last year – without them Bradfield YFC could not run: we truly are small, but mighty!!!
Bradfield YFC 80th Anniversary Report
by Charlie Plank (Club Leader)
At the end of September 2024, we had confirmation from Sir Richard Benyon that we could use the Long Gallery for our 80th Celebration, which was very exciting news.
With this confirmed, we could go ahead with planning our event for Sunday 24th November. Myself and two ex-members, Caroline Bennett and Angie Plank, started by putting together a list of past members and, with the help of the club members, we passed the invite to as many past and present members as we could hoping that word would get to many more!
The RSVPs came back quickly and the number of attendees soon looked amazing!! We spent a couple of evenings at Milehouse getting things ready for the event: one going through all the old photos and another sorting and cleaning the club china and cutlery!
With the help of everyone, we managed to get over 120 past and present members to the Long Gallery for Afternoon Tea.
On the day, club members put out all old photos, put up club boardss and decorated the Long Gallery to made it look stunning ready for everyone who braved the awful weather to join us.
It was nice to have a number of guest speakers, who gave us all an insight to what they all got up to in Bradfield YFC and how that has helped them in everyday life. We must thank Rodney Plank, Jimmy Hynes, Tom Frankum, Hannah Webber and Zara Plank, Also Chris Webber who kindly read out Rodney’s report as he was unable to come. Julian Plank read out a letter we had received from Donald Mitchell, one of our founder member of Bradfield YFC in 1944 our oldest member at 99 years old. We also had a letter from the other side of the world New Zealand from Barbara and Neil Elson.
It was a great afternoon catching up with present and past members
and listening to all the stories about Bradfield YFC – a fun afternoon was had by all.
Bradfield YFC Photo Gallery
