Tag: Farming

Down On the Farm – November 2024

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Emma Cooper - 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 Emma Cooper - Blog

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!

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!

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 Emma Cooper - 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 Earth Cycle - 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.

Back to the farm gate – selling fresh, local milk direct to customers

Posted on February 21, 2024 by Earth Cycle - Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm

Back in the Autumn, we launched our Woodhorn Farm organic milk vending venture – known locally as The Oving Cow Shed. Whilst we sell our topsoil and compost products direct to customers under the Earth Cycle brand, most of the sales process is one step removed. The majority of sales are received and processed by an ecommerce website with bulk bags delivered on pallets by contract hauliers. Milk vending took us a step closer to the consumer and needed us to get new systems and processes in place.

Our dairy produces around 5,000 litres of organic milk a day which is conveniently collected by a tanker and taken to our friends at Organic Herd – the cooperative we’re part of – for pasteurising and processing into milks, yoghurts and cheeses. It’s relatively straight forward and happens like clockwork – the ladies even know when it’s time to line up for milking!

Milk vending required a different approach. Our vending machines can hold around 200 litres but unlike our bulk milk, the milk needs to be pasteurised here, by us. We knew we needed to draw down small batches of milk from the holding tanks, pasteurise it and find a way to get it into bottles to sell to the public. When we first explored the idea, it felt a bit overwhelming; we were used to selling directly to another business in big volumes! Thankfully, when we began speaking to other farmers, we were reassured that there was plenty of support and all the machines we needed already existed. Better than that, we were told this is a thriving market with something of a renaissance in buying direct from the producer especially with consumers demanding better quality and understanding and valuing the importance of provenance.

A return to provenance

The last fifty years has seen how we buy food go full circle. In post war Britain we were used to high streets having a butcher, baker, fishmonger, and greengrocer, all of whom could tell you where their produce was from. Many rural communities still bought at the farm gate – fresh milk, eggs and meat direct from the farmer, daily. Then sadly the race to the bottom began with the advent of the supermarket. Price wars and questionable standards followed. Briefly, society took its eye off the ball and forgot about the people, animals and welfare behind the scenes. Homogenisation (the process of dispersing fat within the milk) only exists because of the supermarkets. Farmers feared that society would never get back that focus on provenance, standards and quality. All the time supermarkets controlled the prices, farmers were being pushed into making difficult decisions – either give up or accept prices that meant many rarely broke even. Then thankfully, the dissenting voices got a little louder and the media exposés generated better consumer understanding of what cheap produce really means in terms of quality, working practices and price to the farmer. These bred a degree of value appreciation, a push for better welfare standards and reminded people of the importance of provenance.

The demand for farm fresh food

Whilst we’re not back at that post war stage – and probably never will be – things have improved and there’s now huge demand for farm fresh produce. Farm shops are springing up all over the country and innovation is making it far easier for farmers to sell direct to the public. Food is once again something to be enjoyed. Consumers look for taste, they care about food miles and they’re taking a more active interest in the environment and animal welfare – which is great for us, as all of our milk is produced under the organic standard.

Take the milk vending machines as an example and all the kit that sits behind it. If this didn’t exist, we couldn’t sell milk directly to consumers and if the consumer demand for better produce wasn’t there, the machines wouldn’t have been created. In fact, such is the current level of demand, just for milk vending, the main UK supplier of the vending machines is literally inundated with orders.

Branching out

Now that our milk vending machines are in place, we’re seeing demand for other items including milk, bread, eggs, fruit and even cakes. We’re listening and planning – you should be able to find all of this in our machines in due course! We’re also co-operating with other farms and local producers to see what else we can offer through our machines as well as considering additional local sites for more machines – such is the clammer. It’s lovely to see and we get a little buzz out of every litre we sell. And let’s not forget, a few more pence too! Yes, there is a significantly higher cost of selling one litre in a bottle than shipping five thousand off in a tanker, but there’s equally something rewarding about someone buying a litre of milk from us, in sight of the fields and our cows. That has a real feel-good factor.

Sales in the first few months have been strong and we’re pleased to see that we’ve got a core of regular customers that appear to be buying a couple of times a week – proving it’s not a fad and there is genuine demand for quality local produce. If you’ll excuse the pun, the vending machines have also provided an unexpected third leg to the milking stool with lots of interest coming from other local producers keen to use our milk in their products. These businesses sit between retail and wholesale and they’re willing to pay a small premium for organic, local, quality milk. These companies are looking for us to supply hundreds of litres a day and we’re now seeing an increasing number of enquiries for Woodhorn Farm to appear in ice cream and other dairy foods.

The majority of our milk still goes to our co-op and probably always will. Because we’re part of that business, we get a fair price for our milk. But now there is once again a real chance for locals to buy our milk, back at the farm gate and enjoy the freshest possible produce.

Down on the farm – November 23

Posted on November 20, 2023 by Earth Cycle - Down on the farm, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm

We finally got there and judging by the reactions, it was worth it! The Oving Cow Shed finally opened on September 25^th. A proud moment in the history of our farm thanks to the hard work and tenacity of the team at Woodhorn.

A huge personal thank you to all concerned from me but even more so to the many, many of you that have supported the project so far and for the wonderful feedback given when you have met me or other members of the team or via social media. I would also like to give a special thanks to Anne-Marie Eastwood and the Jubilee Hall Committee for their support and encouragement. Thank you everyone!

It really has been a joy to witness the level of interest in not just the milk vending project itself but the farm in general, and it has been fun answering so many questions whilst we have learned a lot in return.

We don’t homogenise our milk which is a supermarket driven industrial process to prevent the cream rising to the top. I was aware that many have health concerns about homogenisation, but I was surprised to learn from a number of visitors to the cow shed that some people who are lactose intolerant have no problem drinking non homogenised milk. Our milk is also ‘full fat’ and some people are astonished to discover that ‘full fat’ milk is typically 3.6% fat – officially a low fat food. However, I was unaware (until now) that ‘full fat’ milk is much better for us than semi skimmed or skimmed because the body absorbs the many nutrients present much more efficiently when drinking ‘full fat’ milk.

V2 Radio carried out a live tasting of our milkshake flavours

I think both these facts illustrate that, as always, we are better consuming food in its most natural form, as nature intended, without unnecessary processing.

We are now stocking butter, cheese and chocolate and a common question has been ‘who or what is Organic Herd’? Organic Herd is a cooperative of Organic dairy farmers of which we are members. Up to now all of our member’s milk has gone in tankers to the likes of Yeo Valley, but in August this year we launched our own range of dairy products. These will not be available in supermarkets, only in specialist food shops and farmer member’s vending machines!

We are looking forward to organising tractor and trailer rides out to the dairy in the spring and summer of next year.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already done so, please take a trip down to the cow shed and give our milk and/or milk shakes a try. We need to get sales to a certain level (and a % of every sale goes to the Oving Jubilee Hall) to make the project work, so please help us by spreading the word verbally or via social media (You can follow Woodhorn Farm via the website or on Facebook and Instagram) . Thank you again!

Rain, rain and more rain…!

Back ‘down on the farm’ things are a little wet! Cows can’t swim very well and anyway, ours are so soft that they gather at the yard gate at the slightest sign of drizzle. So they are all happy and safe in the real cow shed at Reeds Farm. The fields are totally saturated and though all our autumn crops were successfully sown, I suspect that some will not survive this level of standing water or washed soils. Perhaps I shouldn’t be overly surprised as October is typically our wettest month, as our own Woodhorn rainfall data shows.

Year/Month	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2019	21.7	47.6	43.3	12.1	18.2	61.2	47	61.2	97.5	100.3	104.7	114
2020	50.3	106.9	41	42.8	2	34.4	20.2	72.6	33	190.2	61.8	110.5
2021	78.5	49.2	24.8	1.4	69.7	44.2	39	54.8	59.8	68.8	4.8	22.6
2022	44.2	34.2	29.2	16	54.2	31.9	5.8	36.2	76.6	35	113.2	64.8
2023	29.3	3.8	89.3	67.3	8.8	26.8	64.2	57.5	57.4	182.2
Monthly Average (mm)	44.8	48.34	45.52	27.92	30.58	39.7	35.24	56.46	64.86	115.3	71.123	77.98

Monthly rainfall in MM at Woodhorn Farm, Oving, Chichester, West Sussex

Thank you again for your support and please follow us on Facebook, Instagram or other social media forums, as we hope this is only the start of things at the Oving Cow Shed!

John Pitts, November 2023

The journey to becoming Organic

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Earth Cycle - Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm, Woodhorn Group

We’ve been farming at Woodhorn Farm since 1882 and during that time there have been some key milestones. Some of these came from technical advances, some were driven by the need for diversification, but some were key decisions about the direction we wanted to take the business in and the role we have as custodians of the land.

Probably the biggest decision was the move to becoming a fully organic farming operation in 1998. Looking back there’s little else that would have such a fundamental impact on the way we operate as a business – even Brexit. So whilst we continue to diversify, like with the launch of our milk vending operation recently, and continue to reach key milestones in our business growth, the decision John Pitts took 25 years ago was a significant one and dictates almost everything else we do today. As a result the markets we now sell into are more limited than if we weren’t organic and we have to achieve a slight premium to cover the increased costs of production. On the flip side, the success of our milk vending operation is in part due to the benefit of being able to offer organic whole milk direct from the dairy – rather than just fresh milk.

The other consideration in choosing to farm organically is that it’s not an overnight process. It’s certainly not as simple as wanting to become organic tomorrow! Our farm, like many others, had been farmed traditionally for generations with an impact on the soil quality that needed to work its way through. Today we’ve developed ways of working and our own supply chains of fertiliser and humus that support us in being organic, but these didn’t exist on day one. So, we had to work through a transition period, set up new relationships and fundamentally alter our way of working and thinking! And this is a key point. Organic is not just a way of working – it’s also a thought process and a way of life.

Protecting and encouraging wildlife

From a farming perspective organic means farming in a way that protects and encourages wildlife whilst looking after the health of the soil. So, instead of relying on chemicals, we strive to work with nature to feed the soil and control pests. We use crop rotations, legumes, clover and vetches along with our own composted cow manure to build fertility in the soil.

There are plenty of benefits of organic farming, though most people think of the absence of pesticide and/or antibiotic residues first. For us it is also about the environment as a whole; by not using pesticides we’ve seen a transformation of the flora and fauna on the farm. No herbicide usage means that all our crops have varying levels of weeds and wildflowers in them. These act as a habitat for a wide range of insects, small mammals and ground living birds.

Animal welfare

Where animals are concerned, organic is about maximising their welfare, concentrating on the principle of prevention rather than cure. Organic means free-range and all our animals are grazed on fresh grass throughout the spring, summer and autumn period and fed home grown forage through the winter. All our feeds are, of course, GM free. We proudly antibiotic free across the herd now, with herbal and homeopathic remedies the preferred options for dealing with health related issues.

We’re not leaving it there

Once we’d made the decision to become an organic farming operation, there’s little else that can be changed in agricultural terms that has as big an impact. There are no ‘levels’ when it comes to organic and it’s impossible to become more organic…! So, anything we do now concerns better land management and increasing the positive impact of our work on the soil, wildlife and our animals. Here’s what we’re planning or already underway:

Land management – we now have a zero bare soil policy. This means there is always something in the ground, so as we finish cropping and harvesting, we immediately replant with a different crop or natural green fertiliser. Rather than being classed as intensive farming, this process is referred to as a ‘green bridge’ helping hold nutrients in the soil, limiting erosion and reducing run off into rivers and ditches.

Land management – we’re working towards minimum tillage. Each time the soil is disturbed, nutrients escape and the structure is broken down a little more. This also releases carbon that would otherwise be sequestered in the soil. Ploughing and tilling the fields can have a detrimental impact on soil health as well as releasing carbon into the atmosphere. We’re therefore looking at how we can minimise surface and ground disturbance. It is a bit of a trade off as to use our own green fertilisers (vetch, legumes, clover etc.) to maximum effect, they need to be ploughed back into the ground to encourage them to break down and release nutrients at root level. At present, we plough ahead of our main crops, but our cover crops and fertilisers are drilled directly into the soil. It’s an area whereby there is currently a lot of research and innovation taking place and so we’ll continue to adapt as soon as we can.

A bold move that has paid off

Back in 1998, John’s decision was still something of a bold move. Other farmers were moving to partial organic farming but John felt it needed to become a wholesale change across the entire farm. Today our organic farming activities extend to 1,500 acres on the Chichester Plain and the South Downs. We have a 250 head of organic dairy cows and sell our milk, some 5,000+ litres a day, through our organic co-operative, Organic Herd, and directly to the public via our Woodhorn Farm milk vending machines. Our crops go to organic producers manufacturing a range of foods and drinks, like our barley which is used by a European organic brewery.

We understand what it takes to be an organic farm and actively embrace it. We also have plans to do more. It’s not necessarily been easy; organic farms are often more at the mercy of nature than non-organic farms and major diseases or extremes of weather can, and have, impacted us more than other farmers over the years. But organic remains a philosophy we’re committed to, ultimately we believe that how we farm matters.

Why did we choose to diversify at Woodhorn Farm?

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Earth Cycle - Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm

Our organic farm lies at the heart of our business. Since 1882 the Pitts family has worked the land in and around Oving, and John Pitts, our owner, still oversees our operations today. Since John took over the reins in the late 1980s the Farm has diversified into several other business streams. Here we share some of the reasons behind our decision to diversify…

When we began farming here in 1882 everything was centred around our crops and cattle. These mainstays of the business meant long hours and hard work but provided good sources of income, as well as employment opportunities to the local community. Through two World Wars and the inter-war period the Pitts family oversaw the Farm, including a revolution in food production at Woodhorn.

When John took over the Farm in 1989, it was against a backdrop of tough times for farmers – nationally the sector experienced enormous challenges with squeezed prices, tighter margins, intensification and the use of chemicals taking its toll on livelihoods, soil health and production.

Farming is of course vulnerable to various risks, including weather-related disasters, pest invasions, market price fluctuations and disease outbreaks. Diversification into other areas can help mitigate these risks and avoid the Farm having to bear the responsibility of the whole enterprise. Added to this John had a growing interest in the Farm’s responsibility to the wider environment and the community.

So change was necessary for a range of economic and environmental reasons. Sustainability became an important factor and the search for new and alternative revenue streams became a key focus.

In 1995 we took the first step, converting some of our old farm buildings into office space for local companies to use. Today we have a mix of 27,000sq ft light industrial, storage and offices supporting more than a dozen businesses.

Three years later came the decision to start the process of conversation to a fully organic farm. At the same point we began a green waste composting business taking waste from gardens and the horticultural sector to create peat-free products. This has developed into a core revenue stream, with three sites, diverting 100,000 of green waste from landfill and producing 50,000 of compost and topsoil for gardeners and landscapers.

And in 2012, we took advantage of the combination of our position in sunny West Sussex, to establish our own solar farm which now is home to 13,800 solar panels creating 5.4 MW of power.

Today the Farm supports an organic dairy herd of 250 cows. We grow a range of crops – the majority of which feed our dairy herd; we are 96% self-sufficient. But we also supply wheat for organic bread making, barley to a European co-operative for organic beer, and oats for oat milk. The Farm works on the basis of very little bare soil – providing a green bridge between crop yields to reduce run off and manage rainfall. And we operate within DEFRA’s mid-tier Countryside stewardship scheme to help the environmental value of our farmland. We’re also part of Organic Herd, a co-operative of organic farmers with 120 members across the UK. Together we supply milk to Yeo Valley and Sainsbury’s, amongst others and champion sustainable and ethical practices for animals, the environment and dairy.

Our latest venture, launched in 2023, is selling our organic milk direct to the public through The Oving Cow Shed, in our local village. The milk is pasteurised in our dairy, before being transferred to the Shed less than a mile away for people in and around the area to enjoy.

At the core of these steps to diversify has been a focus on conservation and welfare – of people, animals and the land which everything rests upon. We’re a farm that’s been part of the community for a long time. Diversification has given us the opportunity to ensure that remains the case for many years to come.

Down on the farm – July 23

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Emma Cooper - Blog, Down on the farm, Environmental Management, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm, Woodhorn Group

Another year, another drought! Another ‘Down on the Farm’ article, another frustrating delay to our milk vending project!

The latter is down to the continued delay of the supply of our pasteurising equipment. The only manufacture of the particularly specialised kit that we need is in Ireland and they have singularly failed to meet their promised delivery schedule. I sincerely hope by the time I write my next article we will be up and running. In the meantime, please help us choose our first milkshake flavours here.

Weather extremes, a principal feature of climate change, are becoming the norm.

This year we had the driest February on record when just 3.8mm (0.1 inches) of rain fell. Compare this to our February historical average of 60mm (2.4 ins). Conversely, we had the wettest March and April for many years with a combined total of 148mm (6 ins) compared to an average of 52mm (2.1ins) for the same period. June and July are looking exceptionally dry like last year.

We aim to complete all our spring sowing in March, but the ground was so saturated that much of this was delayed until May. This significantly reduces yield potential and some fields or part of fields never dried out enough to sow at all. The high temperatures and lack of rainfall now is restricting grass and clover growth, both for grazing and to make silage for next winter’s feed reserves.

Farmers Weekly has just run an in depth article “Dairy Farming in a Drought” which essentially takes the experiences of dairy farmers in New Zealand and Australia where droughts are the norm. My two ‘take aways’ following a bit more personal research, were how New Zealand dairying (one of largest producing countries in the world and the biggest contributor to its economy) manages drought with huge amounts of irrigation. However, this is becoming environmentally unsustainable as natural groundwater supplies are diminishing causing rivers and lakes to dry up, with over 60% severely polluted due to the intense use of artificial nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers which ‘runs off’ the land into the waterways, where the problem is exacerbated by the lack of water to create a dilution effect.

Australia’s farmers tend not to have the same access to irrigation and so the country has a significant and growing shortage of milk and dairy products forcing it to import much of its needs.

We are, as a nation and like Australia, importing more and more food. However, this is not (yet) because of drought but because of the power of the supermarkets and a lack of government interest in a food strategy generally. Like New Zealand, our water supplies are under pressure though but more as a result of our ever increasing population than from the needs of farming. However, as droughts become more common, the demand for scarce water supplies from both farming and people will increase. However, we continue to be blessed by guaranteed and plentiful winter rainfall. If we, as country and as farmers, invest in adequate infrastructure to collect and store that winter rain, we can meet all of our needs. The cost though of such infrastructure is inevitably enormous at both national and farm level.

After last year’s drought, we made some investment to create the ability to irrigate and we will do more over time. It is an expensive and challenging direction of travel, but one I think will be essential if we are to continue to grow food for our nation. Farming Organically (and so we don’t use the polluting fertilisers and chemicals) and if we are able to store winter rainfall, we will not cause the pollution problems seen in New Zealand

Harvest is not far away now and the harvest machinery and grain stores will be getting their final checks. Calving at Reeds farm starts in mid August. We will be starting the Organic conversion at Madame Green Farm immediately post-harvest and will be sowing a variety of legume (clover and vetch for example) based crops which will start to rebuild the soil’s fertility and organic matter during the statutory conversion period – one can only sow the first organic crop two year’s after the last chemical or artificial fertiliser was applied, which means it will be nearly three years before we will harvest our first Organic crop.

John Pitts

The Belgravia Dairy Company

Posted on July 7, 2023 by Emma Cooper - Blog, Down on the farm, Farming and Dairy, Woodhorn Farm, Woodhorn Group

John Pitts is the 4th generation of the Pitts family to farm at Woodhorn. In this article about our company’s history, John provides more background on Fred Pitts, his Great Grandfather, who moved to the area in 1882 to begin farming the Chichester plains. A farmer and a businessman, Fred Pitts was also the Managing Director of the Belgravia Dairy Company. Here John explains more about life on the farm back in those very early days.

The Pitts family were once long established dairy famers in south Devon. In the late 1800s, farming in England was in dire straits due to a flood of cheap imports from throughout the British Empire. Many farms were abandoned, land values declined and the big landowners could not find tenants for their farms. So it was for one of the country’s biggest landlords, The Church of England, who had many vacant farms in Sussex where the soil quality was considerably better than that down in Devon.

My Great Grandfather, Fred Pitts, saw an opportunity and put his cows, horses, carts, ploughs, wife and children on a train and headed east in 1882. The Church gratefully offered him tenancies on Broyle farm outside Chichester (now a housing estate), Houghton Farm near Amberley and Woodhorn Farm in Oving. I am now the 4^th generation of the Pitts family to farm at Woodhorn.

In 1889 Fred move his family to ‘Sunnyside’ in Chichester and his eldest son, William, moved in to Woodhorn. Sunnyside was a rather beautiful Georgian townhouse situated next to the equally imposing Chichester Police Station. Both were demolished in the 1960s to make way for the existing Chichester bus station.

Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon’s Mines) tells of a visit to West Broyle Farm in his 1901 book ‘Rural England of 1901’. The farm was ‘mainly dairy with 90 pure and cross bred Guernseys’ and the staff consisted of ’15 men, 2 boys and 3 milkmen along with 12 horses’. He also described how Fred was ‘a good horseman and rode regularly around the 3 farms upon a high and strong horse inspecting with a critical eye and a strong arm’.

Fred was a businessman as well as a farmer (a relatively rare combination in the 1800s) and was owner and Managing Director of The Belgravia Dairy Company in West Kensington with 26 branches in the West End, including 7 in the Mall. When my Father celebrated the centenary of the move from Devon to Sussex in 1982 , the Chichester Observer ran the story. My Father subsequently received a letter from an aged gentleman who had read the piece and described how his first job ‘as a very young boy’ was helping out on one of the horse and cart milk floats around London.

The Belgravia Dairy Company was sold after Fred’s death in 1924 to United Dairies (later to become Unigate and Dairy Crest). Nearly 100 years later we will be selling milk from Woodhorn Farm direct to the public, but this time via our vending machine in Oving rather than on the streets of London!