Dendoldrum Farm

Sharing our life on a busy Scottish Dairy Farm. . .

I'm a third generation dairy farmer. My grandfather started the dairy at Dendoldrum, just outside Inverbervie in 1946. He milked around 30 cows in a byre by hand. My father expanded in the 1970's and built a bigger shed and milked the cows in a parlour and since 2006, I have gone on to build a modern luxurious shed where the cows are milked by robots.

The cows are free to get milked whenever they want, which is around 3 times a day and they are currently producing on average around 37 litres each. This gives us a total production of around 22, 000 litres per day, which equates to around 8 million litres a year. . . . . . that's a lot of milk! ! ! Our milk is collected daily by Muller with the majority of the milk going to Tesco.

The cows all wear collars with a transponder which helps monitor all the aspects of the cows life. We can see when they are active, fertile and resting. This helps us meet all their health and welfare needs.

Here at Dendoldrum, milking cows is not so much a job, its more of a way of life. Cows are our passion. My wife tells me the cows get better cared for, spent more time with and live in more luxurious accommodation than she does!

The motto here is that a happy cow leads to a happy farmer and prevention is better than cure. We are always striving to improve cow comfort, cow enjoyment and cow happiness. We want our cows to have a stress free life.

At Dendoldrum, since 2009 , we have been a finalist every year in the Scottish Dairy Farm of the Year competition and have proudly won it twice. We have regularly won awards for the quality and the hygiene of our milk and we think this reflects the attention to detail that we all strive for during every aspect of the milk production process.

We have a fantastic team here who are as passionate about cows as we are. They treat and care for the cows with kindness and compassion - something I am very proud of.

Not surprisingly, we are all big milk fans in our house! From my wife's coffee and cake fix to our three daughters love of custard and ice cream to my post exercise recovery drink. . . we all benefit from the hard work that goes on just on our doorstep.