Start with experience — with your animals, not animals in general
"Good with animals" is not a qualification for farm sitting, where the stock may outweigh the sitter ten to one. Ask what they have actually handled: horses, cattle, sheep, goats, poultry — and in what setting, for how long, and for whom. Someone brilliant with sheep may never have caught a suspicious horse or milked a goat with mastitis looming, and a sitter who says so honestly is safer than one who claims everything. Ask for references from other holdings and follow them up; ask, too, whether they sit alone or bring a partner, and who else would be on your place while you are away.
Driving matters more than people expect: can they drive your vehicles or at least move a trailer, operate the quad, and manage if the tractor is needed for a stuck gate or a fallen tree? You are not hiring a mechanic, but a sitter who cannot move anything with wheels has fewer options in a tight spot.
Walk the rounds and get them to talk it back
Do not interview across a kitchen table. Walk the whole round together — fields, pens, water troughs, feed store, stables — and talk through the routine as you go: what is fed, how much, in what order; which troughs need checking and which gate is always, always shut. Then ask the sitter to walk you through it back to you. The talk-back is the moment misunderstandings surface, while you are still there to correct them, rather than by phone from an airport.
Point out the individuals, not just the groups: the old ewe who needs her feed separate, the gelding who must not go out with the new horse, the goat who can open any latch not clipped. Ask what they would do with a morning where everything has escaped into the wrong field — you are listening for calm sequencing, not perfection.
The emergency questions are the real interview
Ask directly: you find a horse cast in its box, a sheep on its back, a cow calving wrong — what do you do first? There is no single right answer, but there is a right shape: make it safe, call the vet, call you, in an order that fits the emergency. Establish which vet practice they should ring, whether you authorise them to call the vet without reaching you first (you should, and say so in writing), and where the emergency numbers, the yard postcode for the vet's satnav, and the head torches live.
Cover the grim practicalities too: what if an animal dies while you are away, what if the water supply fails, what if they themselves are ill on day three — who is their backup, and have you met them? A sitter with a named, briefed backup is worth more than a sitter with none and a promise.
Updates, money and the handover
Agree how you will hear from them: a message each evening, photos of anything worrying, silence-means-fine or news regardless. Settle the fee, what it covers, when it is paid, and whether mileage, feed runs or a vet trip are extra. Ask what they want from you that sitters are usually too polite to request — written routines beat remembered ones, every time.
Then make the handover properly: once you have chosen them, a KinsLe Care Pass hands your sitter temporary, clear access to each animal's routine, feeding amounts, vet details and quirks for exactly the days you are away, so the answers from that first meeting are written where the sitter can reach them at six in the morning in a wet field.