Farm of the Week: Home-reared beef brings success to family farm

We asked Robert and Heather Copley how they built it and what impact it has had on the farm which hosts it.

Robert's father, Ken, and Ken's brother, Richard, bought Ravensknowle Farm 50 years ago. They sold their dairy quota in 1996, thinking they could keep the place going by growing crops but by then, 180 acres was too small for comfort in arable and by 2003 they were ready to give up.

By this time, Robert had gained some experience of his own – managing dairy herds in Dorset and Cheshire – and a wife, Heather, an agronomist.

They were looking for a base to start a business and a family and came back to the border between Pontefract and Featherstone as tenants. Jacob, seven, and Harry, five, have since joined them.

Robert bought 30 Holstein-Angus calves to start a beef herd on 40 acres of pasture land and rented the arable fields to a neighbour, while he and Heather looked at possibilities. They came down to a shop.

"Robert wanted a mucky carrots shop and I wanted Fortnum & Mason," says Heather. They settled on a butcher's shop, which launched with a 50 per cent grant from the Rural Enterprise Scheme because the development would employ a full-time butcher. Meanwhile, Robert bought 20 weaners for fattening and started selling half a pig at a time to neighbours with freezers. But that venture came to an end when the shop went into its first expansion, in 2006. It needed 20 pigs a week and the farm could not expand to meet the demand – partly because of the smell issue but mainly because of biosecurity concerns. Also, the existing pig-house was required for office space.

Another early venture was Christmas trees and he has kept that up, although he has never managed to improve on the 400 customers he picked up the first year – too much competition, he guesses. His dad and uncle used to fatten turkeys. But he did not have room for a poultry preparation line as well as the red meat butchery and the main purpose of the shop was to sell his beef – giving him twice the price he had been getting at market.

"People will go shopping for good beef," says Heather, 37, who runs the retail side. "If you have that, they will come and look at the rest of what you have."

There is a local slaughterhouse, Dovecote Park, but that is a Waitrose-only processor. The Copleys went to John Penny at Rawdon and have stuck with him. One day, says Robert, 39, slaughterhouses are going to be a customer concern and Penny's is as good as they get.

The butchers' counter has been the heart of the shop's success, based on the promise "traditionally fed in Yorkshire". They organised lamb from Martin Hare at Tong, who was putting a Beltex onto Rouges but has since added some Dorsets into the mix to help to get his production of ready lambs up from nine months a year to eleven. Free-range pork came from Mark Burton at Tadcaster and chickens from Milford Farm at South Milford. They now deal with 150 Yorkshire businesses.

In 2004, farm shops had been around along enough for everybody to want one locally but were not so common they were taking customers off each other, as they are now. The business took off.

Its philosophy was that people wanted their food as local and sustainable as possible and that is a principle which still extends to all the produce. Bread comes from Adams Bakery at Castleford. Carrots come from Guy Poskitt, who supplies half the supermarkets in the country but happens to be a neighbour. The oranges come from Spain, because that is closer than Florida, and the garlic comes from the Isle of Wight. Bananas and all other imports come by sea – nothing air-freighted.

All this might sound dangerously idealistic for between Pontefract and Featherstone. As it happens, the farm does sit in a pocket of upper suburbia. But Heather Copley says she never believed the sustainable food movement was only for ABC types.

"I didn't want a dinner-party shop," she says. "All the main supermarkets have a branch within four miles and we pegged our prices to theirs. But also you could get advice on meat, get it cut as you wanted and buy exactly as much as you wanted. Our motto says: 'It's not rocket science, it's just done properly'."

Older people came for cuts they could not buy in a packet, like shoulder of pork – Heather's nomination for most under-rated part of pig. Younger ones came to learn more about this fresh food business they had heard of through the TV chefs.

The shop has been through two big expansions and has altogether cost the best part of 350,000. The last expansion, in 2008, got another grant from Yorkshire Forward because it put employment in the shop up to 30 (19 full-time equivalents) compared to 20 before (14 FTEs). It included the launch of a cafe, Moo, which is now busy all day. And it swallowed Robert's cattle barn.

"We decided there was more chance of the shop buying me a barn than there was of a barn paying for a new shop. I guess the shop and cafe now account for 90 per cent of our income," he says.

The sucklers are mainly Angus crosses, with a few experimental Herefords and Highlanders. A black Limousin bull is terminal sire. For two winters now, they have all lived outside.

"I made sure I had nothing less than six months old still out at Christmas," says Robert. "And they were fine, even this last winter. I have it from a vet that the cattle will be okay down to minus 15, as long as they have somewhere to get out of the wind and rain. And healthwise, I stand by that. The problem with out-wintering is with the land, not the cattle."

The shop is now having to buy in some of its beef – from trusted farmers, through Otley market – and Robert wants a new cattle house this year, so he can expand and calve all year round. He is up to 70 sucklers on 80 acres and aims to eventually reclaim the whole of the family farm.

One little experiment which was good for the farm but bad for the shop was a bone incinerator. It worked but would occasionally set fire to a puddle of accumulated fat with a boom and a lot of black smoke.

In the interests of visitor-friendliness, it was replaced with a biomass burner. Meanwhile, however, by-products disposal specialists PDM have started earning renewable energy credits by burning bone and the cost of getting it taken away has dropped from 27 to 10 a bin.

Farmer Copley's is at WF7 5AF, www.farmercopleys.co.uk and 01977 600200.

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