The family farm facing a bleak future...

THREE GENERATIONS HAVE BUILT A ‘FULL-CIRCLE’ DAIRY - BUT HAVE BEEN HIT BY RISING COSTS

- By LILLIAN RACE

BY the time I arrive, Janet Dearnley is already deep in conversation at one table in the tearoom, leafing through a stack of black-and-white aerial photographs.

As her nephew Nathan and one of the farm's milkmen, Dan, look on, she studies the images taken half a century ago on the Huddersfield farm.

They show just a handful of sheds ringed by open fields - a far cry from the full-scale dairy it has become today.

The tearoom situated on the Barkhouse Farm is small and homely.

Plates clatter, teapots steam and pensioners in fleece jackets and cardigans share cake and gossip.

From the tearoom, the view stretches over fields where the Dearnley herd grazes - about 400 cattle in all - from the milking herd to the calves being reared in the sheds below. Visitors can watch the process from a small viewing gallery above the parlour, where cows are milked twice a day, rain or shine. It's part of a rare full-circle operation: the family raise the cows, process the milk on site, bottle it in glass and deliver it to doorsteps across West Yorkshire through a network of around 20 milkmen and women.

“You either farm it or you're a dairy,” Janet says. “There aren't many that do both.”

RG & ME Dearnley is a true family business. Janet Dearnley runs it with her brother Michael, her two sons and her nephew Nathan. Her parents, Gordon and Betty, built the place in Shelley from nothing in the early 1960s - a first-generation dairy, an almost unheard-of story then, and even rarer now.

“When he was at school, Dad never really gelled with it,” Janet recalls.

“He preferred working. He worked for a farmer at Shepley and decided that's what he wanted for himself.”