The start of the year is always quiet for ice-cream sales – one of the reasons why we are expanding the product range – but thanks to Valentine’s Day, the business enjoys a small surge in February.
Handmade love-themed cakes (think chocolate, strawberries and vanilla but in ice-cream) have proved a popular romantic treat in the past, so our creative “milkologists” stocked up this year at the start of the month.
Unfortunately, the first batch of 10 cakes melted when the display cabinet door was accidently left open overnight, which meant £150 straight down the drain – very frustrating.
However, the remaining cakes sold well and we continue to be grateful to our customers for supporting our dairy diversification.
Artisan ice-cream is perhaps an easy product to support, but happily the importance of buying local is building momentum regionally as well as nationally.
From the high profile, celebrity-led television programmes such as Friday Night Feast (Channel 4), where ardent provenance pushers Jamie Oliver and Jimmy Doherty champion an array of home-grown produce from British charcuterie to silver-skinned herring, to a new “real meals” company, Highland Cookhouse, and a brand new blog and online resource “linking farm to fork”, www.farmerjones.co.uk.
Launched just last week, the face of the Farmer Jones project is former dairy farmer, countryside enthusiast and all-round agricultural buff Richard Jones.
For the past decade, Richard Jones has been countryside correspondent for three regional radio stations and is now using his media experience and passion for farming to reconnect communities with where their food comes from.
“Too often consumers will go into their local supermarket and pick up a plastic pack from the shelf and have no idea where it has come from and how it has been produced,” Mr Jones believes.
To remedy this, Farmer Jones will feature news updates and interviews with industry leaders and celebrity chefs. Mr Jones will also work closely with Scotland Food and Drink, Quality Meat Scotland, NFU Scotland and the Royal Highland Education Trust to provide cutting edge and interactive content.
The project was founded and designed to deliver “important messages within the farming, food and drink industries in a way that everyone can understand and engage with” and Mr Jones says he will also be working closely with government bodies to promote the agricultural industry amongst young people “as this is essential to the survival of the farming industry”; worthy goals Nick and I wholeheartedly support.
Farmer Jones would be pleased to hear then that his mission is already on the early years’ school curriculum; at least it is in our part of the world anyway.
Daisy’s current interdisciplinary learning topic is coincidentally “from farm to fork” and last week we hosted a farm trip here for her P1/2/3 class so they could see the theory put into practice.
The trip started with a look around the top shed to see the dry cows and new calves – the tiny three-day old Jersey calf proving particularly popular – followed by a visit to the hens to collect eggs and with the children all clamouring to pick the birds up.
Then it was time for the milking. Having shut off one side of the parlour for the kids to watch from, Nick and his cattleman demonstrated how the cows were milked on the opposite side. Most of the class were fascinated by the process and amazed by the size of the Holsteins; Nick was amazed by the amount of questions they all asked.
Finally, we showed them the converted calf houses where the ice-cream and yoghurt will soon be made.
It was a pity that the new production kitchen wasn’t up and running for the visit as this would have demonstrated the entire process of farm to fork (or spoon!) for the children perfectly, but Nick has only just managed to track down a pasteuriser in Bath, which is winging its way north as I write.
Naturally we were more concerned about the unfinished production facility than the kids who were just happy to tuck into a tub of ice-cream at the end of the trip.
Sadly, the class were a few days late in meeting Mr Tumble (Daisy’s name for the farm’s strawberry blonde Simmental-cross bull) who was put to market on account of recurring feet problems. Sold (deadweight) for beef, this would have been another prime example linking farm to fork, although not quite as nice for 5-7-year-olds to learn about as the ice-cream.
Another enterprise in our area making the link from farm to fork is new freshly frozen “real meals” provider, Highland Cookhouse.
Working out of purpose-built kitchens in the market town of Dingwall, Highland Cookhouse launched at the beginning of the year and is driven by the three founding principles of provenance, sustainability and wellbeing.
Putting Richard Jones’s manifesto into practice, the founders have handpicked local farmers, growers and artisan food producers to supply the best foods in season to create their range of freshly cooked meals. This takes care of provenance and sustainability.
Wellbeing addresses the care their suppliers take in producing the food in terms of animal welfare and quality standards, while the meals themselves are chilled and blast frozen to maximise flavour and eliminate the need for any preservatives or additives; looking after the consumer’s wellbeing.
Their team of chefs cook up a dozen or so dishes from scratch including shepherd’s pie using lamb from nearby Clunes Farm, macaroni cheese using Dunlop cheddar from Connage Highland Dairy and meatballs in ragu sauce using beef from farmers rearing cattle around the Moray Firth.
And once our pasteuriser is installed here at the farm, they will be using our creamy milk in some of the meals too. Indeed, a number of our ice-cream trade customers (cafes and restaurants) have expressed interest in taking our milk for cooking with.
Now we just need to get the production kitchen up and running . . . fingers crossed for next month.
NEXT MONTH: on-farm milk production (we hope!).
Rootfield Farm is on the Black Isle, 10 miles north of Inverness, where Jo lives with husband Nick, a fourth-generation dairy farmer, their daughters Daisy and Mollie, and 150 cows