Schemes, machines and butterfly dreams

A long read from the farm, April 2026

Spring has sprung and the dairy cows are dancing for joy in the bright green grass. You can see a video of them looking sprightly on our Instagram @northastondairy.

Although we love a bit of sunshine, and the sight of happy cows, for the human beings at the dairy the spring grass means only one thing – and that’s work! All that spring grass means a lot more milk than our milk-round customers can drink, and which we will need to turn into ice cream. We have done a good job running down our stocks over the last couple of months and have plenty of freezer space waiting in anticipation of new batches that will be coming thick and fast over the next two months.

In the processing department we have been focused on machines over the last few months. Firstly, there were repeated problems with our pasteuriser shorting out – with some much appreciated help from a friend we worked out that the problem was a wrongly placed seal causing friction in the pump. It’s now working better than ever. Next, we had an invasion of crazy bubbles overflowing from the bottle-washer to cover the whole room - as if some joker had filled a fountain with washing up liquid. We have no idea what caused it but opening a new barrel of bottle wash and starting again solved it.

Finally, we have decided to retire our ancient and ornery ice cream machine, affectionately known as Hildegard.

Hildegard, who was purchased in the dim and distant past on Ebay, has been resurrected several times over the years, but, the erratic nature of her timers, her habit of tripping the electrics, and the impossibility of getting replacement parts, has finally defeated us and we have splashed out on a new machine.

The new machine is due at the end of this week so Hildegard’s swansong will be our unique Nettle and Ginger ice cream. We would like to say a big thankyou to our intrepid nettle-pickers who braved stingers and swarms of flies on Monday to pluck a whopping 15 kilos of nettle tops – under the intrigued gaze of the dairy cows.

The replacement should improve our potting experience in many ways, although the design of Hildegard was particularly suited to filling our jars, so we are hoping it won’t be two steps forward one step back!

The beef cattle, who have been out all winter eating baled hay, are now definitely finding that hay bales are very ‘last month’ and the grass is indisputably greener on the other side. Somehow, the electric fencing doesn’t seem to be working as well as it was a few weeks ago!

Schemes and incentives

The whole farm has been in a Higher Level Stewardship Scheme for 20 years which has kept the majority of the land in grass with just a small amount of arable. That scheme is now coming to an end, and we are looking to the government’s new Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) to see if we can replace some of that income. Like every other farm over 50 hectares we will need to get organised before the scheme opens on September 1^st - when the funds are supposedly handed out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis – watch out for news stories about servers crashing!

As you will know, if you are a regular reader of our updates, our beef herd has been decimated in recent years with large losses at repeated TB tests.

So, with fewer cattle and land still to farm, we are now looking at a more mixed rotation, similar to the ones we used in the 1990s in the early days of our Organic conversion. Experience has shown us that organic arable can be challenging, and we will be sad to see some of our grass ploughed up, but it is nice to know we will be growing good quality healthy food for vegetarians as well as meat-eaters and doing our bit for food security in these uncertain times.

Although we do not have any of our own sheep any more, you may spot some on the farm over the summer. They will have popped across the brook from next door Fennemore farms on a grazing license.

Birds, bees and butterflies

One thing that won’t have changed is our deep interest in, and commitment to, conservation and wildlife

This certainly seems to be a good year for bumble bees, always a sight to gladden the heart, and there are also lots of birds around singing their hearts out in the hedges just now. The other day we heard one we didn’t recognise, and having left our phones and Merlin Apps behind, James decided the call went something like – ‘hick-jrrk’. He repeated this to Jeremy who immediately identified it as a French Partridge – who needs Merlin when you have Jeremy!

Sadly, the song of the curlew has not been heard this year on Bestmoor. Maybe we have come to the end of an era…

Sam Brown, who surveyed our bat populations last year, and I have hatched a plan to undertake a butterfly survey on the farm. The idea is to plot a number of routes around the farm and to call for volunteers to walk those routes at regular intervals over the spring and summer looking for butterflies and recording what they see. If you think you would be interested in being one of our butterfly route walkers please do get in touch with us at farmoffice@northastonfarms.co.uk