Dairy Manager Mark Roue remembers: “The ground had become saturated and just couldn’t soak up any more. Water was pouring down the track towards our dairy unit like a small river and the collection cellar beneath the milking parlour was filling fast – I have never seen anything like it.”

Mark called the fire brigade in the hope that they could start pumping water out of the cellar, but of course they were completely overstretched with huge numbers of emergencies. “All I could do was look on as the cellar flooded, and then the water level continued rising to waist height in the milking parlour above,” Mark added.

It was a disaster. All the equipment in the cellar as well as everything at a lower level in the milking parlour was contaminated and the herd of Holstein Fresians needed milking. “We put out a plea for help to other farms,” said Mark, “and the response was amazing. In particular we were helped to find temporary homes for the cows by Vic Wheeler, who has done a lot of property consultancy work for Yattendon. By the end of Saturday we had been able to move 250 milking cows elsewhere while we started the clean-up operation.”

On the Monday morning Adrian Moore from T H White’s dairy department arrived at Yattendon to help with an assessment of the work needed to get

“It was an awful sight, “ said Adrian.
“I knew immediately that everything the water had touched would have to be replaced and so we began compiling an inventory.”

The sense of ‘pulling together’ to solve the problem was remarkable, and everyone involved put in a tremendous effort to speed the rebuild. By mid-August the insurance claim had been processed and authority to go ahead was given, but even then it was not a straightforward task.

“All the equipment in the parlour had originally come from the USA,” Adrian continued. “If our order for the replacement items had been shipped in the normal way it could have taken weeks or even months to arrive, and we knew that the Yattendon cows that had been sent away had to be brought back as soon as possible. Because of that we decided to have the whole consignment air-freighted.”

Installation of the new equipment and replacement of all the electronics – even on the bulk tanks which had been partly submerged in the flood – was carried out during late September and October 2007, with milking resuming by the end of October.

Mark Roue comments: “It was a fantastic job, completed as fast as humanly possible. The service we had from T H White was outstanding!”