DOWN ON THE FARM
It might be the bestselling yogurt producer in the UK, but Yeo Valley is still very much a family affair with community and sustainability at its heart
Somerset-based Yeo Valley dairy is very much a family affair, with community and sustainability at its heart
tim Mead is admiring a cow’s bottom. “Now that is a thing of beauty,” he says, explaining why the rear end of this heavily pregnant heifer is so perfect in its proportions. Its square confirmation (shape) is typical of the British
Friesian, a venerable black-and-white breed not to be confused with the ubiquitous Holstein-friesian (which has a high-boned and rather scrawny-looking backside). “The Holsteinfriesian is designed to consume grain, whereas British Friesians thrive on grass,” Tim explains. This is just as well because his 420-strong herd of these splendid animals grazes some of the most lovingly tended grass in the West Country.
Holt Farm in North Somerset occupies 1,500 acres sloping down from the Mendip Hills to the bottom of the Yeo Valley – which now shares its name with the bestselling organic yogurt brand that’s based here. The cows that feed on its pastures supply raw material for some of the nine million pots the farm produces each week. “If you lined up all the pallets that we dispatch in a week, they would reach the outskirts of Bristol 15 miles away,” Tim says.
As Yeo Valley’s chairman, Tim has plenty more numbers where those came from: 4,500 tonnes of product is made every week in the company’s four West Country dairies, which process 100 million litres of organic milk each year (more than a quarter of all the organic milk produced by British farmers), including three million from Holt Farm’s own cows. But the fact he’s most proud of is that Yeo Valley is still a family-owned business, based on the farm that his parents bought nearly 60 years ago: “There is a heart and soul behind our name because we are a real place and a real family that makes decisions based on real feelings.”
That heart and soul is very much on show at Yeo Valley HQ, the former hotel that now houses the business’s offices and some of its 1,800 staff. At the top of a steep road that winds through the charming village of Blagdon, it is also a popular community space, home to a gym (which invites local members to ‘Get Moo-ving’), lecture theatre and meeting rooms. Its centrepiece is the Yeo Valley Canteen, a large contemporary café with floor-toceiling windows that frame a stunning view of Holt Farm towards Blagdon Lake, the Victorian reservoir fed by the River Yeo.
“When we invite our customers to come and have lunch with us, we really mean it,” says Sarah Mead, Tim’s wife and the brains behind the Canteen, which serves a nose-to-tail menu based on locally sourced produce, including pigs raised by Tim’s sister (also called Sarah). She also oversees the six-acre Yeo Organic Garden (YOG) and the tea room, which can be found a little way along the valley. Sarah’s quirky, industrial design scheme is no doubt part of the frequently sold-out Canteen’s appeal – the self-confessed townie honed her artistic eye and urban edge in
“We had to find a way of adding value to our milk and controlling our destiny”
London, where she was working as a dancer when she met Tim. “I was going to be the next Liza Minnelli,” she jokes. “It certainly wasn’t my plan to marry a farmer.”
Marry him she did, though, and her creativity found fertile ground. Innovation is in the Mead family’s blood. It has enabled them to keep and expand their farm during a half-century in which the dairy industry has changed profoundly. “Farmers are the original entrepreneurs,” says Mary Mead, Tim’s mother, who has been a driving force at Holt Farm since she and her late husband, Roger Mead, bought it as a 150-acre mixed holding in 1961. “We’re always asking ourselves: what can we do with this land?’’
Their answer, in the early 1970s, was to make yogurt. “My father, whose family had farmed in Somerset since the 1400s, could see that all dairy farmers were not going to survive,” Tim says. “If you wanted to remain, you would have to find a way of adding value to your milk and controlling your destiny.’’
It was a prescient decision on the part of an enterprising young couple, who’d begun establishing their dairy herd in the 1960s while also raising Tim and his two sisters. When he was a boy, Tim remembers, his parents diversified into pick-your-own strawberries and opened a tea room. The popularity of the homemade cream served with their scones left them with a glut of skimmed milk, so Roger converted a disused potato shed into a yogurt dairy and began delivering to local outlets in an unrefrigerated Morris Traveller van. Gradually, the business expanded, as Holt Farm acquired more land and began supplying customers with cheese and butter from local producers.
When Roger sadly died in a tractor accident in 1990, Tim returned to the farm from London, where he was an accountant. Four years later, with consumer interest in organic food gathering pace, Tim and Mary began buying organic milk from other farms, launched Yeo Valley Organic and helped to set up OMSCO, the Organic Milk Suppliers’ Cooperative. “It has grown from six members to more than 200,” says Tim of the farmer-owned organic milk pool that now supplies 65 per cent of the UK’S requirements. “If only all farmers could stick together like that,
we’d solve all our problems.” Making the decision to take the farm in a different direction turned out to be invaluable when Roger’s predictions about the dairy industry proved to be well founded. “In 1960 there were 150,000 dairy farms in Britain,” Tim says. “Now there are 15,000 in the UK and Ireland, producing the same amount of milk. Going organic in the 1990s felt like the only way we could keep control of our business – we had a responsibility to our staff and our community.”
Having spent three decades establishing and developing her herd, Mary, however, was nervous about the organic conversion. “I worried about milk yields,” says the former nurse, who was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to sustainable dairy farming and is renowned for her genetic expertise and advocacy for the British Friesian. “When you’re selling cows and bull semen around the world, yield is a big deal,” she adds. But ultimately she recognised that organic was the way forward. “As farmers, we’re linked to the land, and there is a natural predisposition to do what’s best for the soil and the animals.”
Holt Farm may now have 1,500 acres rather than 150, but in many ways its practices have come full circle. “We farm in rotation, just as we did 55 years ago,” says Tim, who grazes 600 Romney-cross-shetland sheep, too (in partnership with another farmer), and grows 400 acres of cereals for cattle feed. He has also been a passionate adopter of sustainable technology: the cow sheds are covered with solar PV panels while the HQ buildings are heated using a boiler fuelled by home-grown elephant grass.
“I remember being an eight-year-old boy and hanging out in the tea room, where people were eating fresh strawberries and Yeo Valley cream,” Tim says. While the menu might be a bit more sophisticated these days, you can still buy Yeo Valley cream to take home, alongside crème fraîche, milk, butter and the newly launched Yeo Valley ice cream. Oh, and at least 30 different varieties of yogurt, which still account for three-quarters of the company’s sales. “Ten million people bought a Yeo Valley product last year,” Tim says. Not bad for a venture that started out as a small family farm with big ideas.
For more about Yeo Valley, as well as information on visiting the Canteen, Organic Garden and Garden Café, go to yeovalley.co.uk.
“There is a natural predisposition to do what’s best for the soil and the animals”