Weekly Meeting

2 August 2018-‘Tales from a Dairy Farmer’s Wife’Jane Barnes

Jane Barnes gave the Club a passionate and enlightening talk entitled ‘Tales from a Dairy Farmer’s Wife’. Jane and her Dairy Farmer husband, Mark, live and work at Southfields Farm in Somerby, Leicestershire. The farm is a dairy farm with an average herd size of 160 pedigree Ayrshire cows producing milk for the Long Clawson Dairy that produces the world famous Stilton Cheese. There are also two pedigree Ayrshire bulls (Billy Beaumont & Quaker), the proud fathers of some of the calves that enter the milking herd or if not sold on Facebook.

Facts and figures flowed, relating to their present set up and their plans for the new farm, as their son Harry has now qualified and committed to continuing for the next generation of dairy farmers with targets of1.2million litres and 230 cows.  Jane was passionate that we all drink ‘Whole Milk’ at 4% fat content and said that using anything else was just helping the Supermarkets to make more money and able to sell other dairy products.  Like other farmers Jane said that the long spell of dry weather was causing problems this year but because they had looked forward their crop of long stem maize would help as well as the ‘New Zealand’ type of grazing the grass.  Jane said that she really wanted to tell the story of their life to as many people as she could and as well as her talks she is about to organise school visits to the farm to show children and their parents from viewing platforms where milk really comes from.

In conclusion Jane said that Dairy Farmers have so much to be positive about and quoted ‘It’s amazing that we get to wake up in the morning and actually produce food for people to eat’, a very uplifting and forward thinking presentation that Club members thoroughly enjoyed.

Gordon Marsh