Farm of the Week: Family concern heads to premier division of beef

To the Powleys' pleasure, anyone who knows livestock wants to know the same when they have just seen the animals, never mind the accounts.

Mike, now 44, was fresh out of college and Tom, now 70, was managing a farm in Cheshire when the opportunity arose to take over Elm House Farm at Green Hammerton, between York and Harrogate. It was owned by Tom's wife's family and still is. Mike came in as a tenant in 1987, followed by his dad and his younger brother, Richard.

The whole 130 acres was more or less "farmed out". They hired themselves out for milking and harvesting and Mike got some work on a pig farm and began hauling manure home. His brother started a business they helped with, Garden Grooming, which grew into a self-supporting enterprise Richard still runs. It took 10 years to mend the soil on the home farm but more land came up for rent and the Powleys built on an inherited sugar-beet contract until the York factory closed.

They also started producing beef weaners for sale to the fattening specialists, starting with a dozen standard sucklers produced by a Hereford bull on dairy Friesians.

Beef has become a much harder business since, under constant pressure from cheap imports – not only from the likes of Brazil but from Ireland, where a bit of land and a few cows is the equivalent of a semi in the English suburbs and the country produces four times the beef it eats.

Now, with EC subsidies for farmland running down, even the Irish are giving up and the big buyers are waking to the danger of losing their supply chains. However, margins are still dauntingly tight and the Powleys decided early on to spread their bets. They moved into finishing.

Then they invented their own kind of suckler cow – and that took them into breeding the grandmothers which produce the sucklers which produce the beef.

Recently, they have "completed the cycle", as Mike puts it, by delivering some beef direct to the consumer. Most of it goes to ABP at York, however – a big buyer for Asda. And it is success in this mainstream market which has launched Mike into a new diversification, as consultant and lecturer.

He sits on the Eblex board, has been centrally involved in its Better Returns programme and has recently been hired to organise farm walks and talks for Asda producers. He is also northern chairman of the National Beef Association.

His first lesson is on genetics. He and his dad were early converts to Estimated Breeding Values – the measurement of bull and cow bloodlines in terms of the health, growth rates, conformation, fertility and ease of birthing of their offspring. The appliance of science took them towards Limousin bulls, then Belgian Blues, before they started serious work on the dam line.

That took them to a relatively unusual cross between South Devons and Limos, which "worked better than we ever imagined", says Tom. They call it the Elm House Red.

They set up their own South Devons pool, reading EBVs when they could and spending boldly for what they wanted. The next-generation Reds grow fast and are crossed with Angus to have first calves at 24 months, then with Blues to make bigger commercial beef animals. Bulls for the abattoir put on an average 1.5k a day, against an average 1.1, and the biggest go to Continental butchers, who like to be able to fillet out individual muscles.

Elm House will have 110 animals calving this year - 35 South Devons, 16 Red heifers having their first Angus-sired calves and the rest delivering the Red-Blue crosses.

Some Devon and Red and Red-x-Angus heifers are sold on for breeding and there are spares at the moment.

The farm has grown to 335 acres in 11 parcels rented from five landlords and is now entirely about beef and fodder.

Most of the bulls, all down the line, come from the Genus catalogue. Such intensive use of AI – and lately of sexed semen – is unusual in beef, and the benign temper of the South Devons is critical.

Their amiability also fits in with Tom's long-held belief that stress is the great spoiler of beef. Sticks and dogs and quad bikes are out when it comes to herding but the Devons will naturally amble up for a scratch behind the ears anyway and their offspring learn their ways.

The cattle are rotated around the pastures for fresh grass for eight months and creep feeders follow the calves from June, so they can top up their intakes as the grass goes down. The cows are "fat as barrels" by November, says Mike, and a bit of slimming down, on a relatively cheap winter mix, is good preparation for calving. He says: "I used to think calving problems were 70 per cent down to bull and 30 per cent down to management but now I think it's the other way round."

All this juggling of factors is aimed at the optimum results summed up in the European standard carcase grading grid, which shows how a farmer can get up to 100 a head more from the right balance of weight and conformation and muscle and fat.

Eblex is taking farmers on abattoir tours to teach the crucial differences between liveweight and deadweight value and a surprising number are surprised by what they learn. But Elm House Farm has been hitting the right buttons for some time.

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