Willow Tree Farm

Follow Willow Tree Farm if you are interested in:

• Going completely soy-free
• Making better use of muck and slurry
• Reducing waste and antibiotic use by changing the herd’s living space 
• Using genomic testing to help target genetic investment

Overview

Willow Tree, located near Northallerton in North Yorkshire, is farmed by the Pattison family. 

Our farm

The farm extends across 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 6,350 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.

Our herd

The herd consists of around 280 cows with an average yield of 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, which are 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.

Our journey

Howard and Tom are looking to continue their journey towards net zero, sharing key learnings and previous successes with others through on-farm and digital meetings. They will be exploring how to use less fertiliser, reduce waste and make better use of genomic testing.

News and past events

• Tackling mastitis and enhancing efficiency at a Yorkshire dairy farm (December 2024) Howard and Tom’s journey over the first two years of the Strategic Dairy Farm program, highlighting their efforts to tackle mastitis and how this process revealed additional challenges within the herd.

• Mastitis control: Small changes, big results (April 2023) A year into their work with James Breen, Howard and Tom are starting to see the benefits in their North Yorkshire herd.

• Reducing mastitis in the dairy herd (February 2023) Howard and Tom have been working with James Breen to tackle the number of cases of mastitis in cows +30 days in milk in their North Yorkshire herd (YouTube, 2 minutes).

• Using efficiency to improve your environmental credentials (October 2022) Willow Tree is part of a series of new farms that will focus on environmental impact by exploring ways to improve their businesses, while also reducing their carbon footprints. Howard and Tom tell us more about their farm in North Yorkshire.

• New environment-focused strategic farms (June 2022) Introducing AHDB’s environment-focused strategic dairy farm, Willow Tree Farm. They are committed to advancing their journey toward net zero, aiming to share valuable insights and past successes with others. Their focus includes reducing fertiliser use, minimising waste, and optimising genomic testing practices.

Press

British Dairying: How one dairy Farm has boosted yields and cut mastitis (December 2024) The journey the Pattison family have been on during the first two years of Strategic Dairy Farm programme, including how they were tackling mastitis and how this opened up other obstacles within the herd.

Yorkshire Post: The Yorkshire dairy farm which is still milking the good times (May 2024) Looking back at the story of the Pattison family and the history of Willow Tree Farm.

Darlington and Stockton Times: Northallerton dairy farmers demonstrate journey to net zero (October 2023) How Northallerton farmers Howard and Tom began their journey toward making Willow Tree Farm net zero.

Northern Farmer: Northallerton dairy farmers demonstrate journey to net zero (October 2023) How Yorkshire farmers, Howard and Tom started their journey to become a net zero operation.

Yorkshire Post: How intensive farming is reducing carbon footprint for a North Yorkshire dairy farm (March 2023) Howard and Tom, who have carried their family dairy farming business into its fifth generation, are sharing their journey to reduce their carbon footprint.

AHDB launches ‘strategic farms’ to support net zero dairy (June 2022) After a successful recruitment campaign, AHDB announced new strategic farms that would be working towards achieving net zero on their farms.

Explore our other strategic dairy farms