Farm of the Week: How The Milk Well's self-serve vending machines are reviving a Yorkshire dairy's fortunes

Crowds have been gathering daily at an East Riding farm just out of Hull ever since the Collinson family of husband and wife team David and Moyra, and son Philip of Bellfield Farm in Willerby took a decision to sell the milk from their dairy herd direct from the farm via their all-new self-serve milk vending machines.

The Milk Well is fast becoming the village’s most visited tourist attraction as families arrive to taste what Moyra describes as real milk.

“We wanted to give people the opportunity to taste milk that, other than being pasteurised, is straight from the cow and straight from the farm without being collected by a milk tanker, standardised, homogenised and driven miles to a dairy and then even more miles to a supermarket.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“We’ve had hundreds of people who have tried our milk and they have all given us such great feedback and keep coming back.

Country Post - Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson, who run The Milk Well, at Bellfield Farm, Willerby near Hull, along with their son Philip. The family have installed their own milk dispense for members of the public to purchased fresh and flavoured milk, from their cows and their son Philip looks after the arable land on the farm. Pictured Dairy farmer David Collinson, with his herd.Country Post - Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson, who run The Milk Well, at Bellfield Farm, Willerby near Hull, along with their son Philip. The family have installed their own milk dispense for members of the public to purchased fresh and flavoured milk, from their cows and their son Philip looks after the arable land on the farm. Pictured Dairy farmer David Collinson, with his herd.
Country Post - Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson, who run The Milk Well, at Bellfield Farm, Willerby near Hull, along with their son Philip. The family have installed their own milk dispense for members of the public to purchased fresh and flavoured milk, from their cows and their son Philip looks after the arable land on the farm. Pictured Dairy farmer David Collinson, with his herd.

“I try to explain to our customers that a cow’s milk changes. It doesn’t stay quite the same all of the time. Everybody is interested. It’s something they wouldn’t know. The composition of milk changes by the seasons and what the cows eat. I explain that is something you don’t get in standardised milk.

“We did a lot of research into milk vending and visited others before going into it. We sell a lot of milkshakes, a greater share of those than the milk on its own. It is the shakes that sell the rest of the milk.

“We get a lot of families and we have a calf viewing window,” says Dave. “They’re only 20 yards into the farm and you can see the look on their faces when they see a tractor or the cows. It’s like ‘look we’ve been on a farm’, but we don’t let them on the whole farm when they come for the milk because we have school visits and specially arranged visits to my mind if you’ve been invited you’ve still got that magic of being where nobody else has been.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Selling milk direct from the farm through vending machines isn’t new, but in every other case I’ve written about in recent years it has been entered into while also maintaining a larger volume of milk to be collected by tanker to a dairy company and in so doing maintaining or increasing the number of cows in the dairy herd.

Country Post - Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson, who run The Milk Well, at Bellfield Farm, Willerby near Hull, along with their son Philip. The family have installed their own milk dispense for members of the public to purchased fresh and flavoured milk, from their cows and their son Philip looks after the arable land on the farm. Pictured Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson at The Milk Well, with a selection of their flavoured milk.Country Post - Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson, who run The Milk Well, at Bellfield Farm, Willerby near Hull, along with their son Philip. The family have installed their own milk dispense for members of the public to purchased fresh and flavoured milk, from their cows and their son Philip looks after the arable land on the farm. Pictured Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson at The Milk Well, with a selection of their flavoured milk.
Country Post - Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson, who run The Milk Well, at Bellfield Farm, Willerby near Hull, along with their son Philip. The family have installed their own milk dispense for members of the public to purchased fresh and flavoured milk, from their cows and their son Philip looks after the arable land on the farm. Pictured Dairy farmers David and Moyra Collinson at The Milk Well, with a selection of their flavoured milk.

That’s not the case here. The Collinsons are actively reducing their herd to the number of cows needed to produce the quantity of milk demanded by their milk and milkshake sales.

“In my entire life the milk tanker has been coming here and it stopped earlier this year. I’ve still got to get my head around that fully,” says David.

“We have had a very good relationship with Chestnut Dairies in Seaton near Hornsea who picked up our milk. They are a very hard-working family as dairy farmers and a dairy. They were very good to us and took us on when Dairy Farmers of Britain went bust.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“But our customers are now coming direct to us. We are meeting them and everybody who comes says how quiet and friendly our cows are. That’s because they are always handled by us.

Last weekend the Collinsons had another great weekend with their milkshakes as they launched their Coronation range of red, white and blue shakes, with red velvet, white marshmallow and blueberry muffin flavours for King Charles III’s impending investiture.

“We’ve been busy since we opened on October 28 last year, after 18 months of planning,” says Moyra. “It went mad on social media last winter and we have been busy ever since. We are busier at weekends and it drops off a bit through the week, but we are open from 7.30am to 6.30pm every day. Last weekend was another phenomenally busy one and with another bank holiday weekend we could be set for a second consecutive really busy time.

“We’ve not had a full year yet to gauge what the business may be annually, and we will probably need a couple of years to decide how many cows we need, but we’re flat out as a family business at present, doing it all ourselves.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Bellfield Farm is tenanted and for a time the Collinsons were unsure whether their landlords would be selling some of the land.

“Our farmland is tenanted and runs to 130 acres between Willerby and Cottingham,” says David. “We can’t increase the size of our acreage and we just felt we needed to do something different.

“I look at other farming set-ups in magazines and sometimes think ‘what’s that all about?’ when I see the amount of investment needed. It’s as though someone must have just joined the Millionaires’ Club, but I question whether they are making a million. It is more likely they’ve borrowed a million.

The Collinsons’ have certainly not done that. They have always cut their cloth accordingly to their acreage and where they farm.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“We are a traditional dairy farm with arable land and chickens. We operate a closed herd breeding our own replacements using sexed semen to achieve the heifer calves we need. The cows and the heifers run together. We milk in a 10-cow parlour, five at each side. Any surplus milk is fed to the calves and we operate all year round calving.

“We grow winter wheat, winter barley, spring beans and 5-year and 3-year grass and clover leys for the cows’ forage. We are controlling blackgrass and managing the soil. We sell the eggs from our chickens, which we feed with our own wheat.

Moyra says the best day of the year on the farm is still cow turnout after the winter months of being housed inside when the cows just love it, and that their customers are falling in love with their cows.

“We put a video up during lockdown of the cows going out for the first time in spring and we had people commenting ‘that’ll be us running to the pub when we’re allowed out’. The cows just love it, getting back out to fresh grass with all the new sugars they can take in.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“People say aren’t they lovely, aren’t they comfortable, aren’t they clean. We have always looked after our cows and some stay in the herd for many years.

“We also get a lot of handicapped and special needs people and we are finding that the cows are really helping them.

David is a third-generation farmer who was born into dairy farming even though in his early days he confesses to being more of a tractor boy, spending many hours on board his Fordson Major bought from Harbour Motors in Hull.

His grandfather Arthur started the then pedigree British Friesian herd with the prefix Botanic in 1928 when originally farming just off Spring Bank in Hull. Today’s herd is made up of Holstein Friesians and Jerseys.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Grandad had two cows registered in the Friesian Cattle Society Book and farmed at 7 West Parade. Dad used to walk them from there, over the railway crossings at Walton Street, under the next railway bridge and graze them on the fields on the left-hand side,” says David.