North Yorkshire: Willow Tree Farm - Strategic Dairy Farm Launch

Join us for an on-farm meeting to launch our new strategic dairy farm, Willow Tree Farm, owned and run by Howard and Tom Pattison.

Willow Tree Farm joins an exciting programme of new strategic dairy farms that will be providing a focus on environmental issues.

First and foremost, Willow Tree Farm is a successful dairy business, but as members of Arla’s 360 programme, Howard and Tom have already taken significant steps to reduce their carbon footprint.

The day will feature a tour of the farm and an opportunity to find out more from Howard and Tom about their operation, performance figures and goals for the next three years. Paul Savage, Arla's Director of Member and Agri Commercial Operations, will also be talking about Arla's 360 programme and their sustainability goals moving forward.

You will also learn about: 

• How Willow Tree Farm has managed to go completely soy free, recognising that soya has a high carbon footprint and is not likely to be an option in the future 

• How the team are looking to use less fertiliser and make better use of slurry and muck 

• How the team are trying to reduce waste and antibiotic use by changing the herd’s living space 

• How the team is using genomic testing to help target their genetic investment.

Please note children under the age of 16 and dogs are not allowed at the event, even if they are staying in the car. Click here to find out more about AHDBs health and safety guidelines for events.

About Willow Tree Farm

Howard Pattison farms with his family at Willow Tree Farm, Northallerton. They run a 280-cow herd with an average yield of around 11,500 litres. Cows are milked twice daily in a herringbone parlour, calve all year round, and are fully housed. The cows are arranged into four milking sheds and two milking groups with one dry cow group.

About 150 replacement heifers are reared on-farm while beef calves are sold at around six weeks of age. Replacement heifers are served at 13 months, and in-calf heifers graze during the summer months.

Milking cow accommodation is provided in modern portal frame sheds fitted with 324 deep sand cubicles and integral feeding passages. Passages are tractor scraped with slurry deposited in an adjacent, concrete block-built slurry store.

Youngstock occupies a variety of sheds, mostly straw yards producing farmyard manure.

The farm extends to 162 hectares, growing a mixture of grass, winter wheat and maize. All cropping on the farm is fed to the dairy herd and followers.

Slurry is stored in two stores with a total capacity of 6350 m3 and utilised as fertiliser for the forage crops. Parlour washings and any yard water run-off is collected in a separate dirty water system and distributed to fields via a mobile irrigator. Access passages and scraped areas between sheds have been covered reducing the slurry storage capacity requirement. Slurry is applied to grassland at the rate of 28 m3/ha after all four cuts of silage.

About Strategic Dairy Farms

Strategic dairy farms aim to help farmers learn from each other through regular on-farm meetings where key performance data is shared and what the best farmers are doing is showcased.

They form part of the Optimal Dairy Systems programme which aims to help dairy farmers reduce costs and increase efficiency by focusing on either a tight block or all-year-round calving system.

The growing network of strategic dairy farms have calculated KPIs for their enterprises which are shared at meetings and published online. These are physical and financial performance measures that are critical to success. Farmers can benchmark their businesses against these KPIs to help identify areas for improvement.