Entrepreneurs are often looking for the newest business opportunity – but for one Northern Ireland farmer, an old-fashioned approach is paying off
A young dairy farmer in Northern Ireland has revived the once-popular doorstep deliveries of fresh milk in glass bottles in his local town.
For Gareth Baird, who helps run the family’s Carnrassie Farm on the northern edge of Carrickfergus, it was an essential way to add value to the family property, and to help him find a way to work on the farm full-time.
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Gareth Baird helps run the family farm in Carrickfergus
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The Bairds milk around 150 cows, normally supplying their milk to mozzarella manufacturer Glanbia Cheese – but ever since completing an agriculture course at Greenmount College Gareth had ambitions to start his own milk round.
“We needed to boost the farm income to justify me coming come from college to farm full-time,” Baird says.
“Increasing the cow numbers was not an option here so we had to find an alternative. Although I’m the third generation here I’m the first one to work full-time on the farm as my father and grandfather also worked in other jobs as well as farming.
“I’ve always thought about bottling our own milk and, after a great deal of research, we decided to start up the new side of the business in July [2020]. This meant setting up a pasteuriser and a bottling plant, washer and steriliser. It also meant obtaining all the correct hygiene certificates to get started,” he says.
High demand
With Baird, 22, currently delivering a total of 1,600 litre bottles of milk a week to households within a five mile (8km) radius of the farm, it looks like that bold step is paying off.
The herd of predominating Fleckvieh cows has an average yield of 7,500 litres per cow per year at 4.35 per cent butterfat and 3.35 per cent protein.
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1,600 litre bottles of milk are being delivered a week
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Grass is plentiful on the farm’s 115 acres (46.5 hectares), which are all in one block, as it is located close to Northern Ireland’s east coast in a superb grass growing area.
“We have some Friesian cows in the herd, too, but we are now more switching to the Fleckvieh breed,” Baird adds.
“I find the Fleckvieh is more suited to the grazing, is hardier and produces better quality milk.”
The Bairds source their own specially-labelled one-litre sized glass bottles to increase the sustainability of the enterprise and eliminate the use of the typical plastic container that milk is normally supplied in.
The family launched Baird’s Fresh Farm Milk in July 2020, with a soft launch on social media – even though Northern Ireland was already well into the COVID-19 era at the time. “The response we received from Facebook when we launched was totally overwhelming,” Baird says.
“Our goal was to go out with 30 bottles on that first night’s delivery, but the response was so good we delivered 120 bottles that night.
“Following a deluge of requests for milk on Facebook and word of mouth advertising we had to stop taking orders to try and sort out the deliveries within Carrickfergus first.”
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Social media was a huge driver of success
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New pastures
Baird’s Farm Fresh Milk is pasteurised, not homogenised, which some say keeps it creamier and a good match for cereals and in tea and coffee. The family uses a pasteuriser with a capacity of 500 litres to batch process the milk.
Deliveries are on Monday and Thursday evenings and that means it’s all systems go for Gareth, who relies heavily on family members to help get the milk to the doorsteps.
“At the moment we have four vehicles out delivering milk on the two nights,” Baird says.
“It is great family members want to help out. We hope to streamline the deliveries later on and have three branded vehicles out four hours each per night.”
With Carrickfergus deliveries well optimised, Baird is now ready to take on new customers in neighbouring areas.
“We are the only people delivering milk in Carrickfergus and are now opening up the order books again so customers in the neighbouring areas such as Whitehead can receive milk too,” he says.
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Plans are in place to expand the products available
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It is only whole milk in blue top glass bottles that is currently for sale at £1.20 (A$2.27) per litre from the Bairds, but there are plans in place to build a new processing facility that can separate the milk.
“We are planning to build a completely new dairy unit and processing plant on a green field site here on the farm. I hope to have the processing unit built first by January 2022,” Baird said at the time of the interview.
“A new separator will be installed, which will let us produce skimmed milk and creams.
“There are also plans to add a new dairy unit beside the processing plant with a 20-point swing-over parlour, which should reduce milking times down to just over one hour.
“Right now, we use a six-point parlour with no ACRs, installed in the ‘70s, and it can take almost four hours each milking. A new parlour will save us a lot of time milking and give us more time processing and delivering.
“The overall goal is to build up a good delivery round and sell most of our milk this way, therefore, we need to invest in infrastructure now to achieve that goal.”