PROFILE Dann’s Farm
There are 12 varieties of ice cream and 12 sorbets produced on-farm
Making a future in milk and ice cream
A £2 million investment on a Norfolk dairy farm has seen cow numbers more than triple. Judith Tooth reports.
“W
e’ve put in the in- vestment;
now we need our foot
on the floor,” says Alex Dann, fourth generation dairy farmer at Pound Farm, North Tudden- ham, and the driving force behind a major expansion of the family’s herd of pedigree Holsteins. After three years’ training in dairy management at Rease- heath, experience gained on other dairy farms and a lot of research visits, Alex was keen to take the family business in a new direc- tion, from a mixed farm with 120 cows to a specialist dairy unit. The plan was to use the farm’s own herd to build up numbers to 300, with a new parlour and housing. “We’d got planning permis-
sion, but hadn’t made too much progress beyond that,” says Alex’s father, Simon. “Then one morn- ing I got a phone call from the next door farm. Charles Carey had reached 70 years old and was selling up, and was I interested in his 200 pedigree Holsteins and their followers.” The family’s bank had already
agreed in principle to the 300-cow build, but its risk department had seen the milk price tumble from 28 to 17 pence per litre in the in- tervening months, and drew the line at further investment.
Opportunity But it was too good an oppor- tunity to miss, and finally the AMC came to the rescue. The new unit, with a bigger parlour and more bulk tanks than orig- inally planned, has been up and
running for a year. It wasn’t an easy transition: for 18 months Simon and Alex were milking two herds in two places. Now everything is under one roof – or two, as there are two new buildings in place of the one planned originally. One houses 125 cows and the milking parlour – a 25:25 herring- bone swingover design; the sec- ond, 250 cows. Total investment in buildings and livestock was £2 million, with a Leader grant for cluster flushes and a varia- ble speed vacuum pump in the parlour, and a slurry separator. Design advice came from Tim
Mckendrick of Taunton-based consultancy The Dairy Group and inspiration from Essex dairy
“
The cow club is the best thing that’s happened, a real driver for the younger generation
farmer John Torrance, who runs a high-yielding herd in a similar zero-grazing unit. With limited land available for grazing at Pound Farm – the dairy unit is sandwiched between two major roads – and the abili- ty to grow two-and-a-half times more grass in a given area than a cow can graze, the buildings are designed to hold the cows year- round. Only the youngstock and dry cows go out to grass.
Efficient design “The buildings have a steeper pitch than you might expect to allow for better ventilation, and there are LED lights rather than skylights, so the cows keep very cool in the summer – much bet- ter in these conditions than being out in the hot sun,” says Simon. “Alex wanted wide passage-
The pedigree Holstein herd in the new dairy unit
ways to give the cows a lot of space to move around, whereas I was sure we could get more cows in. But he was right.”
The aim is to be as self-suf- ficient as possible. A 100kw
AUGUST 2018 • ANGLIA FARMER 57 >>
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