Jersey has a rich history of the development of our Jersey cow in her Island home for over 250 years and I would be the first to admit that we are fortunate that this has occurred within a highly defined geographical space. This development has allowed us today to create value from a very special brand, Jersey Dairy, which is fundamentally underpinned by our unique pedigree cow.
The foundation of the breed was created when the States of Jersey, our government, first banned the importation of cattle from France in 1763 as the Channel Islands were being used as a back door route for cattle exports to England and this trade was interfering with the development of what was becoming a nascent breed. In 1833, the Royal Jersey Agricultural and Horticultural Society, our breed Society, was formed to organise the development of the breed as well as the promotion of good agricultural practice.
By 1850, a scale of points of what was deemed to be the perfect animal was devised for both cows and bulls and in 1866 the Society formed the Jersey Herd Book to formally register animals and their progeny. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a rapid and organised development of the breed alongside the development of the Jersey Royal early potato and it was not long before a flourishing export trade of live pedigree cattle was established globally along with strong sales of Jersey Royal potatoes to the UK market. Pedigree Jersey cattle and Jersey Royals became unique brands to the Island as a symbol of quality and genuine provenance.
In 1954, the Jersey Milk Marketing Board was formed, under Govt statute, initially to manage the supply of milk from a thousand very small farms to local dairies in St Helier, Jersey’s capital, but with the advent of the financial services industry in the early sixties and its demand for office space, these dairies soon sold their premises and the first central dairy in the Island was built by the Board in 1966. This successfully supplied the needs of the Island for the next forty years by which time it was becoming very difficult to meet modern dairy processing standards.
In 2009, the Board sold the original dairy site and the following year moved to become a neighbour of the Society in the northern parish of Trinity thus establishing a headquarters for the Dairy Industry in the Island and, with it, the development of a much greater symbiotic relationship between our organisations for the benefit of the Island’s breeders, de facto members of the Co-operative, and ultimately our Jersey cow. The Dairy’s relocation occurred soon after the States changed the law to allow the importation of bovine semen into the Island for the first time in 2008 and the Society was swift to amend its Herd Book rules so as to only allow the registration of progeny from international pedigree Jersey bulls which were a minimum of seven generations pure bred, with no known ancestors of another breed.
In investing in a brand new Dairy, the Board was clear that this facility should be compliant to the best standards of the day so as to be capable of processing a wide range of quality dairy products to adequately meet domestic needs as well as those of potential export customers.
Operating in an Island with high innate processing costs, the Board viewed the development of an export trade as being fundamental to allow controlled growth of milk supply from our members, thus diluting the high fixed cost base of both our farms and the Dairy; above all, our aim was to add value to export products so as to sustain the business but avoid any form of cross subsidisation from the local dairy marketplace.
We now receive an annual intake of 14m litres from our eighteen members and due to planned retirements and an amalgamation of two herds, it is anticipated that there will be fourteen members by the end of this year. The Board ‘micro manage’ milk supply to the Dairy through a milk licensing scheme and regularly update the standards for milk supply to the Dairy so that at the present time, on average, ten per cent of farm gate milk value is derived from achieving bonuses, in line with market requirements. Currently, 30% of milk supply is processed into a range of niche bespoke dairy products which are exported to the UK and increasingly to customers in the Far East.
Jersey Dairy currently processes a range of fresh milks, including organic, UHT milks for local and export markets, creams, crème fraiche, butter, ice cream, yoghurts
and soft mix recipes; spreadable butter and cheese are processed in the UK using milk supplied by the Dairy.
Regarding the branding of Jersey Dairy’s export products, our aspirational customers have a real desire to learn more about the unique properties of the milk from our pedigree Jersey cows as well as the history of our cows and, indeed, our Island itself. Fundamental to our strategy, is that ‘Provenance plus Quality equals Consumer Trust’ and this requisite is absolutely essential if real added value is to be derived from the Brand.
Returning to the development of the breed, the improvements that have arisen in the ten years of being able to access international pedigree Jersey sires have been significant: average milk yields have risen by nearly 20% and, with a wide use of different sires across the Island herd, there has been a remarkably consistent improvement in the conformation of our cattle, with an improvement in virtually all measurable traits.
Last year, the Society commissioned Dr Maurice Bichard, your Club’s patron, to independently assess these improvements to the Island herd and to advise on a breeding plan for the next ten years. This plan for the future makes a number of recommendations which are being actively discussed at the present time but, for the purposes of this article, I want to highlight a statement that Maurice makes in the summary to his report which I believe encapsulates the strategic aims of the Society and the Board and the importance of their strong symbiotic relationship.
The statement reads: ‘If Jersey Dairy can continue to build the value of its brand, then the island farmers will be able to concentrate more on the product quality, health, welfare, and environmental goals rather than always driving production costs down through ever higher yields’. I strongly believe that this statement sits extremely well with the conference theme of, ‘Building the Brand to promote our Uniqueness’.
So, can the genetics of our pedigree cows build value into a brand? The JMMB has three cardinal rules of milk supply to Jersey Dairy: firstly, all milk from every member’s farm must derive from cows registered in the Jersey Herd Book, secondly, all member’s herd’s must be officially milk recorded each month, which is organised by the Society – remember provenance and quality equals consumer trust! And thirdly, all cows must go out to graze between the months of April and September each year. As I have already mentioned, there are a considerable number of bonuses and penalties in respect of milk quality, including fortnightly thermoduric and psychotropic testing as well as a market profile supply bonus and an annual farm premises appraisal score. Alongside these, the Society organises an extensive programme of disease testing to continually monitor the health status of the Island herd and categorically prove the absence of disease. Since the commencement in 2009, all cattle in the Island meet CHeCS Accredited Free status for IBR (Since 2012), BVD (Since 2010) and Leptospirosis (Since 2010), through Biobest’s HiHealth Herdcare Cattle Health Scheme. Jersey is thankfully also free from TB, Brucella and, since 2017, officially Free from EBL. Through CIS collected milk samples every milking cow is automatically and independently screened for Johnes Disease at least once, every lactation. What these programmes exemplify is that ‘Branding Starts on the Farm’!
Analysing this statement in its broadest sense, the ‘promotion of our uniqueness’ is about the delivery of a constant stream of verifiable evidence to our consumers, beginning at the farm – ‘we are all in it together’. I maintain that brands have to be continuously ‘fed’ in order to develop their uniqueness and, whilst the Island herd is an integral part of our heritage, we cannot allow ourselves to resort to nostalgic memories of the past in the promotion of our products. Information is therefore key but the truth is that whilst we have loads of it, do we appreciate how valuable it could be in identifying superior cattle producing superior milk??
The breeding of dairy cattle is changing in this country in so many ways but with such a rich heritage of cattle breeding, often with indigenous breeds, I believe it is essential to recognise the important role that breeders and breed organisations can play in adding value to great British dairy products. Fortunately, through many very clever people at AHDB, this vast pool of information can be distilled down into some very practical indices and rankings to enable all cattle breeders and producers the opportunities to improve the efficiency of their farms and, increasingly, the welfare of their cattle. As the marketing of dairy products becomes increasingly globalised in the dominant commodity market, frequently resulting in sharp downturns in farm gate values, all milk producers have to become more commercially focussed and we, as breeders of pedigree cattle, are simply a subset of this primary grouping; the ‘patrician days’ of breeding cattle are firmly over and the emphasis in future can only be on embracing new technology and harnessing its development, before others take it away to use for their own corporate ends. To achieve this effectively requires not only a thorough understanding of the scientific principles which underpin the information, but also a concerted relationship with those who provide it in the first place; only then can we, as breeders and breed societies, share and promote the ‘uniqueness of dairy’ with our customers and thereby add much needed value to our brands before others convince them otherwise.
So, to conclude and elucidate my opinions in a practical manner, I would like to tell you a story about a visit to my farm of journalists from a major Chinese TV company some five years ago to film a documentary on the Island’s dairy industry: the Chinese visitors took a very keen interest in the cows and were soon taking close up pictures of the cow’s heads. Whilst everyone knows that Jersey cows are the most beautiful and photogenic, I nevertheless asked what it was that attracted them the most: ‘their eyelashes’ was the reply, ‘they are so long and dark’. I would like to leave you with one last message: as our Jersey cows’ eyelashes are long, dark and completely natural, could it be in the future that the difference between a 93 and a 94 point ‘excellent’ cow is the length of her eyelashes??!!