Tag: Down on the farm

Down On the Farm – November 2024

Posted on November 25, 2024 by - Blog

Reflecting on what’s happening down on the farm, John Pitts, our owner and fourth generation farmer at Woodhorn, shares some thoughts about the farm’s relationship with Organic Herd.

Organic Herd is a farmer owned co-operative of around 100 Organic dairy farmers across the UK and we at Woodhorn have been proud members for the past 25 years. Organic Herd supplies milk to the likes of Yeo Valley, Wyke Farms and Kendal Nutricare baby foods. As well as being the only 100% Organic dairy cooperative in the UK, they are also the only supplier of milk in Europe that come from farms that never use antibiotics.

A year ago Organic Herd launched an own range of speciality cheeses, butters and chocolates. None of these are available in supermarkets simply because the big chains expect to take such a big percentage of the sale price that, after production costs, there would be nothing left to go back to the farmers.

So instead these products are available through delis across the country, stores such as Planet Organic and in our vending machine at Woodhorn Farm!

All products are made by artisan producers that fit Organic Herd’s ethos (“How We Farm Matters”), are made to historical recipes, are additive free and of course are made from milk that is certified Organic and antibiotic free. Cheeses are made using traditional cultures and matured in wooden boxes, whilst butters are cream tumbled in 1960s butter barrels and then hand salted and churned in small batches.

Whilst this might seem an Organic Herd advertisement, it’s simply another part of our story and who we are at Woodhorn, supporting all the things we are trying to achieve.

Down On the Farm – July 2024

Posted on July 18, 2024 by - Blog

cows in farm shed

Reflecting on life down on the farm, John Pitts, our owner and fourth generation farmer at Woodhorn, shares some of the latest developments.

We have taken another positive step on our sustainability journey with the installation of solar panels at Reeds Farm which will provide renewable electricity to the dairy.  Our main demand for power comes from the milking parlour, the hot water required for milking plant sterilisation and the milk cooling in our bulk milk tank. In addition, our new pasteurisation plant will be entirely powered by solar energy, so hopefully another positive for those of you enjoying our milk from The Oving Cow Shed!

solar panel in field

Our main use for electricity at night is for lighting in the cow sheds when solar panels are asleep. We are about to upgrade all of our lights which will be significantly more energy efficient and will then consider installing a commercial battery storage system so that these too can run on solar power.

Harvest is approaching, although expectations are rather low this year following the incredibly wet winter and spring. Wet, cloddy seed beds inevitably meant that plant populations were low on emergence with many seeds not germinating. Across the country many thousands of acres were not able to be sown at all, so the farm team at Woodhorn did extremely well in the face of one of the most challenging springs in memory.

Continued wet weather created enormous disease pressure in all our crops and even conventional farmers, with the massive armoury of chemicals at the disposal, struggled to control the likes of septoria tritici in wheat and crown rust in oats. Being organic and chemical-free means that ‘disease years’ (like this one) significantly reduce our yields but one might argue that the ‘gap’ between Organic and Conventional farming systems is even more stark when the amount of chemicals applied is so high on other farms.

Whilst the subject matter of these articles is naturally governed by the title ‘Down on the Farm,’ I thought I would give a mention to our teams on our green waste sites at Tangmere and Runcton. Wet spring and summers inevitably generate more garden waste than normal, and this puts huge pressure on everyone during a time of year that is already extremely busy. What is more, the active composting material that has sat on-site over the winter is, inevitably, incredibly wet which has made screening the finished compost at best extremely challenging and at worst impossible. I often refer to the dedication of our farm teams and the same very much applies to all our staff involved in the composting enterprises. Thank you, all of you!

green waste being recycled

We are on course to process over 110,000 tons of waste this year, all of which would otherwise have been landfilled and as most of you know, we turn this into a variety of peat-free soils and compost mixes which we retail through our Earth Cycle brand. We are also currently providing c.8500 tons of a bespoke British Standard peat-free topsoil mix for the new sports pitches at Shopwyke Lakes, which have suffered significant delays due to the wet weather – are you noticing a theme to this article?!

Until autumn…

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.