2015 Farmers Weekly Awards: Local Food Farmer of the Year finalists revealed

• Sally Bendall
• Charlie Hughes
• Richard Vaughan

See the other Farmers Weekly Awards finalists

Hollow Trees Farm, Suffolk

© Tim Scrivener

Sally Bendall has been on a 30-year mission to challenge perceptions of farm retail and make agriculture accessible to all.

From the ashes of near bankruptcy in their 20s, Sally and her husband Robert have turned around their fortunes and grown their business from a roadside cart selling produce into a thriving farm shop, café and education destination.

Today they employ 60 staff, turn over in the region of £2m and still continue to grow, investing more than £250,000 in 2014-15.

On just 54ha, the couple produce vegetables, beef, pork, lamb, goat meat and eggs – all of which are sold through the farm shop and café, while about one-third of the acreage is under arable cropping with a contractor.

Sally’s bright farm shop is a masterclass in farm retail, offering customers attractive home-grown fresh produce and other products from local and British producers.

The butchery is brimming with creative added-value items (such as ginger, garlic and herb butterflied leg of lamb and Thai pork kebabs) and the café uses the farm’s produce as much as possible. 

About 70,000 visitors are pulled in by a farm trail, which has become something of an institution in the local area, while an education barn plays host to hundreds of school visits and events a year.

Sustainability is an important focus and Sally and Robert have recently installed 30kW of solar panels and plan to add a biomass boiler to heat the coffee shop. Biodiversity is encouraged by a wildlife pond, nectar flower mixes, bird boxes and planting of trees. 

Humble beginnings

It is hard to imagine now that Sally and Robert started with very little.

With neither having a family farm big enough to support them, they first rented a 5ha smallholding near Ipswich, growing and delivering vegetables and rearing veal calves. Later, they rented part of Robert’s family farm.

But when the bottom fell out of the veal market, the couple faced near bankruptcy and had to say goodbye to their cowman.

That was a turning point for Sally. “I swore I would never make someone redundant again,” she says.

She started again with a roadside cart and honesty box selling potatoes and eggs. Her firm aim was to become a professional outfit that could challenge the perception of farm retail being expensive and a “table at the end of the road”.

“We had the energy to achieve the best farm shop in the country,” says Sally. “We have always wanted to be taken seriously in the industry.”

Gradually each year, the couple reinvested their profits and swapped the cart for a hut and eventually their farm shop and café.

Now Hollow Tree Farm pulls in 235,000 visitors a year and Sally’s passion for education means a dedicated member of staff welcomes more than 100 school children a week from April to October, while a recent farming careers fair attracted 400 college students.

Open to advice

Education begins at home though and one of Sally’s main strengths is her ability to recognise her own shortcomings and the expertise that other people can offer.

“We have always taken business advice where we can,” she says. “A business mentor was the best thing we have done – he came in with fresh eyes”.

And with the help of their accountant, Sally is now running a highly professional outfit.

She looks at the business accounts on a daily, monthly and yearly basis and works off a three-year business plan. All figures are shared with the managers of each divisional team and targets are set in collaboration.

Employees are encouraged to come forward with ideas, develop new initiatives and learn.

Their knowledgeable, relaxed and confident manner speaks volumes for Sally’s good people management.

Recognising the skills of others allows Sally and Robert to keep pushing the business forward. Their skilled and creative butchery team and a new chef are busy expanding the added-value range and a new herdsman will soon be helping to improve the genetics of the livestock.

Sally’s determination, values and openness to learn have driven the business to where it is today- and her hunger to continue improving and expanding, after 28 years at the helm, shows no sign of waning.

© Tim Scrivener

Southview Farm, West Sussex

Charlie Hughes is on a mission to make dairy pay. By embracing technology and taking control of the whole chain from cow to customer, he has turned the fortunes of his Sussex family farm around.

When Charlie first joined his parents’ business on Southview Farm near Pulborough in the late 1990s, milk prices were on a downward slide and the business was losing £5,000/year, selling mostly to a processor, with some raw milk sold direct from the farm.

But with the introduction of a milk processing plant and farm shop, the family is now adding value to 40% of their milk and Charlie’s careful stockmanship and installation of two Lely robotic milkers have improved efficiency and cow health.

Turnover has trippled in 12 years and selling milk direct at an average price of 42p/litre now leaves a tidy profit after processing costs are factored in.

The family produces and sells 400,000 litres direct, with the rest going to Arla. Whole, skimmed and semi-skimmed milk (retailing at 75p/litre) is delivered daily to local businesses and the family also produces creams and 12 flavours of delicious ice cream. About 10,000 litres is also sold raw direct off the farm.

Charlie has expanded further and now also produces beef, milk-fed veal in the spring and summer and milk-fed pork in the winter.

Adapt and grow

But things weren’t always so good for the family and business.

When the milk price slumped to 12.7p/litre in 2002, the family decided that relying on a processing contract was no longer viable. They built a processing and bottling plant and started selling pasteurised milk and cream to shops and restaurants in the local area.

Things got tough again, however, when Charlie’s dad Ian sadly passed away a few years later. This left Charlie, still in his twenties, to take over the family farm, while his mum Julie continued to manage the accounts.

Tirelessly Charlie started designing and building a farm shop a year later to drive up footfall and improve sales of the farm’s raw and pasteurised products.

Charlie’s wife Sarah now manages the stylish farm shop and stocks products from 70 local suppliers, including breads, vegetables, cheese, honey, cakes and condiments – mostly from the surrounding counties of Sussex, Kent and Hampshire. A butchery adds value to the farm’s meat as well as other local produce and game.

Robots and data

Charlie is clearly a great farmer and has developed a healthy and efficient dairy herd using technology and the farm’s natural assets to their best advantage.

He has swapped the 60-head of Guernseys for 110 Friesen-Holsteins and 60 followers. The two robotic milkers allow the cows to be milked an average of three times a day and sand cubicle bedding also helps reduce mastitis.

Cell counts are less than 100,000/ml and Charlie says the cows are more placid, with fewer feet problems. They lactate for 400 days and produce an average of 10,100 litres each a year.

An impressive set of data is collected from the robotic milker, allowing Charlie to monitor each cow and decide when to cull, change rations and which grass leys are producing the best results.

When kept inside, the cows have access to food all day, with the addition of a robot that constantly pushes silage back towards them, while an automatic feeder has improved calf weight gain.

The farm is self-sufficient in forage, producing 24ha of maize silage and 6ha of hay, while Charlie’s recent investment in an aerator has brought the grass silage crop forward a week and a high-energy grass mix has improved milk yield.

Charlie is keen to encourage wildlife and has sown pollen and nectar mixes and developed habitats for owls, bats and hedgehogs, and he has spotted red kites, buzzards and peregrines on the farm.

His commitment to sustainability is clear too. He has installed 30kW solar panels, the farm shop uses air-source heating and cooling and he plans to expand the solar project and make the farm shop carbon-neutral.

Next he wants to develop a yoghurt line and clotted cream, introduce a borehole and develop an old barn into a venue.

Despite his achievements so far, Charlie’s end goal is modest – to be happy and to be able to pass on a viable business for his children. With his hard work and careful management, this goal is in sight.

© Richard Stanton

Huntsham Court Farm, Herefordshire

Great meat should be like a fine wine, believes Herefordshire farmer, Richard Vaughan – produced from the finest breeds to create a unique depth of flavour.

Under his management, the family’s 156ha holding in the Wye Valley has undergone a transformation from an intensive feed-lot system to a speciality rare-breed farm supplying the UK’s top chefs.

By creating an added-value product and developing a niche market, Richard says his business is now more profitable producing 100 beef cattle a year than when he was producing 1,000 for the supermarkets. And with his wife Rosamund’s help, annual turnover has grown steadily and the business now has significant margins.

Now twenty years into their rare-breed meat business, the couple produce and butcher 100 Longhorn beef cattle, 200 Ryeland sheep and 1,500 Middle White pigs a year for 2,000 chefs and private customers.

Richard’s meat has appeared on menus of the most exclusive restaurants, including Racine and the Dorchester, featured on prime-time TV with celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal and been requested by former French president Nicholas Sarkozi.

His energy and innovative character have led this transformation. After taking over the family farm in the 1970s, he travelled to the US to research feed-lots, started one on his return and became one of the UK’s biggest beef producers.

But the introduction of milk quotas a decade later pushed many producers into beef and increased the price of steers. “In one year I lost everything I had made in 10,” says Richard.

Needing to rethink things and frustrated with the quality of meat he was producing for retailers and the “miniscule“ margins, he opened the farm as a rare-breed park. A decade later, with the experience under their belts, Richard and Rosamund closed the farm to the public and chose their most flavoursome breeds for meat production.

A breed apart

From breeding through to butchery, Richard’s focus is on producing the best-quality products possible.

“I always felt there should be beef produced like the great chateaux of wine,” he says. “It is a series of little steps along the way [that make the difference].”

Breed is the starting point, he says, and the farm is now of national significance, with about one-third of the country’s Middle White sows, plus 12 boars covering all of the UK family lines.

With a limited gene pool to draw on, Richard holds data for every Middle White in the country and is considering importing semen from Japanese Middle Whites. All the Longhorns are purebred and bought from approved breeders.

Feed is “kept simple and traditional”, says Richard. Grass pastures have been reseeded with a traditional mix of herbs, while a concentrate high in protein has been especially formulated following analysis of the Longhorn herd.

Welfare is paramount. When the Longhorns are brought in for fattening, a maximum of four to five are housed in the same pens that used to hold 20 when the farm was a feed-lot, but with deep straw on the slatted floor.

Sows and their suckling piglets are housed in warm and spacious pens and Richard has designed his pig fattening shed to be opened or closed according to the weather, with a sprinkler system for keeping the animals cool. A specialist vet visits quarterly.

He is adamant that no part of the carcass should be wasted and customers receive boxes of mixed cuts, expertly butchered to their request by the farm’s full-time butcher.

A significant investment last year in an on-site butchery now allows Richard to offer his customers beef hung for up to 75 days and butchery services for 20 other local businesses, helping to pay off a two-year loan.

Richard also takes great care of the farm’s biodiversity and has been in an HLS scheme for the past 10 years. Together with Rosamund he has planted hundreds of native trees, sown wildflowers and wild bird seeds mixes, replanted old hedges with 10 species and the orchards with old fruit tree varieties.

But with nearly 50 years of farming behind him, Richard is still driven to grow his business and would like to expand beef production to 120-150 cattle a year and take on more clients for the butchery service.

His enthusiasm and energy are evident and his main focus remains on producing the very best quality meat for his impressive list of customers.