YEO VALLEY ORGANIC BY TIM MEAD
“Our desire to accelerate organic food into the nation’s diets by making it accessible and readily available has not waned. If anything, we’re redoubling our efforts to help people better understand the benefits of food produced from regenerative organic farming systems Our journey began over 60 years ago in Somerset’s Yeo Valley, when my parents bought Holt Farm and a herd of 30 British Friesian cows in 1961. Back then we were farming in a way that didn’t have a label. It was about working in harmony with our environment and my family has been doing it since the 15th century. The land at Holt Farm was wet, rich in grass species and good for dairy cows. During the 1970s we started making yoghurt with leftover skimmed milk from the tearooms, which was still quite exotic then. In the 1990s, we decided to produce organic yoghurt and work with a cooperative of British organic dairy farmers who would supply Yeo Valley, with a guarantee to buy their milk to meet our growing demand. Fast forward to today and we use over 100 million litres of organic milk a year and sell two million products a week, supporting over 100 British organic dairy farmers. I’m still very much the farming apprentice; my mother is the farmer of the family, now joined by my nephew. She has championed sustainable dairy farming for the past 60 years and is a firm believer in farming forever. Pedigree British Friesian cows are her lifelong passion and the Lakemead herd has earned her the reputation as one of the finest breeders in the country. We remain a family business and our production company is now 20% employee-owned. Our desire to accelerate organic food into the nation’s diets by making it accessible and readily available has not waned. If anything, we’re redoubling our efforts to help people better understand the benefits of food produced from regenerative organic farming systems like ours. Across our farms in the Yeo Valley and on the Mendip Hills, our dairy, beef cattle and sheep are helping to regenerate soil, locking in carbon and helping to reverse climate change. Our grazing ground is holistically managed, and chemical-free. We’ve measured the carbon in the soil on our own farm and found that we have equivalent to 150 years’ worth of the farm’s annual emissions. Now we’re expanding soil measuring and mentoring across our supplying farms. We see our role as twofold, firstly to provide natural healthy food and secondly to do so in a way that puts more back into the land than we take out.
FOR THE LOVE OF THE LAND II PAGE 30
