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Family enterprise saves shaken-out producers
The obvious result of the Dairy Farmers of Britain shakedown was that everything in the business got bigger.
Arla and Wiseman and Dairy Crest picked up what they wanted. And some small farmers were told they either had to expand or get out, because they were not worth the cost of a tanker detour.
And one small business which proved there was still room outside the central arena where giants tussle for the favours of the Big Five supermarkets is not so small any more.
Out on the edge of Denby Dale, just off the Holmfirth-Barnsley road, Stephen Buckley has picked up about 40 of DFB's abandoned farmers, and customers to go with them, to add to the old-fashioned network of roundsmen, corner shops and other small businesses, on which his dairy was founded.
Luckily for the farmers, he is still small enough to be a bit different. Most of them do not have enough daily output for national buyers but as part of a local network, they can fit into Mr Buckley's rough formula of filling a tanker in an hour – and if they cost more than the average collection, he simply charges them for it.
His grandfather, Hector, started buying land in the area and his father, Brian, added more; the three of them are now partners in 800 acres incorporating three farm names – Dry Hill, where Stephen lives with wife Fiona and three children; Hill Farm and High Hoyland.
They use 120 acres of grassland to feed 130-140 milkers as far as possible and grow wheat and barley for their additional fodder requirements and/or for sale, plus rape and sugar beet. They let space for a few horses and grow "birds and bees mixtures" for Natural England. But the heart of the operation is Buckley's Dairy, which Stephen Buckley has been building up since he left school at 16. He is 40 now. By the time the plant was destroyed by fire, in 2001, it was processing 6,000-7,000 gallons a day.
He kept going by buying in milk for six months and then got back to the same level as before – something like 26,000 litres, in metric, of which about 3,000 litres a day came from the Buckley herd. Other local farmers supplied most of the rest and it was all sold within 40 miles.
That was a fair-sized rural business. But now it is very much bigger.
The start of the expansion was a deal with Medina, a dairy business started in Windsor in 2003 by a Pakistani businessman called Sardar Hussain, who died at the beginning of this year.
Three years ago, it was in the headlines after a series of attacks – including a fire-bombing. But apparently all that helped rally the support of Muslim-run corner shops and Medina is a fast-expanding power.
It is, for example, one of the partners in the new Hillsborough Dairy, which took over DFB's old Sheffield distribution network last month.
Medina was moving into Stephen Buckley's patch two years ago and he struck a deal which involved swapping rounds he had built or bought for a contract to supply milk for the wider network Medina was building in Yorkshire.
Now that they have both taken over bits of DFB, he is receiving from 60 farms and sending out something like 1.3 million litres a week in various forms – which is big-time for a business in which crates are still stacked by hand and shifted by trolley.
It employs the equivalent of 30 full-timers on site, plus about 10 more in haulage.
The whole operation would probably blow a fuse if put through cost-analysis at Arla but Mr Buckley says: "They might have less people on the ground but I've got less bosses."
At the moment, his farmers get 24p to 26p a litre, depending on pick-up costs, which is more or less standard.
No exceptions to the rule of the market last for long nowadays, in the milk business. The price of powder in Rotterdam will reflect the lowest price of liquid milk somewhere else and the dominoes clatter down to every farm gate. A year ago, British dairies said liquid milk imports were a temporary phenomenon but Mr Buckley says the tankers have never stopped rolling off the ferries since.
He sees no point in complaining. Like all those hanging on in, he expects prices to pick up. Meanwhile, it is tight but it is possible.
Meanwhile, too, customers will stand a penny or two for what they want – and what a lot still want is milk delivered to their doorsteps, with a clink. An important part of the Buckley Dairy output is 100,000 old-fashioned pint bottles a day.
"People in the North of England still like their milk out of glass," says the boss. "And I think it tastes better out of glass."
Neither he nor Medina has to worry about halal rules as there are none for dairy products. The only particularly Asian requirement is ghee – cooking butter – and a ghee factory in Wrexham has become a useful market for spare cream.
Fat has to be taken out of milk to suit modern diets but luckily for the farmers, we have learned to eat it in other ways instead. Most of the Buckley's cream goes into a soft cheese called Dairygold, produced at Swillington, Leeds, for food manufacturing businesses.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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