When the sheep arrive at Rootfield from my father-in-law’s Essich sheep holding outside of Inverness, high above Loch Ness, it always signals the start of winter here at the farm.
This and the sporadic sub-zero temperatures are helping us get into a festive frame of mind – although the continued coughs, colds and winter bugs are not.
Similarly, outside the farmhouse there has been good and bad news.
The bi-annual visit from the classifier yielded good results with a dozen cows being classed “excellent” and “very good” (this always reminds me of school), while the number of cows in calf are also up.
Unfortunately, Nick has been down to half-strength on the farm since the beginning of the month with cattleman Piotr, returning unexpectedly to Poland for a family emergency, and farm-manager-in-training, Duncan, signed off work with a serious knee infection.
In light of this pre-Christmas staffing catastrophe, Nick has turned his attention to the possibility of robots for milking – again.
As previously mentioned in this column, he has considered robots in the past for three reasons.
Firstly, Piotr has a young family back home and is unlikely to be with us much longer; secondly, the seemingly remote location of Rootfield has not proved appealing to potential cattlemen and women from farther south when Nick has used a specialist dairy recruitment agency to fill the position; and finally, there is literally nobody in our local area that does relief milking.
This means that when Piotr and Duncan are absent (an infrequent but not unfathomable occurrence), Nick is the only person who can do the milking.
With a milk-processing business to run along with his daily farm jobs during regular “office hours”, relief milking is untenable on anything but a very short-term basis (basically he works from 3 in the morning until he gets in at 6pm, going to bed around 9pm, after checking the cows and draining the system – a very unhealthy 18-hour day).
Fortunately, Nick re-established contact with the sales representative from Lely, the North American manufacturer and supplier of robots to the dairy sector, when he attended dairy trade show AgriScot at Ingliston last month.
The rep will visit Rootfield in January to reassess what Nick’s robotic requirement would be and how easily they would work in the current cow shed. It would be a significant investment but with the dearth of skilled dairy people willing to work in the bonnie northern Highlands, Nick doesn’t have many options.
If only our lovely staff in the milk processing and production arm of the business could milk cows too. Staff-wise on this side of the business, we are at full strength but, typically, at one of the quietest times of the year.
We are grateful, as ever, to our loyal trade customers who have been stocking up on a variety of festive ice-cream flavours this month as well as good old vanilla to accompany their own special Christmas desserts.
And I’m delighted to report that our yoghurt has finally made it to market and is currently on the shelves locally at The Storehouse of Foulis and The Dairy at Daviot as well as in the honesty shop here at Rootfield.
On account of Brexit, Nick and the team have had to recalculate cost of production for the yoghurt as the price of both tubs and labels has increased since the vote to leave the European Union (we are fortunate, however, not to be affected in terms of delayed farm payments, as others have been across the industry).
Nick is finding that it is a similar story when he has been researching potential packaging for pasteurised milk, which is still very much on the backburner for now but something we hope to be able to add to our dairy retail range at some point in the future.
We’ve discussed the possibility of an old fashioned, refillable glass milk bottle but this option is somewhat complicated by the charging (then refunding) of a deposit for the bottle, plus the additional labour involved in cleaning the returned bottles.
Custom-made, branded plastic bottles are cost-prohibitive and then there is the milk vending machine, also discussed in a previous column.
Milk vending would probably represent the most eco-friendly and least labour-intensive option with customers filling (and therefore cleaning) their own milk vessels, but again set up costs are prohibitive in an unknown marketplace.
Coincidentally, however, when Nick was looking into adding a few Ayrshire cows to the Rootfield herd recently, he came across a dairy farmer who pasteurises, bottles and sells all his milk directly to businesses across south-west Scotland.
Third-generation farmer Bryce Cunningham, of West Mossgiel Farm in Ayrshire, was forced to rethink his business when the price he was being paid for his milk plummeted to just nine pence a litre. He ended up selling half of his Ayrshire herd and decided to sell the milk from the remaining 50 or so cows direct, processing the milk himself three days a week.
Before long, demand proved so great that Bryce found he could increase cow numbers enabling him to pasteurise and bottle more milk, upping processing to six days a week.
It’s food for thought, but with everything else going on at the moment, processing our own milk is not a priority.
Farm business – and challenges – aside, we are starting to enjoy the countdown to Christmas here at Rootfield.
Having missed Daisy’s first nativity play last year because Mollie was being born at the exact same time (what were the chances?), we were proud as punch to watch her play Mary earlier this week. And now that we’ve celebrated Mollie’s first birthday, we can contemplate wrapping Christmas presents.
It’s a far cry from this time last year when I boasted that everything was done and dusted by the start of the month because of Mollie’s imminent arrival. I remember writing that I’d even filed my tax return . . . now, there’s a thought for the new year.
Merry Christmas everyone.
* Rootfield Farm is on the Black Isle, 10 miles north of Inverness, where Jo lives with husband Nick, a fourth-generation dairy farmer, their daughters Daisy and Mollie, and 150 cows
