Farmer at the hub of all things Yorkshire

We arrange to meet him because he is chairman of the new Yorkshire Food Farming & Rural Network. And he got there from being chairman of the Yorkshire Food & Farming Forum and having good relations with the Yorkshire & Humber Rural Affairs Forum, which joined forces with the Food & Farming Forum and the Yorkshire Agricultural Society to become the latest in a line of Defra advisory bodies with names which mainly mean, as he cheerfully admits, that “most people have no idea what they do”.

We may have missed out an “& Humberside” or two and we are already seriously abbreviating the official explanations of what all these bodies are or were and who they are supposed to liaise with.

Luckily, people like Mr Willis are prepared to disentangle the waffle from the opportunities in the initiatives Defra ministers routinely launch before moving on.

He grew up in a fishing family, first in Newcastle, then at Cullercoats, near Tynemouth. Somehow he picked up an ambition to be a dairy farmer and was advised to go to the Lancashire Agricultural College. In those days, he says, the Fylde of Lancashire had more dairy cows per acre than anywhere in the world.

He did some work experience in Holland and got an early glimpse of how value could be added to milk, by turning it into fruit-flavoured yoghurt drinks and the like – when a carton of Ski was still an exotic new idea in England. He is 60.

He also saw verges and motorway reservations being harvested and that stayed in his mind, as a reminder to be grateful for grass.

Back in Northumberland, he managed a herd of 220 for a share of profits. And taking a percentage is how he has stayed in business ever since, he says, without having land of his own.

In 1994, he took on a share-farming contract, leading to a tenancy, at Fulwith Hill Farm, alongside Crimple Beck, which runs between the Yorkshire Showground and Harrogate, out of sight of both. ICI used to have premises in the valley and Crimplene was named after it.

The top end of the lane which leads to the farm is a prime Harrogate address. New houses there are £1.7m each and the farm has been on the market for two years with a guide price of £2.5m, including 137 acres. The original tenancy has given way to a short one, subject to three months’ notice. He could not afford to live anywhere close and suggests assisting retirement for tenant farmers might help make vacancies in the industry for youngsters.

A lot of ageing tenants simply run their businesses down because they have nowhere else to go, he says.

At Harrogate, he got up to milking 110 Holsteins at a time, averaging 8,500 litres a year each, but it was taking four hours at either end of the day, in an old six-stall parlour, and he was under pressure to spend on slurry and silage storage. He could not get his tenancy guaranteed far enough ahead to justify a big investment and got out in 2006, having spent £200,000 on milk quota which is now worth £3,000, thanks to the phasing-out of quotas.

“I haven’t milked a cow for five years but I won’t finish paying for them until 2015,” he comments.

One of his last throws was to take the farm organic and he has been buying calves to rear into point-of-calf heifers for organic dairying ever since. But he needed something else and his solution was an interesting one.

The farm became a ‘hub’ for local-as-possible and natural-as-practical veg, fruit, meat, eggs, dairy products, biscuits, herbs, pasta, pet food, bird food, bread ,,, check crimplevalleyfresh.com for the rest. He hires a girl to make soups, coleslaw and some other deli products. Otherwise, the produce all comes from elsewhere. It is nearly all from Yorkshire, including garlic and a range of herbs, but he still buys swedes and leeks from Northumberland, on the basis of ancestral faith that nowhere else can whack ’em. A lot of fruit has to come from abroad, of course, but he buys it himself, at the wholesale market in Leeds, and reckons he can beat the supermarkets on quality, if not price, even for bananas.

Local hubs are one of the stories of the past decade but they are all a bit different. His particular angle was to decide early on that local and decent was probably more important than fully organic – and not to bother even trying for supermarket contracts.

Initially, he sold only through home deliveries. But he picked up some shop contracts, including Fodder at the showground, and four years ago opened a shop of his own in Ripley. He also started a weekly stall at Pannal Church, which has just turned into a full-time shop in the old Pannal Post Office – one of the new Post Office Local collaborations, meaning Post Office services are provided as a sideline.

Latest contracts for the hub side of the business include dinner supplies for Rossett High in Harrogate and eight Sure Start children’s centres in Harrogate and Ripon.

Crimple Valley Fresh is already running three vans, turning over £250,000 a year and employing 11 people, part or full-time, including Mr Willis, eldest daughter and deputy Joanne Ingle, and two sons, although one also works as a pest controller. Mr Willis’s wife, Dorothy, and another daughter, are social workers.

During his dairy days, he did some time on the NFU dairy board. And in 2002, he was recruited into the discussion groups set up in the wake of Foot & Mouth, which led eventually to a part-time appointment to run the Food & Farming Forum, where farmers talked to other food industry representatives and government agencies.

He says they were determined to be better than a ‘talking shop’ and concentrated on outcomes you could measure. One was an annual fair for careers advisers at Askham Bryan College. Another was Future Farmers of Yorkshire, a discussion group with 280 members. When the coalition pulled the plug on their funding, they and the Rural Affairs Forum, which shared some membership with them, determined to carry on regardless. And when the new Defra team, inevitably, decided it wanted its own regional liaison bodies, the Yorkshire Agricultural Society helped them put in a joint bid to fill the vacancy.

The first meeting for representatives of the new networks took place in mid-April, with ministers Jim Paice and Richard Benyon. The message was that they were to be the “eyes and ears” on Defra policy on the ground – roughly as before, in short, but this time with no funding.

One issue flagged up was the slow pace of approvals for new agricultural reservoirs. On the agenda back at home is the resumption of stalled talks with the MoD about buying Yorkshire food for Yorkshire garrisons. And Mr Willis has not forgotten the retirement for tenants issue.

“The NFU does a terrific job but it starts with representing its members,” he says. “In an umbrella forum, you are not necessarily on one side against another. I enjoy it. But it does cost, in terms of time, and the people who volunteer tend to be from the older generations. In the long run, I am really hoping somebody younger will take the job off me.”

Crimple Valley Fresh delivers in and around Harrogate, York, Ripon and North Leeds. Clerk to the Yorkshire Food Farming & Rural Network is Liz Hudson – [email protected]/*