Our Farmers

Sustainable Farming Practices:

"Sustainable dairy farming is about striving to perfect and improve the natural environment, animal health & welfare and enhance the quality of life of farm families and their local communities; while at the same time being socially just & humane, productive & efficient, and economically viable.  Here at Yeats Country Foods our 'Natural by Nature' Dairy Farm Sustainability Programme is an ongoing voluntary initiative that seeks to assist and demonstrate the commitment of the individual family farms that supply us daily with fresh quality milk to operate in the most sustainable manner possible.  For us, healthy individuals, healthy families, healthy farms and livestock and healthy ecosystems are a result of a vibrant, resilient and sustainable food system that seeks to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

John Molloy, M.V.B M.R.V.C.S. Managing Director of Yeats Country Foods.

How We Encourage

Through our Natural by Nature family Dairy Farm Sustainability Programme, we advocate and support sustainable farming practices on our milk supply farms.

To achieve this we have set some key objectives for our Natural by Nature Programme:

1. To produce milk with a high nutritional quality which ensures that our end products meet our existing and future customer needs and wishes while at the same time striving to keep our family supply farms economically viable.
2. To ensure through active management in a precautionary and responsible manner that any adverse effects on the rural environment principally water and air quality, soil, landscape and biodiversity from dairy farming activities are minimised and that positive and continuous improvements are made where ever possible on a farm by farm basis.
3. To enable our family dairy farms and their local communities to protect and improve their well being and the environment in which they live by being respectful of nature.
4. To strive to ensure the optimal well being of the cows through continually striving to improve animal health and welfare programmes and encouraging responsible and caring ownership.
5. To optimise the use of renewable sources of energy and other natural resources e.g. water.
6. To become a driving force that stimulates the continuous improvement of food quality and inspires consumers to adapt new values and ideas that give direction to more sustainable food products by creating a greater feeling of connections with nature, awareness and purity.

Our approach to animal health and welfare can be best summed up by 3 principals associated with organic farming namely:

The Principal of Care:

Reflects human interaction with animals ensuring that the animals can live in harmony with their environment.  The principal responsibility for this rests with the herd owner as the human carer.

The Principal of Health:

At the level of the individual animal, the herd and the dairy livestock system is fundamental to sound animal welfare and improving farm economies.

The Principal of Fairness:

In relation to animal health and welfare this demands that animals be provided with the condition and opportunities of life that accord with their physiology, natural behaviour and well being.

At the End of the Day

At the end of the day, this is for us an ongoing journey, one that has really no end but one where we strive to ensure that each product is made with the highest quality milk, bundles of care and our individual precious recipes so that the choice remains yours.