ANDREW Leggott is straight to the point over what pushes his buttons at White House Farm , Great Smeaton where he runs a herd of 420 dairy cows and 250 young stock on 270 acres , with a further 280 acres rented , growing wheat , maize and grass . It ’ s his Cocklewood Pedigree Holsteins and what they produce and how he has learned how to get the best out of them while keeping them happy that does trick .

“ It ’ s about production for me . It gives me a kick to see a really good cow giving a lot of milk . Over the years we ’ ve put a lot of genetics in , particularly from the mid to late 90s with the Holstein breed coming in . We got a flush of milk then and thought this is brilliant , but then the next generation and the next after that were giving even more and our management hadn ’ t caught up with that increase .

“ We weren ’ t feeding these cows right and they were trying to give us more and more , but we had the same facilities that we ’ d had for the old British Friesians that were more of a crossbreed , and we had a whole new learning curve .

“ We started growing maize , keeping cows inside , mixing by-products and straights to get a more energy-rich diet into them because their fertility and quality of milk was suffering , and the feed

we had been giving them wasn ’ t giving them the energy . These cows DNA is to milk . We had to match that with our own commitment to them .

“ Ever since I was a very small child dairy farming has been a passion of mine . I remember nearly everything that my dad and his young brother Simon , who has now sadly passed away , talked about .

Production is one thing , having the right facilities was always what Andrew realised was needed , but they also needed to invest at difficult times , particularly in the days of milk quota when the quota trade was a stock market all of its own .

“ We needed money at the time , firstly to buy milk quota . At that point you had to buy milk quota and that made it hard to put many cows on . It was difficult and financially restrictive .

Andrew points to the open market for milk in having become a seminal moment for his father , but not right at the start .

“ At the end of the Milk Marketing Board my father was initially a ‘ stick together ’ man and we went with Milk Marque for the first 2-3 years . But dad was doing a few figures and the price difference the coops were giving and Northern Foods Milk Partnership , that became the Arla we have today , with their little ha ’ penny a litre they were tempting us with got to

him as the coops of Milk Marque and Milk Link couldn ’ t narrow that gap .

“ Father basically said to the Milk Marque representative . ‘ If your wife went out to work and brought in an income and you were throwing it away on your job , what would you think ? Because my mother ’ s salary was what the difference was in milk price between Milk Marque and Northern Foods , so we went with Northern or Express as it was by then .

“ We ’ ve stuck with ARLA and around a decade ago , like many other dairy farmers , we got the opportunity to be members of ARLA rather than just suppliers . It cost us a bit of money to get in but that pales into insignificance with the benefits you get .

“ Now we get the dividend , can produce as much as we like and they will pay the same amount for every litre . We ’ ve doubled our litres since we became members .

Andrew tells a similar tale to many about the vagaries of the milk price , but on the whole he ’ s happier with his lot than not .

“ The milk price recently has been a bit like a tsunami , first ridiculously one way and then ridiculously another . We got up to 52ppl . Never seen that before . The trouble was we were getting paid a

fantastic amount of money for the milk and most of them had contracts with feed companies at realistic prices , so the margins were fantastic .

“ Then your feed prices caught up , but then your milk price started coming down and it ’ s now about 40ppl . It has gone a little bit better these last few months but through all of last year it was an absolute nightmare with the milk price plumetting and feed costs stubbornly high .

Andrew believes that the milk price will always have volatility and is at least more reassured overall that White House Farm is in the best place it can be with Arla and with what he is constantly doing with the farm to keep it up to the minute and with his eyes firmly fixed on the prize , of production .

“ Now it ’ s about infrastructure . We went into robots in 2007 with 3 Lely Astronauts . We had around 150-170 cows at the time . In 2019 we upgraded to Fullwood robots . You base your numbers of robots on yield , not on cow numbers , and these cows are yielding an average of 13,000 kilos . We have 8 robots and we are milking 380 out of the 420 in the herd , that ’ s probably the maximum you can milk through 8 at that yield .

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