Agriculture

New milking parlour at Mill House Farm
As the herd edged towards 130 cows Alex found the workload of twice-daily milking too much and reluctantly changed to once-a-day milking.
“I knew it wasn’t ideal,” he said, “but I had no alternative. It was while I was thinking about ways to get back to milking twice a day that I spoke to Adrian Moore, T H White’s Dairy Department Manager.

“I had been dealing with T H White for more than 15 years and I knew that they wouldn’t just give me a quote and try to sell me something – they would look at the whole picture and offer the best advice.”

So it was that Adrian Moore went to see Alex at the beginning of the year. Adrian realised that the only serious solution for Alex was a new and up-to-date DeLaval milking parlour. “That’s a major purchase for any farmer,” said Adrian, “but I was fairly sure that I could make it work financially by taking increased yields into account.” Alex and Adrian sat down and went through the figures, after which Alex decided to take the plunge and order the new parlour.

Installation began on 6 May and, as part of the initial groundworks some major drainage problems were rectified, a job that would otherwise have been a separate expense. Alex first milked his cows in the new parlour on 10 September and is already seeing some significant improvements.

He said “The new parlour is much easier to use than the old one and it helps us to meet current and future milk production regulations. But the biggest benefit of all is that we have returned to twice-daily milking and the milk yield has increased by around 30 per cent. Over a period, that in itself will finance the new parlour. I am absoutely delighted.”

All set for the next 50 years then...!
When Alex Green’s grandparents bought Mill House Farm at Chesterblade in 1936, there was little refrigerated transport and milk was still collected in churns for onward distribution by rail. Much has changed in the dairy business since those far-off days, but at Mill House Farm, nestling in an idyllic valley on the eastern edge of the Mendips, the Green family has never made change for its own sake, but only as necessary and when a real benefit would result.

Indeed, Alex’s mum had to strain her memory to recall when the last milking parlour was installed... “it must have been the late fifties or very early sixties,” she said, “... it would have been soon after we were married.”

That parlour served the farm well for around half a century and was perfectly adequate when the herd comprised around 60 black and whites. However, in recent years Alex Green has been managing the farm and knew that the key to survival as a dairy farmer lay in modest expansion and a focus on quality.

“The first major change came in summer 2000 when we moved to a Jersey herd of 70 cows. That was a real learning curve,” Alex recalls, “the Jerseys are certainly very different. Just as we had established the herd the big foot and mouth outbreak hit, after which we had to start again. We then built a new cubicle shed and the number of cows began to creep up.”