A panel to be proud of

The issue of staffing and personnel is key to many industries, and dairy is no different. Lantra training head of agriculture Andrew Palmer led a panel of three at our Dairy Industries Expo to close out the first day on 29 October: Karen Halton, a farmer with 500 cows at Halton Farm in Cheshire, Dan Karlsson, director of apprenticeships and business services at Plumpton College, a higher education provider in the UK and Paul Harris, founder of Real Success consultancy, who offered the personnel consultancy angle.

Palmer opened by saying the aim of the panel was to discuss why training matters and how important it is to include owners. Karlsson noted, “Training on so many levels ensures productivity and motivation, and leads to retention and a more profitable business for fulltime staff. It embeds skills and training through in what is really a competitive marketplace.”

Halton observed that on a farm, “It can be really tricky because historically we’ve recruited people who are family or neighbours. As farms grow, we need more outside the box thinking people, and people outside of the industry, which can be quite hard. People don’t always want to work outside, and more training and development is what people want right now. For farmers on the ground it’s a hard task. We’ve got to train and engage.”

Harris added, “Staff training and recruiting matters. People ask, am I going to get trained and developed? Where the management thinks, if I spend all the money on training, they’re going to leave. But what if you don’t and they stay? If people feel you’re investing in them, they’re more likely to stay.”

Halton stated, “It’s really exciting when we learn new things, it’s so empowering and exciting, and to train and give people knowledge is giving them power as well.|

Palmer asked, “What’s driving the skills shortage in dairy?”

Karlsson answered, “For a long time, there has been a lack of training and investment, particularly at the farm end. We have people who are lacking management skills, so if we invest in training we will develop the managers of the future. Dairy at the farm level hasn’t done that.”

That being said, he noted, “We have seen a really positive increase in people wanting to study agriculture across the board, from ages 14-18 and inn higher education. We partner with a number of employers in the region, to enhance the content to ensure it meets the demands of the sector. What’s going on in the farm and out in the dairy is added to our provision as quickly as we can. We know what’s needed is the management skills, and we have added into the extras. At the same time, it’s about listening to the industry.”

Halton noted that “It starts on day one with the induction. We provide an amazing product but we don’t get paid properly for it. A lot of farmers will be cutting back on staff training to provide cow food. I understand and value the need for training people, to train them in the ways we need them to work with our animals. We over employ so we have a bit of leeway. Once we do an induction, it’s hands on training with the herds manager, and it’s important that they see every single bit of the business. We send them to training, and engage with Reaseheath and Harper. We employ apprentices as well.”

“Jeremy Clarkson came along. Do you think that made a difference?” Palmer asked.

Karlsson said, “It made a huge difference, and a lot of our students now go out into the industry with digital skills training, making them more visible on social media. Many of the farms we work with who take on our students see the benefit of our students with social media. they’re bringing that to the farmers.

Halton agreed: “The average age of a dairy farmer is 58, and they are not that savvy on social media either. Harris added, “The younger ones are spreading the news as influencers on social media. They all have to get onto the bandwagon of social media.”

Karlsson concluded with a few notes: “Employees should be invested in time away from the workplace mixing with their peers, and having time to absorb the learning. Recognise people management, the importance of appraisals and develop craft, love and knowledge. Invest more time in your staff.”

Harris noted, “People are the centre of every business but, particularly in farming, people are seen as a cost, not an investment. However, if you don’t have people to work on your farms, you’re out of work.”

Day 2

Guilio Ansaloni, CEO of Proactive Analytics, was up first on Thursday 30 October, with his presentation about the business. He noted that recalls in the food industry are costly, and keeping a close eye on every aspect of your production line was key. “The question is, what is the efficiency in your everyday protocol and the integrity in your process?” he asked.

“Compliance is not enough, it’s about product quality and integrity. ExiFlo, the hardware product, is a device that tests the integrity of pressurised production channels within the heat exchange system, identifying leaks between plates, pipes, and shell heat exchangers to the external environment, without requiring the system to go offline. These tests are carried out quickly before and after each production cycle, ensuring that every product batch receives a pass or fail certification prior to distribution.

“It is all about helping the processors to have less stress, increase the bottom lines, and not just be the compliant operation, but the safe one,” he noted.

Smaller dairies

Jaap de Jonge, owner of Jongia (UK) Ltd, was on hand to discuss smaller dairies and how they may either grow or fail. “Grow, you can’t stay small. The dairies that succeed are the ones that grow. Standing still is dying. That is easier said than done, but it is the way. Those with plans and enthusiasm are the ones that succeed,” he noted.

He observed, “Here in the UK (as in other countries), the small dairies are facing many issues. Higher staffing costs, legislation and so forth makes running a dairy much more complicated for the few people in it. If a dairy processes 10,000 litres per day with 20 or so people, you have more automated dairies doing 100,000 litres with a similar number. Some specialist dairies can still get away with it, such as Cropwell Bishop, the famous Stilton maker. However, there are limits to everything and with Tuxford & Tebbutt closing last year, it is clear that the producers of the ‘queen’ of British cheese are not immune from the market forces,” he warned. “Reduced spending power makes customers trade down and the specialists get often squeezed. Artisan cheeses can easily retail for over £30 per kilogram. Compare that to a Waitrose Duchy Organic for just over £10 per kilogram. You need an excellent story to get that premium.”

He cited Müller of Germany, which is a successful family company. Theo Müller owns the German company, which had a turnover of €9.5 billion in 2024. “He inherited the company in 1971 with only four employees. The four person business can go either of two ways. It does not stay four people for long. It either grows, or it fails,” de Jonge observed.

However, “the sad thing is, in the closing cases, there was no business to sell. The door was shut for the last time and the equipment sold. Why is it that most dairies have no business to sell? When a dairy closes, and it has no family members interested to take it further, the business just folds.

“I once talked to a serial entrepreneur who said I had no business to sell. It’s all in my head. That is true. He built businesses, had personnel and a building and sold them. However, many of these dairies do have all of that as well and they still have no business to sell. I understand that many are in rented premises, but they have brand names, customers, equipment and a reputation built over many years. Suddenly, when the cheese maker does not want to continue, it just stops like a tire with a puncture, and years of hard work just disappears.”

He offered some advice:

1. Keep an eye on your purchases. Check regularly if you buy the best products for the best prices. Profit is not only generated by selling at a high price, but buying competitively also helps the bottom line.
2. Check automation. It is often more affordable than you think. The fixed weight cutter does 30-40 cuts/minute. That is difficult to do with a human. The machines doesn’t get ill and does not need a holiday. And it reduces give away.
3. Buy in services. Sometimes it is cheaper to contract out than to do everything in house. One cheese maker used another cheese maker for contract cutting. This was a win-win for both. The machine was used more and he got some extra income while the other one had a fixed weight without the need to invest immediately.
4. Grow, you can’t stay small.

Noel Carr of DuPont Water Processing, detailed what the company had to offer, noting, “Water is our heritage and milk is 80 per cent water.” It offers a broad range of products, including the FilmTec brand, reverse osmosis (RO) and nanofiltration, ultra filtration and ion exchange. He showed the testing that DuPont has done, looking for higher recovery rates in systems, reusing more wastewater, reducing energy consumption and so forth with filtration. Filters deployed include ceramic and polymeric hard shells, which offer much better cleanings, energy and improved flow, already reducing the amount of bypass and extending the service life. The company is working on the next versions and current average lifespans are one to 2.5 years, but reuse in another application is not possible for dairy filters due to bacterial growth, he added.

Looking at bulk packaging

Bulk packaging and recycling are often not taken together. Mervyn Silk, sales manager of Royal LC Packaging, challenged this idea on Thursday 30 October, about an issue close to his company’s remit, which is modified atmosphere packaging and product sustainability. He observed that in reducing waste in packaging, a lot of larger bulk packages are overlooked, such as the flexible intermediate bulk container (FIBC). “The key issue is that any product lost during production has quite a big impact. For dairy packaging, dairy related ingredients, powders and cultures, are suspectable to moisture, and food safety is of top importance. There are now consumer and retailer expectations, and we can’t just say we’re doing things environmentally, with nothing to back it up. Our products are now being designed for recycling, with multi-barrier liners and easy release liners, to recycle as much as possible without impacting the product itself.”

Using a selection of gases, LC Packaging is also flushing with nitrogen for dairy powders, to offer better product safety and extended shelf life for large bags. “A MAP bag is easier to fumigate than an entire room at a plant,” he explained.

Overall, “transparency is essential, and we have to document packaging information, as it’s all going to change – there is post consumer recycling, changes and challenges, in a challenging, very different global market,” he concluded.

AI for the dairy industry

Suhas Patel, CEO of Tvarit, detailed the “AI Co-Pilot for Dairy Industry For Sustainable And Zero Waste Production, Leveraging Deep Tech Software.” In his presentation, he asked, “Why can’t traditional optimisation methods solve today’s problems? Humans on the whole can track around seven variables using the five senses, but plants run with hundreds of parameters and so optimisation needs to understand all the parameters with many cheese products. These include coagulation, rennet and temperature, along with moisture retention, just to name a few. Cheese making is a very complex process. This is what we do with AI for optimisation,” he noted.

With the knowledge graph, the programme takes the data from the plant automatically, simulating the human way of working, and different areas are graphed using AI created by the software automatically. This creates the causal information and finds out why things are happening. The software helps the customers: the golden parameter values quality, anomaly detection and root cause analysis are all about optimising the variation range. It provides different optimum values and each cluster is a batch, with thousands of parameters monitored. Overall, using easy to understand dynamic generative AI powered prescriptions can improve the outcomes of a batch in a plant. Over the period of one year, one customer saw a 37 per cent efficiency rate increase to 56 per cent, by reducing moisture variation and increasing yields, Patel observed.