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. Visit the Old Holly Farm website here.
We have started to build an extension to the farm shop side of the business this month - the extra area will give us room to host larger school visits (the more urban schools that can’t afford to visit unless they fill a large coach). We have attracted some RDA funding to help with the project and at a RDA grant meeting they updated us on how much money is still available for rural businesses to use, and how few applications they currently have for some of it. It’s there to be used, after all, it’s your modulation money anyway, and if we don’t use it we lose it. Then all us farmers will say is, “nobody wants us, it’s not fair!” The nice thing about projects like this is the employment it provides, not just at the end but during construction; builders, their suppliers, the quarry and tool hire all get a much needed boost. All hidden bonuses to grant schemes that benefit the local community.
This month I was invited to visit the UK’s biggest bespoke coffee supplier in... you’ve guessed it… sunny Wigan of all places!! They had a large open day for the great and the good such as Manchester United’s coffee shop and for some bizarre reason thought I had some cash too. Proper coffee machines make new tractors look cheap and are half as useful, and after being shown a full sales pitch of only grinding the finest roasted coffee beans 20 minutes before use and applying the correct pressure I was allowed to sample some. And again you guessed it; the milk they used was standard stuff from a cut price retailer “as after all, milk’s milk!”. Honestly, pass the double espresso. The consumption of coffee grows year on year and you’d think we could be missing a trick here. To be fair to our milk buyer, they are currently sponsoring the UK coffee making championships, and one of “team Old Holly” is in the competition along with a local farmer. But in the grand scheme of things two farmers in a coffee competition is a tiny coffee bean splashed in one big milky ocean.
For those who don’t know, most dairy farms get paid a bonus on the constituents of milk. To make sure our cows are producing the right amount of butterfat we have started feeding them a little bit of hay alongside their normal feed - credit to our nutritionist who suggested the cheap solution instead of advising us to buy this month’s must-have feed additive. This seems to have worked well and the cows appear to be really enjoying having a variety of old fashioned feed available to them. It’s like a 24hr buffet for cows, except this buffet is based more on roughage than anything else!
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