Farm of the Week: How catering proved to be the Lovegreens' salvation

The countryside was at a standstill due to foot and mouth disease restrictions and just weeks later David suffered a contiguous cull of his own livestock. Tears were in his eyes as he recalled a moment that will stay with him forever.

“We were lambing. Davina had started with it as I’d been working away. I’d come back when the cull had been announced and had brought the ewes in. One was giving birth. I pulled it out, revived it and the vet then inserted a needle straight away and put the lamb down.”

If that all sounds extremely matter of fact all I can say is that you should see the emotion it stirred for David, mirroring what I have seen on fellow farmers’ faces whenever the events of that time are replayed, but life has gone on for the Lovegreens.

A tough decision was made to exit dairying in 2000. David’s whole life up until then had been in dairying.

“My father had run his own 100 cow herd, along with sucklers and sheep at Hutton Henry near Hartlepool. I grew up with dairy cows and when Davina and I took on the tenancy here in 1993 we had 40 dairy cows giving an average of 5,000 litres. By the time we came out I had 30 giving 10,000 litres but purchasing milk quota and poor milk prices meant we were hitting our heads against a brick wall.

“Davina’s catering business had grown and I was getting more involved in that too. In the end, with all the pressures of not getting anything out of the milk game and Davina’s side doing well the common sense decision was to give up dairying.”

Selling the herd and knowing they had plenty of catering work that summer, David and Davina took a first foreign holiday since their honeymoon, with daughters Emily and Kate - but things did not go to plan.

“We’d put the holiday on our credit card thinking we had loads of work in the summer. I was reading the newspaper one day while away and read about foot and mouth having broken out. When we came home the countryside had been effectively shut down and every event we had in the book was cancelled. Our business at that time was finished.”

Compensation for their culled livestock and receiving payments for cleaning the farm themselves offered some respite, but a chance to buy their now 45-acre farm and David’s decision to take a chef’s course at Darlington College, have built firm foundations for what is now a farm that almost wholly supplies Davina Lovegreen Catering Ltd.

“I try to produce exactly to Davina’s requirements for such as the livestock market café at Darlington that we run two days a week, outside catering for events such as horse trials and farm sales, major shoots and a number of private clients.

“I run a suckler herd of 20 cows mainly Aberdeen Angus and Hereford but with a few Simmental. We take all our progeny to fat, except for replacements, and send a beast to slaughter every three weeks.”

The Lovegreens are also self sufficient with pigs and sheep.

“We normally have four Large White sows. Each sow produces around 20 piglets a year and we usually kill out 60-80 a year. We have a flock of 45 Texel breeding ewes but we only use a few of their lambs through the catering operation. Others are sold through Darlington livestock market.

“With the range of outlets we have there is a market for the whole beef and pork carcases. Once we have the carcases back from the abattoir we process everything here on farm. We cure all our own bacon, make our own sausages and pies, cut our own joints and steaks.”

Davina’s parents also farm near Hartlepool where they have an arable and pigs enterprise. Baking cakes for private parties, discovering a niche that she enjoyed and acquiring a traineeship at a hotel were to be her teenage assault on a remark that has stayed with her throughout.

“I left school at 16. It just wasn’t for me and I had a teacher who had told me I wasn’t going to get anywhere in life. I walked into the Swallow Hotel in Stockton and asked whether they would give me a job. I wanted to see what happened in a hotel. They set me up on a training scheme and I became trainee of the year.

“My parents hosted a dressage event on the farm and I used their caravan to sell tea, coffee and cakes. That’s when I thought to myself, hang on there’s a market here.

“I’ve always gone for the best quality ingredients and David has been fantastic. We get on so well in business, which can often be difficult for married couples, but what drives me on and is my very real passion is that I sell what David produces.

“ I didn’t plan where this has gone, visiting lovely houses, meeting lovely people, running a livestock market café, catering at outside events and at conferences at Thirsk racecourse.

“I have just gone through every gate as it has opened and wherever it has taken us.”