Nobody Sees the Farrier's Van: Ten Backroom Trades Keeping Exmoor Working

Tourism gets the postcards. Agriculture gets the subsidies and the headlines. But the economy that actually keeps Exmoor running sits one layer further back, in vans with no signage on the side, moving between yards at seven in the morning.

These are the backroom trades — the people you only meet when something has already gone wrong, or when something needs doing before it does. Most have no website worth the name. All of them are booked further ahead than you'd expect. And nearly every local business owner has a story about the day one of them dropped everything.

Here are ten, and what the rest of us should take from the way they work.

1. The saw doctor

Sharpens and re-tensions circular saw blades, bandsaw blades and chainsaw chains, often from a workshop off a lane with a hand-painted sign. A blunt blade isn't just slow — it wanders, burns timber and costs fuel. The nearest alternative is often Exeter or Bristol, which turns a day's turnaround into a fortnight. Why they're hard to replace: nobody else will look at a 30-year-old blade and know what to do with it.

2. The agricultural engineer

Diagnostics, welding and hydraulics on tractors, telehandlers and mowers, mostly on your yard rather than in a workshop. In silage week they triage ruthlessly by who is mid-cut. That's not favouritism; it's an informal queuing system built on years of knowing whose crop will spoil first.

3. The farrier

On a six-to-eight week cycle, booked months out, working in all weathers with a horse's foot on their knee. A slipped shoe the day before a show is a genuine emergency, and the good ones fit you in because you've been reliable for a decade.

4. The fencing and hedge-laying contractor

Stock fence, gate hanging, strainers, and traditional hedge laying between October and March while the sap is down. Weather decides their week, not their diary. If a gate needs hanging before tupping, the conversation happens in August.

5. The septic and drainage specialist

Exmoor runs on off-mains drainage, which means tanks to empty, soakaways to clear and the occasional call nobody wants to make on a Sunday. Regulations around small sewage discharges have tightened over the years, so paperwork and permits matter as much as the pump. Utterly unreplaceable when your holiday let has a full house.

6. The mobile hydraulic hose man

Arrives with a van full of fittings and makes up a hose on the spot, in a field, in the rain, while the machine sits where it stopped. Without him, a £40 hose means a machine stranded for three days and a contractor's day written off.

7. The agricultural tyre fitter

The one who will come out to a field, deal with a puncture on a machine that can't be moved, and foam-fill a tyre so it never happens again. Worth every penny of the callout, and everyone knows it.

8. The livestock haulier

Movement licences, welfare in transit, loading in the dark for a market start. Their day starts before yours and finishes after it. When a lorry is booked, the whole farm's morning adjusts around it.

9. The contract shearer

Has roughly a fortnight in which the entire flock needs doing, and books the following year's round before leaving the yard. A two-person team moving through the moors at speed is one of the great unsung logistics operations of the West Country.

10. The refrigeration and cellar cooling engineer

The pub trade's quiet lifeline. Warm beer, a cellar running two degrees out, a display fridge giving up in August — this is the call that decides whether a bank holiday weekend goes ahead as planned. Good ones know every ageing unit within thirty miles and what's likely to fail first.

What these trades teach the front of house

Book on their calendar, not yours. Every one of these businesses runs a diary with very little slack. If your job can be done in November, don't ring in June. If it must be done in June, ring in February.

Pay in a week, not in ninety days. Small rural suppliers carry your credit whether they say so or not. Paying on receipt or within seven days is the single fastest way to become a priority customer, and it costs you almost nothing. Large-firm payment terms imported into a village economy do real damage.

Be ready when they arrive. Move the animal, clear the yard, have the part number, know which gate. Every hour they spend waiting is an hour they aren't earning.

Don't only call in a crisis. The contractors who turn out for you at short notice are doing so because you've given them steady work the rest of the year. That's a relationship, not a transaction.

Learn their season. Hedge layers work in winter, shearers in late spring, septic firms in the shoulder months. Understanding the rhythm of the people you depend on makes you easier to schedule — and easier to say yes to.

Say thank you, and mean it. A note, a bottle, a genuine review passed on to the next farmer. In a place this size, reputation travels along the lanes faster than any advert.

The economy you can't see from the car park

Exmoor's visitor-facing businesses get judged on the welcome, the view and the cream tea. All of that depends on a layer of trades most customers will never meet — the ones who fix the fridge, hang the gate and make the hose while the rain comes sideways.

If you run a business here, you don't just buy from them. You're part of the same supply chain, and how you treat them is a business decision in its own right. Book early, pay fast, and be the customer they're glad to hear from.