All things Dairy

Location
southwest
im not going to be popular for saying this, and i am just pointing out some truths not painting everyone with the same brush, but as an industry when it comes to inspections and record keeping we have it pretty easy. Think of what everyone else up the foodchain has to do to be able to just keep the place running. Sign at every corner, immaculate work floors and production lines, endless amounts of signing in and signing out, labelling and procedures that they have to go through multiple time a year, machinery that has to be updated every few years and maintained spotless.
And now think of us as the primary source of where food comes from how we can get away with shabby paperwork, slightly made up application records for muck and fertiliser, dust and cobwebs building up everywhere, medicine cabinets hardly holding together, bottles of penicillin left about having used the same needle 10 times over. if something get contaminated at the source that is severe and should be regulated as such. I am afraid I don' sympathise with anyone that thinks that a bit of extra paperwork and tidiness is unreasonable.

I think you're a bit out of touch with the reality of how Dairy Processors operate.

Ten minute visit once a year from EH, other than that, it's down to how often and to what standard their customers Audit them.

Tesco is a toughie with perhaps up to three Auditors on site for 2 days but you know weeks in advance when they're likely to turn up. The last RT audit I was involved in, the auditor never left the QA manager's office (was there for about two hours. And if you can't pass a Coop inspection, you must be really bad.
 

vantage

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
Pembs
im not going to be popular for saying this, and i am just pointing out some truths not painting everyone with the same brush, but as an industry when it comes to inspections and record keeping we have it pretty easy. Think of what everyone else up the foodchain has to do to be able to just keep the place running. Sign at every corner, immaculate work floors and production lines, endless amounts of signing in and signing out, labelling and procedures that they have to go through multiple time a year, machinery that has to be updated every few years and maintained spotless.
And now think of us as the primary source of where food comes from how we can get away with shabby paperwork, slightly made up application records for muck and fertiliser, dust and cobwebs building up everywhere, medicine cabinets hardly holding together, bottles of penicillin left about having used the same needle 10 times over. if something get contaminated at the source that is severe and should be regulated as such. I am afraid I don' sympathise with anyone that thinks that a bit of extra paperwork and tidiness is unreasonable.
And still they managed to get horse into beef mince!
Afraid the last bit of your post is rather extreme regarding needles and medicines, certainly not true here.
 
Location
East Mids
If a Tesco store didn't have enough staff to sell food safely it would shut until it could. I know we like to think ourselves different but if we don't have enough manpower to do the job properly we need to do the job differently until we can.
so we shut for 6 weeks, yeah right. The farming was done perfectly effectively there were no compromises to either animal welfare or food safety. All that happened was some bulk containers for baler twine, netwrap etc didn't get emptied so they overflowed and the muck that fell off the trailer onto the stackyard didn't get picked up (by hand). Nothing exactly mindblowingly important.
 
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som farmer

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
somerset
we have a friend, who was CEO of a very large helicopter business, selling machines world wide, visited while i was doing our 'iacs' claim form, he was interested, so explained it, his comment, ' l sell helicopters, all over the world, with less than 20% of that crap'. I many ways farming is lucky, however many people would like us to disappear, they cannot do without us. Plus we are the primary source of food, it leaves our farms, and is 'processed' before it hits the public, even milk is pasteurised, frozen veg, any bugs killed off in flash freeze, very little ends up on a kitchen table, with out being sterilised, heat treated etc. Plus everybody above us, in the food chain, knows they cannot push us down any further on price, so perhaps we do get a light touch. Certainly a works floor, should be very different to ours, like covered in sh1t. And of course, we all know imported food is not necessarily produced, to our UK standards. We can never make our farms clean and spotless, it's totally impossible, if animals are on site, but that is no excuse for farming in a 'sh1thole', which we all know of some. Audits generally find a genial balance, and l would rather be told 'off' about buckets in the parlour, than told to renew concrete etc, but the complete and utter stupidity of some of the 'tick box' stuff, is both useless, and pointless. And then there are the 'jobsworth' auditors, we had a lady, as said earlier, we fell out big time, and l made a formal complaint, she came on the repeat visit, with her boss/manager, things went very well, and we passed, virtually none of the major fails, had been done, and lots of 'minors' the same, nothing mentioned.
 
Location
southwest
What Planet are some people living on? Tesco shut stores rather than operate in an unsafe manner? You're having a laugh.

What happens to milk deliveries during the run up to Christmas when the store's chillers are full? Leave it in the yard outside the back door-same in the summer if the store's in a holiday area.

We complained so much about Tesco breaking the chill chain that our MD had to tell us to back off.
 
Location
West Wales
D19AA25E-5D56-4390-AE88-4A6C3600AB3E.jpeg

Ready for first cut. Ended up with an extra inch on the floor which cost us an extra 20 cube but suspect long term we won’t be complaining
 

DairyGrazing

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
North West
From the governments farming is changing document. Regulation will be that all slurry stores need to be covered.

I'm guessing tipping box muck on the lagoon until it stops smelling isn't going to count!

1617899158660.png
 

DairyGrazing

Member
Mixed Farmer
Location
North West
My reading of that is that the new regs will cover (ie apply to) all slurry stores

Yeah agreed. I think their end game will probably be tanks or covered towers. I had planned on doing a 2 million gallon clay lagoon this summer but i'm holding off until we know more.

I can't see how a floating cover will work in practice or a shed over a clay lagoon either.
 
Location
West Wales
Ran out of panels for the left side?

going to have it as one big pad for the moment and use free standing a walls when funds allow. We’re using the money saved on more cow tracks,troughs and a slatted tank so the auto scrapers don’t over shoot.

it will also give us more flexibility with blocks of land we have that come available for later cuts but not inline with the rest so we can then just open a little section instead of a full pit.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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  • Up to 25%

    Votes: 65 34.9%
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    Votes: 30 16.1%
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  • 75-100%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

    Votes: 6 3.2%

Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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