Chris McDonald used to have a name for every cow in his herd – until their number grew to over 200. Now he knows them by personality.
“Some of them will give me a cheeky nudge in the back and I think, ‘Oh, you remember me do you, well I remember you too’,” he explains.
With spring just around the corner when we meet, Chris is preparing to bring the herd of 1,000 dairy cows back out into the pastures at Bays Leap Farm in Heddon on the Wall.
At the farm entrance, visitors are greeted with a sign that says: “Full fart milk!” It’s a humorous nod to the holistic, organic farming techniques that are helping Bays Leap survive a decade-long squeeze on wholesale milk prices.
Chris’ day starts at 4.30am, when he takes the first 500 cows to the milking parlour. It usually ends around 7pm.
“I get a dog walk in the afternoon; I look at the fields with my German Shepherd,” he says. “They are long days, but this is a vocation and your hobbies are rolled into your job.”
Chris, 62, has run Bays Leap Farm for the Mellstrom family for the last 26 years. One of nine children from a small Lancashire village, farming is in his blood. His mum was a dairy farmer’s daughter, and his dad was an animal nutritionist. As a young lad, he found himself milking a small herd of 80 cows at a farm in Lytham St Annes, and he moved to Northumberland to manage a larger herd in 1994.
When Graham Mellstrom – an accountant by trade – bought Bays Leap Farm in 2000, he asked Chris to come and manage the operations for him.
“We started with 240 cows and we just kept going up and up to make it pay, simple as that,” Chris says. Then came a huge wholesale price cut, which made Chris and Graham think about the whole operation in a different way.
“In 2014, I remember wondering how we were going to survive because we lost around 10p per litre, which was a loss of about £600,000 per year.
“I was interested in what I could grow for the cows to graze on without the expense of fertiliser and started looking at things from a different angle.”
Chris started going on biological farming courses, and one particular lecture in Warwick delivered a light-bulb moment.
“There were about 70 of us in the classroom and the lecturer said: ‘You realise there’s 74,000 tons of nitrogen gas in the atmosphere above every hectare of land. That’s 55 truckloads. You’ve just got to earn the right to sequester it into your soil’.” Chris wanted that, and so began his mission to heal the soil.
“When you’re feeding the soil chemicals and sprays it’s like an addict, it won’t do anything unless you give it that. Once you get it breathing again and get the microbes working, it’s able to absorb the nitrogen that’s in the atmosphere, rather than using a chemical fertiliser,” he explains.
Chris’ passion for natural farming methods grew, and Bays Leap was certified organic in 2018.
He goes on to explain how the cows grazing in the pasture enhances the soil health with the microbes in their feet, noses and saliva. The diversity in the pasture in turn enhances the quality of the milk they produce.
“It’s just a big circle of life that really is a big bonus, full stop,” he adds.
Through the winter months, the cows eat a mixture of hay made from grass grown in the Bays Leap fields and homemade grass silage.
“It’s like sauerkraut for cows,” Chris says. “You bag up the grass clippings, take the air out, and the sugar in the grass turns into lactic acid and pickles it, making a succulent feed that’s good for their gut.”
Since going organic, Chris has experimented with herbal leys – diverse pastures composed of grasses, legumes and herbs designed to boost soil health and provide high-quality, mineral-rich grazing for livestock. At Bays Leap these feature red clovers, white clovers, chicory, plantain, and different grasses like cocksfoot and Timothy.
In March, the herd is turned back out into the fields to graze, and the cows are excited on those first journeys back out to the pastures.
Once they get into a routine, Chris says they know they’re going to a fresh field every morning and coming back in the afternoon to be milked.
“It’s just a pleasure,” says Chris on taking the cows back and forth to the fields during the warmer months. “It’s a really good job for anyone who’s doing it – taking the cows to the field and bringing them back on a quad bike on a nice day. Nothing really beats that to be honest.”
Bays Leap now produces 12,000 litres of organic milk per day, the majority of which is sold to Arla Foods.
“They’re good to work with and because we’re organic, it’s a niche market, so the price hasn’t dropped over the last few years,” Chris explains.
Some six years ago now, Bays Leap decided to start selling raw (unpasteurised) milk. By law, raw milk is only allowed to be sold directly to the consumer on-site or at farmers’ markets in England, following strict regulations and undergoing regular testing. The growing interest in raw milk has encouraged more customers to visit the farm in person, and Bays Leap now has three shops on-site – the dairy, the butchery, and the fruit and veg store.
The range has gradually increased with more homemade dairy products, and the team is planning to scale up yogurt production this year.
Meanwhile, six hectares of the farm have been dedicated to growing organic potatoes – affectionately named Geordie Macs, a nickname given to Chris thanks to his honorary Geordie status.
Despite the early starts, Chris shows no sign of slowing down after three decades of farming life.
He’s currently planning more polytunnels to grow a bigger range of vegetables on the farm, and he occasionally pauses to realise that he’s very proud of what they have achieved here.
“That’s the pleasure of the job that I do really – knowing that you’re leaving something for somebody else at the end of your career. You’ve been a custodian of the land, you’ve grown good crops, you’ve got healthy animals on it, and you can see that what you’ve done is actually working.
“It’s really a big boost to me. I’m only a little fella and when someone says: ‘Whatever you do, Chris, don’t stop doing this,’ I feel like I’m 6ft taller!”
Bays Leap Farm is located on the A69 near Heddon on the Wall, NE15 0JW. Follow on Instagram @baysleapfarm
