Poor returns force out organic milk supplier

ONE of Yorkshire’s few suppliers of organically-certified milk has got out of the business, because of poor returns, dwindling public interest and last summer’s drought.

Thornton Hall Farm, Dewsbury, closed the processing and bottling plant which supplied a local delivery round, under the brand Clever Cow Organics, in 2010, because of customers cancelling to save a few pennies.

But the farm stayed in organic production until just before this Christmas – when the last of its own organic silage ran out because it was forced to use some last summer. Faced with having to buy in supplies, farm manager Tom Rawson called it a day on December 19.

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His parents, Gary and Linda, the original farm tenants, have retired and Tom Rawson is running Thornton Hall from his new base near Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, using hired hands. For the past two years, he and his business partner, Oliver Hall, formerly of Bradford but now based in North Wales, have been developing a new business model, taking in other people’s cows and milking them as contractors.

They are now milking around 1,250 cows on four farms and running a consultancy business drawing on their pooled experience. Most of their business was already in mainstream milk production and now Thornton Hall is too. See http://evolutionfarming.com/

Mr Rawson helped his parents to turn the farm organic in 2001 and start an on-farm processing and bottling plant in 2003, at a cost of £100,000. They supplied roundsmen, corner shops and independent supermarkets, canteens, coffee shops and some schools, as well as selling in bulk to OMSCo, the Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative, which has national supply contracts.

But he said this week: “With the recession, it all got increasingly hard to justify. In the north of England, especially, people began to ask themselves why they were paying a few pence extra for a litre of organic milk. A couple of little businesses went bankrupt, owing us £1,000 or £1,500. And the milk price in the organic sector just didn’t move up in accordance with the conventional sector. I was paying £350 a tonne to buy in organic concentrate and now I am paying £200 a tonne and if each cow eats half a tonne a year, that soon makes a big difference.

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“Then, after two years of drought, we ran out of organic silage on December 17 and buying in meant finding other organic farmers who had some to spare.”

Another organic milk producer, Robin Cornforth at Northallerton, said this week: “I’m still in it because my heart is in the organic ethos. But it’s true that prices haven’t kept pace with costs.”

Richard Hampton, sales and marketing director of OMSCo, the Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative, said Britain was the only western country in which organic milk sales had declined over the past two years.

Demand from Europe meant he could still sell all he could get but his suppliers were in a tough market and there had been a number of drop-outs. The pressure to reduce costs and the stringency of organic regulations had meant increasing reliance on grass, so the silage factor had been significant in some areas – although last year’s exceptional conditions had meant record grass crops elsewhere.

Sales of organic products fell 5.9 per cent in 2010, according to the last market report from the Soil Association.