Yet, Ali has done exactly this, with absolutely no previous experience in farming. And ironically, he seems quite happy with his decision.
Everything about Ali is an irony. Coming from a family of management graduates in Teheran, Ali first arrived in England some thirty years ago to learn English. He was struck by the beauty of the English countryside, and made the decision not only to stay on by marrying a local Cumbrian girl, but to live the life of a farmer, with all its trappings.
He and his wife Eleanor put themselves through some animal husbandry courses at local colleges, and later arrived on the Cumbrian horizon in search of large pastures for their livestock. “When my parents first came here, they were astounded with the starkness and the solitude. How can you live here, they asked. What happens if there’s a fire on your farm ? It will be weeks before the fire brigade turn up, they said !”, he laughs. As he scans over his eighty-five acre farm, Blackhamilton at Blackford village on the outskirts of Carlisle, Ali drops the bombshell - “It’s not worth it. If you calculate the cost of keeping a cow, stabling, feeding and depreciation after calving, it works out at 50p a day. Now who wants to make that kind of money ?” Ali easily crosses the bridge between farming methods and cost accounting and bursts into profit figures like machine gun fire. The crux – farming in England is not profitable, because of the lack of new talent, high costs, and a lot of red tape, thanks to government bureaucracy. Switching quickly between English and Farsi, he says, “Our subsidies haven’t come in yet. The Government is dragging its feet – we’re all in the red. Considering the fact that we’re feeding the nation, its not fair on us.”
So why is he doing it ? “Because I just love it. I can’t live in cities any more. I’d rather be free, and live a stress-less life here in the countryside. It really is beautiful here.” Coupled with this is his immense passion for breeding local cattle and sheep. He’s full of pride about his breeding methods which have unsurprisingly earned him lots of prizes too. And he’s using his Iranian background to his advantage. Figuring that buyers at auctions would raise eyebrows on hearing unusual names of livestock, he has begun christening all his cattle with Persian names – like Sholeh (fire), Sherin (sweet) and Ahfsane (legend). “When the auctioneers finally manage to pronounce their names, I get quite a few stares of interest.. One stare, one potential buyer.” In fact, he takes so much interest in matters Persian, that he insisted on travelling to Newcastle to cast his vote for the Iranian presidential elections, inviting angry glares from exiled Iranians. “I’m proud of my Iranian background; there’s nothing to be ashamed about it. We’re just getting attention for the wrong things.”
Going by the fact that farming is heavily aided by the Iranian government, would he ever return to Iran, and perhaps be a farmer there ? “No. I want to be here.”, he says resolutely. So while the English farmer finds himself turning into an endangered species, Ali Afsari’s is one proud and perpetual silhouette to look out for on the Cumbrian plains. | 
