Us.
We are Tom and Clare Noblet, we have four children – Beth 6, Lucy 4, Jessica 2 and Thomas born in June 2015. We farm in partnership with Max and Jenny Burrow whose family have owned the 250-acre upland hill farm since the 1960s. Max grew up on the family farm at Kelker Well, a short walk across the valley from Whin Yeats. His father, Arthur, bought Whin Yeats in 1962 and installed the ‘Old Dairy’ which was used until 32 years ago when the new dairy was installed.
Tom grew up in Catterall, near Garstang, and spent a lot of time helping family members on their farms. After leaving school, he worked on various farms, as well as having spells working in a steel works and for a company that fitted, maintained and repaired milking parlours. With these, and his Dad a wagon and car mechanic he gained lots of skills that have proved invaluable as a farmer!
Clare grew up on a dairy and sheep farm at Ingleton, and trained as a nurse after leaving school, working initially in Cardiac Intensive Care before going into community nursing in Garstang and then South Lakes.
The Dairy.
The fluctuating milk prices (currently it costs more to milk a cow than milk is worth) made us keen to look at ways to ensure the future sustainability of the farm, and cheese making has emerged as a way of adding value to the milk we are proud to produce.
During the summer of 2015 we built a small dairy and embarked on a new venture - making cheese using the unpasteurised milk from our pedigree cows. Following on from this, we now bottle and sell our wholesome unpasteurised milk, fresh from the cows and completely unprocessed.
We also sell pork at certain times in the year, free-range eggs and hope to sell our lamb in the near future.
We milk 80 Holstein Friesian cows and have 150 Rough Fell Sheep, as well as a small number of pigs & hens.
Our Environment.
Our Farm backs onto Farleton Knott, next to Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
Living and working where we do, looking after the environment is important to us. We have 7.5 acres of woodland, 4 acres of which we have planted in the last 25 years (approximately 2,000 trees). We have created 350 metres of new hedgerows and we lay the rest of the hedges in rotation. We have also created 2 new ponds.
Around the farm we have approximately 10 swallow nests in our buildings and milking time in the summer is accompanied by the sight and sound of our regular visitors feeding their young. Green woodpeckers, nuthatches and mistle thrushes are often seen, as well as more common birds and we always hear the cuckoo!
The black plastic which we use to cover the silage clamps and wrap the big bales is taken away and turned into stockboard, the black material seen around the farm that we make doors with. Other types of plastic are also recycled.