Karen and Tom Halton

Chance Hall Farm, Halton Farms Ltd, Cheshire

Ambitious team Karen and Tom Halton have high hopes for their dairy and want to be in the top one per cent of profitable dairy farms in the country.

To that end, they are working hard to achieve and maintain excellent cow health and cow fertility.

The couple are milking their 530, three-way cross cows across 550 acres three times a day to deliver an average annual yield of over 10,000 litres per cow. A further 300 heifers, residing at their second unit, are waiting to enter the herd.

The Halton’s supply County Milk split between three contracts and have a successful on-site vending machine where they sell raw milk, cheese produced with their own milk and eggs from their own flock of rescued battery hens.

Ambition

With a keen interest in bench-marking best practise, they are involved with the AHDB’s Strategic Dairy Farm initiative to help understand the farm’s overall performance good, average and poor indicators. The couple also run five social media groups on cow management and knowledge gained is transferred around the team.

Investing in what works and not afraid to challenge and change what doesn’t, staff welfare and training is taken very seriously as they feel this contributes massively to a successful business.

Karen says: “Being in dairy is always going to be challenging, but we’ve come so far and we’re at such a high level now that our focus is to achieve consistency. We love what we are doing.”