GYS: Debut dairy couple win supreme title

Husband and wife team Linda and Howard Batty are seasoned cattle exhibitors but this was their competitive debut at the Great Yorkshire Show.
Ayrshire heifer Willowfields Winnie II was named the Great Yorkshire Show's supreme dairy champion. Picture by Kate Mallender.Ayrshire heifer Willowfields Winnie II was named the Great Yorkshire Show's supreme dairy champion. Picture by Kate Mallender.
Ayrshire heifer Willowfields Winnie II was named the Great Yorkshire Show's supreme dairy champion. Picture by Kate Mallender.

And it turned out to be a wise move to step inside the ring this year. The couple from Hatton in Derbyshire would usually be peering in at the action in the livestock rings as interested spectators but they emerged victorious with a string of big wins.

Their Ayrshire heifer Willowfields Winnie II, a past winner at Scotland’s Dumfries, East Kilbride and Royal Highland shows, and part owned by the Lindsays of Lanark, was named both the Great Yorkshire’s champion Ayrshire and supreme dairy champion beast.

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In addition, their homebred Willowfields June II won the junior Ayrshire championship.

On winning the supreme title, Mr Batty, a retired agri-goods salesman and long distance lorry driver, said: “It means the world. I’m 76 and we have had that peak of winning the Great Yorkshire and the Royal Highland, the two biggest shows in the country, so it means a hell of a lot.”

For Mrs Batty it completes a remarkable rise, having reared Willowfields Winnie II’s great grandfather on a small holding of just six acres of rented land.

The show’s reserve supreme champion dairy beast was Robert and Elaine Butterfield’s five-year-old Holstein, Saxelby Brady Amber, a mother of three calves that was being shown for the very first time.

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En route to being named overall runners up rosette, the pair from High Bentham, who trade as Ingleview Holsteins, won the Holstein championship for a third show following wins in 2016 and 2017 with Newbirks Jazz.

Mr Butterfield said the latest win boosts his herd’s reputation.

“It’s part of our advertising - we sell a lot of stock,” he said.