Ian Pye works a 250-acre dairy farm near Preston which also grows crops for the autumn calving herd. His is an open farm where the public can come and watch cows being milked, have a coffee in the tea room and buy an ice cream from the small farm shop. There's a strong focus on school visits.
Ian is also vice chairman of the NFU Next Generation Dairy Board.
Like all sectors, farming doesn’t seem to be immune from inflation at the moment and taking delivery of a fresh load of hen feed the rising costs were really driven home.
Our hens are only really glorified pets so feed is bought at spot price. It’s frightening; you can see why a producer in the poultry sector would need large scale and economies, coupled with a dedicated contract, to have the confidence to invest in the future. A real question mark sits over organic at these feed prices.
Plus, when every other house seems to have eggs for sale from hens in the back yard I’m just glad cows are too big for everyone to keep in the garden as the dairy sector doesn’t need that added pressure - although it would help spread the NVZ burden!
On the topic of dairying, our milk buyer has recently run a series of meetings on Johne’s disease, I can only say our regional one was excellent (although a tad too long, as with all evening meetings I could see some heavy eyes at the end of a hard day’s work).
I think our vet who attended was impressed at the proactive approach the industry is taking, and for our milk buyer to follow up with an offer of free carbon footprinting and energy advice again shows the proactive approach the sector is taking to address future customer concerns.
It can be hard to quantify farming’s contributing to public good.
I suppose farmers are used to measuring things in terms of yield and output so they can be forgiven for not fully focusing their attention on it.
Having recently restored an old stone building with the help of HLS, I got a good example of the benefits of doing things for public good. Every single person who has seen the building has fallen for its charms and all have said that buildings such as this, whilst being far from a stately home, are the fabric that make up the rural landscape.
I couldn’t have afforded to have restored it properly as it has no practical worth, but preserving things like this cottage seem more real to the public than maybe putting in beetle banks, even though both are equally as important.
The building will hopefully be a real asset for farm visits and, getting a bit carried away with a project such as this (not helped by the mountains of paperwork), I gave the builders a time capsule to seal into the wall space.
It includes information on who, when and why. And when I mention it to the stonemasons they give a schoolboy giggle which makes me think page 3 of certain well known newspaper was also stuffed in there. I can only hope future generations surmise that Kimberly (24, Halifax) was one of the builders, or maybe even the farmer, who was so impoverished by feed prices.
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