Month: March 2024

A day in the life – Cameron Lewis, Managing Director, The Woodhorn Group

Posted on March 25, 2024 by - Woodhorn Group

Meet Cameron Lewis, our Managing Director. In this meet the team blog series, you can find out more about our team, their roles and a what a typical working day looks like.

I’ve spent the majority of my career in farming and agriculture, so I’ve always woken early. I’m normally up and about by 6am, and the addition of children and family life hasn’t really changed things! Being awake early means I can get my eldest two packed and off to the school bus for 7am. I can then spend time with my youngest who, at 4, ensures breakfast involves some enjoyable conversations – she certainly helps set a positive mood for the day ahead. The final job before heading out the door is to make sure Mrs Lewis has a hot cup of coffee in her hand.  

I have the benefit of living on the farm and so it’s a very short commute for me, but also means I have lots of open space on my doorstep to walk Andy, our dog. My proximity to the office also helps me get there early so I can greet the team as they arrive and have a bit of a catch up before we all start work.

It probably goes without saying that as MD of a highly diverse business with a team of nearly 50 employees, there’s no such thing as a ‘normal’ day. I report to the owner of the business and oversee the cultural and strategic direction of The Woodhorn Group, so the demands on my time vary significantly across a year. As with any farming operation, there is some seasonality and I’m used to the flow of that, but equally, life throws curve balls and so even when I do plan my days, sometimes something comes up that requires my attention. I’ve become good at pivoting and delegating to the five members of the senior management team who report directly to me, and I’m fortunate to have effective people around me. They are primarily responsible for the day-to-day operation of our core business divisions which include the farm and dairy, waste management, certified soils and the business centre. There’s also the overall finance and HR aspects of managing a growing team within a multi-million turnover organisation.

A changing role in a changing business

My role has changed a lot over the 15 years of working with Woodhorn, mainly because the business has changed and grown so much. Through the week I aim to spend time in each department, working on any live projects and speaking to the team. I will visit all the sites and farms through the month but no longer need to do so on a daily basis, given the skill of our managers.  

From time to time there are projects that require my attention more than others. Our milk vending operation, which launched in 2023, was one of these. This was a big project for us as a business and for me personally, as it’s another aspect of our continued diversification, a key theme in our strategy. It allows us to sell our organic whole milk direct to the public and takes us closer to the consumer than any other aspect of our operations. The complexities of getting the systems and processes in place to sell a single litre of milk to a member of the public, in a business which normally ships 5,000 litres a day in a bulk tanker, was interesting! But this is what I enjoy about my role, and I like that I’m always learning.

Whilst the diversity of my role is what keeps it fresh and interesting, it can also be one of the most challenging aspects. Juggling priorities and allotting time to each of the different operations can mean I have to swap hats at speed and quickly recall information about projects, strategies and budgets. So it’s important that I know and understand each part of the business, but without being involved in everything, all of the time. I have a genuine interest in all that we do, so it can be hard to maintain the divide between strategic and operational. Again, the strength and quality of our team means I know I don’t need to be involved in every little decision.

Strategic time management

One of the practices I’ve developed to remain strategic is booking out chunks of time to look at the business as a whole, each business unit individually and also the wider market. This means going out, meeting other similar businesses, visiting suppliers, attending conferences and importantly, spending time with John, the business owner. I actively look forward to the part of the year where we start looking at the next 12 months and also those sessions where we set a slightly longer term strategic flight path for the business.

Looking back over my 15 years, many of our plans have come to fruition, but there are of course some that haven’t taken off. Like any business we’ve had challenges over the years; from economic impacts to the weather and from health emergencies (both animal and human!) to significant changes in demand. We’ve always had to pivot, and been tested, but typically, because we’ve made diversification the core of our strategy, we’ve not just survived but come through stronger. 

A moment to reflect each day

Generally, I like to ensure that I’m organised and prepared for the next working day before heading home each evening. Recognising what I’ve achieved and looking at what’s on tomorrow’s agenda is important. If I’ve finished the day in the office, then the short walk home with Andy is lovely. In fact the beauty and peace of a rural environment is one of the things I love most. The other thing I like about life at Woodhorn is the people I get to work with. We’ve got a talented group of hardworking and very skilled people and being a family run business also means there is still a personal feel to the company. John still lives on the farm; his family has been farming here since the late 19th century. Sometimes as I walk home, I’ll bump into him and we’ll have a quick, unplanned update ‘over the farm gate’. These brief catch ups, late in the day, are really valuable and give us the chance to reflect on any highlights, challenges or ideas from the day.

Arriving home I’m straight into family life, hearing about school days and clubs before we all have dinner. Because we’re rural, and as the children get older, there’s often the need for ‘Dad’s Taxi’ in the evening, and if there’s some rugby to watch, I’ll be there! But most of the time a bit of peace, a chat, or a quick walk around the farm with Mrs Lewis, the children or Andy the dog is all it takes to reset before it’s time to do it all again tomorrow!

Down on the farm – March 24

Posted on March 23, 2024 by - Blog, Down on the farm, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Group

At the time of writing it feels like there is no hope for an end to the rain. We have water lying in fields where I have never seen water before, winter sown crops have been severely damaged and some won’t recover, whilst we are unable to get near the land to sow our spring crops.

These concerns are overshadowed by the desperate need to let the cows out to grass as we are rapidly running out of our winter feed. There is plenty of grass for them but a few hours on saturated fields will create such a muddy mess that the grass will not recover for the rest of the year. In fairness, the cows aren’t aware that their larder is nearly empty and they wouldn’t leave their dry and warm cow shed anyway, even if we pushed them – and you try pushing 800Kg of obstinate cow where she doesn’t want to go!

Rainfall levels have been record breaking but we have to accept the weather is, as always, just ‘part of farming’. Our troubles are nothing compared to those of the poor souls whose homes have been flooded in the parish, sometimes with raw sewage. Our farm team have spent an enormous amount of time, effort and expense clearing and maintaining our ditch network this winter, as they do every year. This is our responsibility and of course we do not get recompensed. It is, however, intensely frustrating when our efforts are undermined by the refusal of the local authority, highways and water companies, to carry out their duties in the same way.

I wrote a while back about our net zero ambitions. The objective remains, but to my mind it needs to be much more nuanced. There is far too much ‘greenwashing’ and manipulation of numbers and messages in the name of ‘net zero’ throughout industry and even national governments. Furthermore, there is little clarity or agreement as to what should be measured, let alone how. We recently engaged an independent company to carry out a carbon audit on the farm and the results were encouraging – we are making good progress. However some of the advice as to what we should do to progress further was, to be blunt, absurd. An example: we naturally have some cows that produce less milk than others. This, according to the current metrics, makes these lower yielders less ‘efficient’ and therefore they use more resources per litre of milk produced than the higher more ‘efficient’ yielding cows. The advice? To kill the lower yielders and replace them with more ‘efficient’ higher yielding cows. If being carbon neutral means killing perfectly healthy, productive cows then ‘I’m Out’.

Our ambition has always been to produce top quality food whilst being fully aware of our responsibility to the environment from the flora and fauna on the farm, animal welfare and our role in the community, to our role in tackling climate change. Pursuing net zero in isolation appears to be contra to this and whilst it is disappointing to acknowledge, it is something we need to understand better. Our overall approach to farming maybe understood internally but we have never written it down.  Over the coming months I aim to (try) to create our own Woodhorn focused set of written policies and objectives that demonstrate and prove what we are doing (to our customers in particular) whilst helping us to learn where and how we can improve. The ambition to achieve net zero remains but we will do it our way and in a way, I hope, that has real meaning.

Hedge laying at Woodhorn Farm

Posted on March 18, 2024 by - Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm

We have planted many miles of new hedges in recent years (and will continue to plant more) but we of course have many old hedgerows too, some that are officially classified as ‘ancient’. Eventually all well managed hedgerows become ‘leggy’ and hollow at the bottom or, at the other extreme, they can become too tall and overgrown.

Eventually every hedge needs to be rejuvenated from the base and hedge laying is one of the best and most traditional ways of doing this. A laid hedge provides a stock proof barrier and a dense habitat for wildlife but most importantly it encourages new growth that starts a new life cycle of the hedge.

However, hedge laying is a traditional country skill that has been largely lost to the modern generation – it is also hard work! So we are truly grateful to Sarah Hughes, our local wildlife Officer and advisor, and her fantastic band of volunteers for giving up their time and energy this winter to produce some stunningly rejuvenated hedgerows.

A day in the life – Mike Jupp, Commercial Director, The Woodhorn Group

Posted on March 5, 2024 by - Blog, Woodhorn Group

Meet Mike Jupp, our Commercial Director. In this meet the team blog series, you can find out more about our team, their roles and a what a typical working day looks like.

I’m normally in the office at about 7:45am and so my day tends to start early – around 6am. I’ve made a resolution to be more active as once I’m in the office I don’t get much of a chance to do any exercise. So at least once a week I’ll head to the gym for a circuit session on the way in. But most days, it’s a more gentle start; I’ll get up, make the tea, let the dogs outside and prepare their breakfast. Whilst home isn’t that far from the office, it takes about an hour to drive in so I’ll leave the house before 7am. It’s a busy part of the world and so I enjoy listening to the radio as it gives me something else to think about that’s not the traffic! It’s actually quite good to have some time to myself in the car as it gives me a chance to get my thoughts together for the day ahead and – on the way home – to mentally leave things behind or make some calls.

As the Commercial Director at Woodhorn I work closely with the teams across all of our departments. The first conversations in the morning are something I value, whether its discussing what the team got up to last night, what everyone watched on TV or what they ate for dinner. It gives us a chance to chat before the phones start ringing and the craziness of the day begins.

An industry of early starters

Across our certified soils, waste management and farming teams, we work with companies and individuals that typically start early. It’s not unusual to find a batch of emails or orders in my inbox even before I’ve left the house in the morning. Therefore, once the computer goes on, we’re hard at it, certainly for the first couple of hours of the day at least. Whilst I oversee the commercial side of things, I’ve been with the company more than a decade and so I know a lot of our customers extremely well. I like maintaining contact with them and have recently moved back to sit in the sales office because I still love the buzz. As a consequence, the short to-do list I start the day with tends to grow as I enjoy picking up the odd opportunity or deal myself.

I report to our Managing Director, Cameron, and because we’re a close-knit team, we regularly chat about various aspects of the business. Yes, there are the key times of the year such as the summer when we focus on developing new budgets for the coming financial year (which will end up being my targets!) and the winter when we look at bigger, strategic plans for growth and expansion; but we’ve developed a diverse business and so there’s always something to discuss regarding the day-to-day operations or opportunities.

A focus on soil and waste management

Whilst my background is in the horticultural sector, Cameron takes the lead on our farming activities, leaving me to manage certified soils and waste management. I work with our Materials Recycling Director, Morgan, on securing new waste contracts and have a sales team of three people who run soil sales including our retail brand Earth Cycle. Recently, however, a fair amount of my time has been dedicated to launching our milk vending operation. This takes milk from the farm and sells it direct to the public through some innovative vending machines. We opened our first location in Autumn 2023 and have big plans to expand this to other sites and sell more of our milk to restaurants and food producers locally. So having not been heavily involved in the dairy previously, it’s an area I’m getting to know well now.

I know a lot of people say that no two days are the same at work, but they’re really not here, especially because of the seasonality we encounter in each aspect of the business. For instance, our soil sales are non-stop from March to September with retail sales peaking around Easter or early summer, subject to the weather. Our green waste, however, tends to be offset to that and is busier from summer into the early winter. The farm is of course dictated by crops, harvest and calving but from a sales perspective can be quite busy over the autumn and winter as we sell our calves, crops and grains to various customers and merchants. Oh, and there’s always thousands of litres of milk to collect and sell every day too! So not only are no two days the same, what I am doing on those days will be dictated by the part of the business currently most in demand.

Establishing a B2C brand

As far as challenges go, growing the Earth Cycle brand is probably the one aspect of my job that has brought the most over the years. The majority of our work is about bulk, business to business transactions. Setting Earth Cycle up as a consumer facing brand with ecommerce and all that entails presented some interesting tests to the business model and our normal mode of operation. By and large we have overcome them and today, Earth Cycle is a highly successful part of our business and I anticipate that it will continue grow into a big enterprise of its own. I’ve enjoyed being part of that journey and helping it establish and flourish.

Having spent a lot of my previous career outside and selling, I still enjoy getting out and about. I’m based at head office but frequently visit our compost production sites in either Tangmere or Fawley. I also like to go and meet customers, do site visits, and catch up with some of our suppliers. Thankfully I’ve got a great team at the office, so I know that everything will be looked after, whilst I’m away.

Without my team I don’t think we’d have built the customer base we have. Our customers trust us as their supplier because they know the people they’re working with and they can rely on us. Working alongside these guys and being in a rural location are probably the things I love most about my job. Whilst the drive from home can be tortuous, once I arrive at work and take in the peace and quiet and the views and catch up with the team it all becomes worthwhile.   

Reviewing the day

Towards the end of each day, the team will come together to review the day’s sales, look at tomorrow and the remainder of the week and month. We analyse and track our performance against budget constantly and will share thoughts and ideas as to how we can correct the numbers or manage supply and demand to try and even out production. As noted, I start the day with a small, focused to-do list and this is the point where I prep that and look at what the following day will bring in terms of meetings, calls and visits. We end the day as a team much as we started it, having a friendly chat about any evening’s plans.

I’ll go home via the gym a couple of times a week to maintain my resolution to be more active and help break the journey and avoid the peak traffic. I also DJ occasionally so from time to time, I’m heading to go and do that. It’s busier around Christmas as I work in several venues across the festive period, but during the remainder of the year, Fridays and Saturdays are when I’m typically spinning the decks! It’s very different to the day job and I love listening to music and watching others enjoy it. As a family we have property in Spain and so my other relaxation includes holidays or long weekends there. It’s great to have a bolthole in the sun, especially during the autumn and winter; it always helps me recharge the batteries, ready for the next big push or project at work.