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In 1992, the Saunders family who had farmed Northdown Farm for almost 90 years sold up. They sold the farm land and buildings separately, and the farm buildings were redeveloped as housing. The land was bought by a Purbeck landowner. For the first time in its history, Preston and Sutton Poyntz had no working farms - all the land was farmed from outside the parish borders. Milling had stopped well before this. Thus ended, for the foreseeable future, any tie between the population of the parish and food production - in seventy years the economy of the village had changed completely, from mainly agricultural to wholly residential.