Peter is joined by Tim Fussell from Fussel's Fine Foods and Rachel and Chris Knowles from Trink Dairy to discuss 'adding value'.
In this episode Peter talks to Tim Fussell from Fussel's Fine Foods in Somerset and Rachel and Chris Knowles from Trink Dairy in Conrwall about 'adding value' and the journeys that each respective business has been on.
In this second series of Farming Focus we're asking the question 'does my farm have a future?'.
Farming Focus is the podcast for farmers in the South West of England, but is relevant for farmers outside of the region or indeed anyone in the wider industry or who has an interest in food and farming.
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Timestamps
00:01 Cornish Mutual jingle
00:14 Peter Green introduces the show
00:51 Peter's Future Farm in 60 seconds
02:00 Peter introduces today's guests
02:27 Tim Fussell introduces his business
03:41 Rachel Knowles introduces Trink Dairy.
04:22 Chris Knowles talks about the herd.
05:29 Trink Dairy selling direct
06:48 Understanding the pit falls.
08:03 Fussel's Fine Foods - why they started to add value.
10:57 Be led by people who know better than you.
12:03 Staffing at Trink Dairy.
14:42 Staffing at Fussel's Fine Foods.
18:12 Future of Fussel's Fine Foods.
20:15 The Future for Trink Dairy.
21:28 The role of adding value in the future of farming.
23:09 Jingle
23:17 Showstoppers
25:31 Messages to take away
26:46 Three words that farmers will need in the future.
28:04 Peter rounds up.
Cornish Mutual. Farming insurance experts.
Hello and welcome to Farming Focus, the podcast for southwest farmers brought to you by Cornish Mutual. I am your host Peter Green and today's podcast focus is adding value. How can you add value to your produce? What obstacles have others faced in doing so? And what role might this have for the future of farming?
I'll introduce my guests in a bit, but to start each episode, I'm sharing one thing that I'm doing on my farm to help it thrive into the future. And I have to do this in less than a minute. It's time for Peter's future farm in 60 seconds. Start the clock.
Since 2017 I've been selling meat boxes from my farm. Friends enjoyed some surplus sausages so much that I tried selling some beef. We've never advertised but now sell around five bodies of beef each year and have around 100 customers. In truth, once the costs are taken into account the margin is comparable with selling live weight but for me there are two benefits that are hard to quantify.
Number one, I have more control. I've become a price maker, not a price taker. And by only selling a defined mix of cuts, we have very low waste. Number two, the thing that I find most rewarding is meeting the customer. I hear feedback, which has influenced our aging, butchery, rearing, and even our breed selection.
I can have a conversation with members of my local community. Explaining why our cattle are grass fed and finished, how the beef is carbon negative and how by eating this product they're helping nature and are supporting our family business as it heads into its second century. So let's turn now to our main topic.
Adding value. I'm joined today by representatives of two farming operations who have added value to their primary produce in different ways. Tim Fussell from Fussell's Fine Foods near Froome in Somerset and the Knowles family, Rachel and Chris from Trink Dairy, which is just outside St. Ives in Cornwall.
Tim, welcome to the show. Your family have been farming in Somerset for generations. Uh, could you just introduce yourself and Fussell's Fine Foods, please? We're third generation. So it's my brother and myself. My brother is a farmer and I ran away I didn't get involved in farming or anything agricultural wise for a long time I ran away to the French Alps and became a ski instructor for 20 years, but that's another story We set up Fossils Fine Foods in around about 2007 2008 As a result of the price of oilseed rape, uh, falling through the floor at that particular time, it was an important part of our rotation.
We grew a three crop rotation in those days, wheat, barley, and oilseed rape. And, um, the price fell to, it was a long time ago now, but I think it was below a hundred pounds a ton, no longer commercially viable to grow. So we had to find a way to add value to something that we already had. We didn't co pressing.
And we came up with Fussels Fine Foods and here we are 17 years later, 16, 17 years later with a brand which we supply into food service and a few supermarkets and we continue to just keep going, really. Tim, thanks very much for that. Rachel, Chris, welcome to the show. Rachel, can you start by just introducing Trink Dairy to our listeners, please?
Yeah, so Trink Dairy is a family run herd. predominantly spring carving grass based system. In 2016 we started Selling pasteurized milk direct to the public under our brand name and drink dairy limited And since then it has gone from strength to strength brilliant. That's fantastic So what sort of um platform are you working off?
How many cows are you milking? Um, I know that, uh, Chris has just about made it to the seat in time for the start of the recording of the podcast. You are clearly very busy people. If you could just give us maybe a bit more background on, on the, the herd, Chris. Yeah, sure. There's about 300 cows in the herd, roughly 250 of those cows calve right now.
So, so the very end of February and through March, um, the other 50 we, uh, calve in October. to provide the milk that we bottle in the winter. We farm about 500 usable acres, of which about half of that is, is here in one block, that's used for the grazing, and the other half of the land is used for silage and, um, and heifer rearing.
We rear about 50 heifers a year that we bring into the herd. We've got a kind of a reasonably small cow, use the Frisian cow, and we've crossed, we've crossed a lot with the Jersey. So we've got a crossbred cow, which is ideal for grazing and producing high quality milk. Something I'm interested in as well is that you're selling, correct me if I'm wrong, primarily to the consumer.
Whereas Tim, I believe is doing a lot of sort of wholesaling into retailers. So Rachel, if you could give us a little bit of information on that, please. Yeah. So we started selling milk direct to the public in. the autumn of 2016. Um, and I called it market research. So for three months, we sold milk from a pop up honesty fridge in our garage at the house, which is a field away from the dairy to understand if people would enjoy the flavor and texture of our milk, because it's very different to shop bought commercially available milk.
And also to see if they would, um, pay the premium, or no, pay the honest price of what it's worth actually, it's not the premium. Yeah, with fairly small quantities and I'm kind of embarrassed to say what I did for three months, but you know, each day I could only pasteurize 15 liters at a time. And to pasteurize 15 liters in our converted utility room into a pasteurizing room, it took me four hours from driving up to the boat tank.
To bringing it back to the house to pasteurizing it and to finishing labeling with a milk ready for sale in the fridge. But you had to, you had to do that to find out how that process was going to work. That's what, that's what strikes me about that. You can think about an idea, but actually, until you put it into practice and try it out, it's very difficult to really understand what the pitfalls are going to be and what's going to work and what's not.
Absolutely, because it was nothing that I'd learnt at college. Um, it's nothing that our family had ever done and then there was very few farmers doing it. So, in the September, I, I um, took a week away from the farm. I went to the Women in Dairy Conference up at Worcestershire. It was on the Wednesday. But I left Cornwall on the Monday morning and I didn't get back till Friday night.
Um, and I visited as many dairies as I could. upcountry, because that's the only way we can go from down here, that we're pasteurizing or selling raw milk using vending machines. I visited two vending machine sales, uh, the companies that sell them, um, and I just learned as much as I could in one week and that was, you know, Invaluable.
Yeah. So, so both sides of the market. So people that were in the space that you wanted to be in, that we're selling the product, but also what the consumer wanted as well, getting both sides of that coin was, was really critical at the beginning of that process. So Tim coming to you, we've talked there a lot about trading direct to consumer, but can you tell us a little bit about setting up Fossils Fine Foods in 2005?
Why did you want to add value and is it mainly a wholesale operation or are you retailing as well? Trying to find your best route to market was not always the first route to market that you chose. So for example, we thought The easiest and best way was to sell through retail to the, to the end user. So we came up with our, our product was branded around a 500 mil bottle, which we would sell at farmer's markets.
And we started off selling at farmer's markets. That was the only route to market. So we used to take, uh, boxes of our 500 mil rapeseed oil. put it on a table and try and sell as much as we possibly could. Uh, we were, we were quite lucky in the, in the early days we became involved with organizations like Taste of the West and the Guild of Fine Foods and organizations like that.
But we thought the only route to market for us would be through retail and to the end user. And I can, I can remember quite clearly and what happens is as you go through time, as things change and you end up changing direction, You remember these, these instances and I can remember I was phoning up the people we were buying a glass of and we started buying it in pallet loads of glass.
So I bought this pallet load of glass and then just as I was about to put the telephone down, the guy says, I've got a really good deal on some 5 litre tins. Do you want to buy some 5 litre tins? And I said, why on earth? And I got a bit, you know, I thought I've been doing this for 12 months or whatever.
Why on earth would I want 5 litre tins? And he said, uh, he said, what about your food service customers? And I went, uh, food service? I didn't know what food service, I didn't know what food service was. And he goes, you don't sell your oil in 500ml to pubs and restaurants and all the rest of it. What about food service?
And I suddenly thought of all the pubs and hotels and all this kind of stuff. So I said, uh, okay, fine, uh, I'll have a, I'll buy a pallet of tins then, not knowing whether it was a good price or a bad price or whatever. And I can remember then I went to my brother and I said, you wouldn't believe it. Um, he said, when's that glass arriving?
I said, the glass will be here next week. And I said, I'll tell you what else. I've bought a pallet of tins. And he goes, you, what, what have you, what have you bought a pallet of tins for? Are you mad? So anyway, we now sell more five litres and we've now got those five litre tins then morphed from a five litre tin, which we still do.
And that goes to retail to a five liter plastic, which goes into food service. We sell more of those than anything else. Do you know, Tim, just to jump in there and I'll come back to you to finish off the question that I asked you, but it's really interesting. That's a bit of a theme that we've seen this series.
It's that readiness to take opportunities to come up as they arise. It might be an idea that you haven't had. It might not be anything that you would have even thought that your business was going to end up doing. Making sure your business is in a position to just jump to take a leap. Someone offers you an opportunity to be able to take it.
It's huge, isn't it? I think you have to be prepared to be led by people who know better than you, you know, when you get involved in the other side of our, our business, we You know, our core business is growing food, but then getting involved in the other side in order to market it and sell it to the public.
The other people who've been doing that have been doing it for a lot, lot longer than us, so we've gotta listen to them and we've gotta learn from them. And we've gotta try and figure out how to, in some cases, do it better than them so that our point Can stand out on the shelf, uh, et cetera, et cetera. So you, you do, it's this sort of, it's this ongoing cycle of going, right, let's have a look at that.
Let's see what that means. Let's see where we can go with it. But what it also means is if that avenue Isn't working, you got to know when to stop, you know, you don't want to be, um, going up a blind alley all the time, just because somebody says it's a good idea coming back to you, Rachel and Chris, I think I'm right in saying that your daughter, Maddie is coming into the business.
How has the profile of staffing on the business and, uh, the different roles evolved, I guess, particularly. In, in your tenure sort of managing the farm. So from, from my point of view, um, I came to the family business 20 years ago now, and I became what our youngest daughter described as an office farmer. I was doing that and I guess I came to a moment in my life where I thought, Oh, fancy a bit more of a challenge, which is when I took on the mill.
As I said earlier, it's going from strength to strength, but it also takes time. And typically with family businesses, you manage to fit it all in. And I was fitting it all in, but with a lot more support, particularly from Chris. Chris was for a couple of years, I was amazing with, with the girls and shopping and cooking.
So I was stretching myself a bit, but going back to, um, Maddie wanted to come back and join the business. Um, and it was a great timing for us because I was starting to stretch myself too thinly. I was procrastinating on a lot of office jobs that I was supposed to be keeping on top of. So Maddy came back and I basically took a step sideways from the dairy, pasteurizing the milk, and she basically took on my role there.
I guess we'd call her dairy coordinator. She coordinates everything up at the dairy, keeps the balls rolling up there and just quickly on. So the rest of your staffing. So, um, as is the way these days, I follow you guys on instagram and I see that you do your team socials and things like that. I know that, um, the way you've organized your milkings is with a mind on making sure that there's a bit of a better balance than might historically have been the case in, in dairying for your team.
Chris, do you want to talk about that just briefly? Okay. Yeah, sure, Peter. I mean, I think dairying is synonymous with long hours and, you know, early mornings. I was aware of a situation in New Zealand where basically they milk cows 10 times a week instead of the conventional 14. And I think it's worked out to be a wonderful compromise.
Basically, we milk the cows on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the normal way, probably at 5. But on a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, we milk, uh, basically at 9. 30am and that's just the one milking for the day. And it's been well received by those that help us really. I think especially at weekend, you know, I was finding it increasingly difficult to convince people to, to not only come early at the weekend, but then to also be there at 5.
30, 6pm. Whereas now at the weekend, you know, people can be done by lunchtime. It just seems a sensible compromise to make the industry attractive to the, to the next generation. Yeah, absolutely. Tim, coming to you, what's the structure of your business? But, um, in particular, what challenges have you faced with labour and staffing?
Fussels Fine Foods was always part of the farm. It was just an extension of the farm. But then we got to a point where, Uh, we started, so we were, there was, me and my brother were working part time doing, obviously he was the farmer, I was doing a few other things at the time, and we were working part time in the business.
So I'd come in the morning, switch the press on, and, and if, if we had, if we had 300 litres of oil in our IBC, in the tank, then I wouldn't put the press on, because that would be enough. Oil for the week. We're now doing, God knows, I don't know, 1, 000, a week or whatever it is. Um, and the press is running, you know, 24 hours a day when I need it to.
Uh, so we, we came to a point where I actually had to work full time in, in the business. And then we had to think about employing other people. So, so we started to employ people in our own right as Fossils Fine Foods, which was a separate business. And, and our staffing levels have increased. changed quite considerably over the past 15 or 16 years because in the first instance our, one of our only routes to market was to do farmer's markets and to do agricultural shows, food fairs, so on any one weekend we would have four or five or six events on.
Now there was only two of us, so we couldn't do four or five or six events on a weekend. So we had to bring people in. Um, and we did that. So we got a lot of, uh, people who were semi retired part timers who would come in and they did a great job for us. But then as we sold more, we had to produce more.
Food service grew. We then had to employ people to deliver it, all that kind of stuff. So our staff numbers grew and we got to a point probably around about I don't know, probably about ten years ago, where we were up to about six or seven full time members of staff. And then that presents its own problems, because then you have to think about your payroll and everything else.
You go, hang on a minute, we can't afford to employ all these people all the time. We can when we're really, really busy. But what about in January, February when we're not particularly busy. So we then have to look at it and we go, well, maybe we don't need all those people. And then what happens is you get whammed with a global pandemic and you can't go to market.
You can't take your produce to market. So all of that stuff closes down. And then you get this beautiful thing, which is e commerce comes along and you go, right, we now have to learn how to sell our stuff online. We've now got a. Work that, we've got to make sure that works in conjunction with our social media, with our different aspects of marketing, so that we can draw people to our website, the website then has to change from being a landing page to a shop front, and you have to learn how to do all that kind of thing.
Where we are now, we're running a team of three full timers. And maybe one part timer, which does everything that the business did years ago, but we're not having to go to market as much as we were. We're not having to go and stand in the cold and the rain and, uh, and the freezing cold at Christmas markets and all that kind of stuff.
We just don't have to do that anymore. On the other side of the coin is we wouldn't be able to do that had we not done that. All of that stuff in the first place and growing the brand. So it's that, that, that staffing level has always, has always changed as well. So Tim, what are your aspirations for your business?
I mean, do you, do you have a formal vision? Where, where do you see the business in five years time? That's a really good question. It's one of the mistakes we make as farmers when we diversify is we don't have. an exit or an end in sight. Yeah. I get quite a few people now they come to me and I'm involved in one or two other little businesses, food and drink businesses.
And when they come to me, the first thing I say to them is what do you want out of this? And what's your exit? You can have all of these wonderful ideas. And it, you know, by listening to you guys, we were forced into this diversification because we had no option if we wanted to continue with the business moving forward, we had to add value and diversify.
But what we never do is we never think about what's going to happen 20, 25 years down the line. And with succession planning in farming, that's always difficult. Um, and, and especially when you have diversified businesses. So my brother has two boys. One of them is going to take on the farm. Is he going to take on the food business?
Who knows? Is this an asset to the rest of the farm? Is it something which can be sold? Is it something? That, um, can be kept going, so, so it's a, it's a really difficult thing to do. I, for, for me now, if, if we can maintain what we're doing, yeah, we've got a really good presence in the marketplace, we're very happy with our products, we're always looking to develop new products within our range, we're always looking to be, uh, spokespeople for farming and for diversification, we're always looking to help other people, we're Who want to diversify, but in terms of this business, the fine food business, I hope it's sustainable in the long term.
It might not be me. It might not be anything to do with me. It might be one of my Children might come into it. I don't know. But if anybody was coming to me about a diversification project, the first thing I would say to them is what do you want out of it? And what's your exit? And when's that going to be?
Absolutely. So Chris, Rachel, same question for you, really. What does the future have in store for, for Trunk Dairy? We'll probably have quite different answers now, having worked so, having worked so closely for the last 20 years now, I think family businesses, we just kind of bumble on and like Tim was saying, there's no real plan.
We do have a plan, but it's so difficult and takes so long to put into practice. We don't want to semi retire yet. Exactly. But I am starting to plan it because it takes so long to get the staff in place or to get the office management in place. It takes so long. So I'm probably pushing that on a bit faster than Chris, but it still means we'll spend a lot of time, hopefully more time together.
Chris. So, uh, Rachel said that you might have different ideas. You know, what's, what's your vision? I think my, my vision really is. It's to give the next generation options. Myself and Rachel have kind of established it to a certain point and, you know, created a, uh, kind of a platform. And that could go, I suppose, many different ways.
You know, I wouldn't put any pressure on which direction that took. But I'd like to think that there are various options. Thank you very much for that. So, just quickly, for each of you, and, uh, Rachel and Chris, I'll stay with you, then I'll come back to Tim. What role do you think that adding value has for the future of farming?
I think it has really strong place. The way I see it really is that You know, if you think about the 80 20 principle, I think 80 percent of consumers are, in my mind, um, quite content to go off to one of the big supermarkets and buy almost for the sake of it, you know, without thinking, but I think 20%, and I'd like to think that is maybe increasing a little bit, are more discerning, are more, um, willing to pay for that, And that 80 percent of food will probably be produced from a very small number of people around the world.
So I think the challenge is that if we can start to target those 20 percent of people that, that want to, uh, spend some more and have, you know, really, um, high quality products, that, that to me is the exciting opportunity. Yeah, absolutely. And Tim, would you agree with what Chris has said? I would, yeah. And I think it's an intrinsic part of what we do as farmers.
And one of the things I say is, I don't think there's any such thing as a farmer anymore, in the sense of when we grew up, yeah? You have to be an agricultural business. You have to be somebody who is not content with just growing your crops or your cattle or your sheep or whatever it is. You've got to find a way to add value so that you become that 20 percent that Chris is talking about becomes really, really important.
So adding value is essential and, you know, Southwest food can be the vanguard of that, um, of that movement. Brilliant. Cornish Mutual. Farming insurance experts. Founded for farmers by farmers in 1903. It's time now for the showstoppers, the part of the show where I try and pull out three nuggets to take away.
The first is Seek first to understand now we talked to Rachel about the importance of doing research and Tim talked to us about how the best route to market may not always be the first one that you try. So it's really important to talk to consumers, people that will be using your product, but also retailers, people who will be selling it because these are the people who know what works best in the market.
Number two, plan. Establish the route to market. Would you need to build a farm kiosk? Would you need planning for that? Would you want to get a vending machine? How much is that going to cost? How would you finance it? Do you need a manufacturing or processing partner? Do you need to find retail outlets?
There's lots of questions that actually really need working through and you need to get these details sorted. We need to think about the costs, the risks, even the opportunity costs. So it might be that you think it's, uh, the right thing for your business to be selling milk direct through a vending machine, but actually what does that mean for your contracts, your milk contract.
What are you going to be losing out by not supplying, um, your processor? What are the food hygiene and health and safety implications? Speak to your insurer Cornish Mutual to check that you have cover and to ask them whether they could put you in touch with anyone else who's doing something similar.
And number three, develop, be prepared to keep an open mind and to keep an eye on whether what you're doing is the right thing. If you're changing a primary product into something with added value, then develop samples and make sure you've got a consistent recipe, which gives a consistent product every time.
And every batch that you. Think about marketing. How will the product look and feel? How will it be promoted? Trial it, get broad feedback, honest feedback, not just from your friends and keep learning before we go. Um, I'm going to ask each of you for one practical tip that you'd give to farmers based on our discussion today.
So, uh, Rachel and Chris over to you. One of my favorite sayings, Peter, is feel the fear, but do it anyway. And linked into that then is, is follow your passion. And if you, if you're really passionate about what you do and what you produce, and you've done it to the best of your ability, and you're really, you know, proud of that product.
then go for it, have, feel that fear and have a go at it, however humble it might be. That's great. Tim, over to you. What one practical tip would you give to farmers based on today's discussion? Chris has obviously been reading the same books as I have. Feel the fear and do it, you know, all that kind of stuff.
And you, you have to take the plunge. As farmers, we are so resourceful. Yeah, there we go. I agree. With everything that's been said. So we're talking about feeling the fear. We're talking about taking the plunge. This is obviously becoming a podcast for adrenaline junkies rather than farmers in the Southwest.
I like the direction of travel. So the final question that we're asking everybody this series and Tim, I'll stick with you, then I'll go to Rachel and Chris. What three skills or attributes would farms of the future require to be successful in your opinion? So, as I was writing these down, then it occurred to me, so I came up with, you've got to be adaptable.
You've got to be adaptable, and you've got to react to, to what's going on around. And as a consequence of that, you've got to be resourceful. You've got to be able to think on your feet, you've got to be able to come up with solutions. And in turn with that, a little bit going back to what I was saying, alluding to what I was saying earlier, you've got to be forward thinking.
You've got to think down the line. You've got to be thinking five, six, seven years down the line. And then when you think about farming in general, Because it's a family business, farmers have been traditionally good at thinking what's going to happen for the next generation. And then it occurred to me, when I was coming up with those three words, I said, much the same as they always have been, you know, even though we're talking about diversification.
These three words that I've come up with is what my father would have said and maybe what my grandfather would have said as well. So there's that, there's that sort of current theme going through. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Tim. Rachel and Chris, how about you? What three skills or attributes do farmers of the future really need?
You asked the three words. I've got 15 and I struggled to narrow it down, but I think the top three were communication, planning, and balance. Communication, planning, and balance. I like hearing balanced in there. That's the first time that's come up this series. Brilliant. Well, that's it for today's episode.
A huge thank you to my guests today, Tim Fussell from Fussell's Fine Foods and Rachel and Chris Knowles from Trink Dairy. In the next bonus episode available from Tuesday, you can hear more of our discussion from today. Then we'll be back the following Tuesday with another full episode in which we'll be talking about future proofing your land to cope in more volatile climatic conditions.
If you've got any questions, any suggestions, any guests that you'd like us to feature, please do drop us an email on podcast at Cornish mutual. co. uk. Please subscribe to the show on whatever podcast platform you use, but also give us a rating and a review. This really helps in encouraging more people to subscribe.
Please also tell your farming neighbors and friends about the podcast or indeed anyone else, you know, that might be interested. Check out the show notes for more information on today's episode, including the link to our podcast disclaimer. You've been listening to Farming Focus brought to you by Cornish Mutual.
I've been Peter Green. Until next time, it's goodbye from me and everyone in the Cornish Mutual podcast team. Cornish Mutual. Farming insurance experts.