EVERYTHING that has progressed with Evolution Farming in the past six years would not have been possible if Tom Rawson hadn ’ t attended a meeting in 2014 when Arla were touting for dairy farmers .

‘ I ’ d gone along just to hear what they had to say ,’ says Tom , whose business in partnership with Charlie Crotty just keeps expanding with dairy herds now in several counties . ‘ If anything had happened , perhaps if one of our kids had been ill or something had come up , I wouldn ’ t have been there . It was quite a weird twist of fate , but that same night I signed that bit of paper to become a member and signed over the milk from both our centres at the time – here at Thornhill Hall Farm near Dewsbury and the other at Market Rasen .’

‘ We ’ d been with First Milk in Lincolnshire and Buckleys here . Arla were needing to recruit farmers at the time to get the UK as part of the full cooperative and needed a bigger quantity of farmers to put money in to join to secure the deal .’

Tom ’ s father Gary had been a farm manager before taking on Thornhill Hall Farm in 1991 where he started milking 50 cows with his wife Linda . Tom

came back from his studies at Harper Adams in 1999 and worked on the farm , but his first game changer was in going to a New Zealand-based discussion group meeting with a couple of local farmers , Simon Kellett and Malcolm Fewster .

‘ That ’ s how I got into paddock grazing , making milk from grass . Until then I had been focused on achieving high yields . We were into organic conversion at the time also , which I pushed .’

Tom ’ s second game changer was being awarded a Nuffield Scholarship in 2005 .

‘ It enabled me to travel to America , Australia and New Zealand , which was interesting learning particularly about the New Zealand ways of farming . That ’ s where I learned about selling your other farm machinery and concentrating on milking cows . It ’ s also where milk from pasture became more important to me .’

‘ When I came back home I sold off a lot of surplus machinery and brought in contractors for most of the field work . Those sales allowed me to buy more cows and we went up to 200 .’

Tom also changed his herd shape and size by crossbreeding from Holsteins using a Jersey on to them .