A family-run farm ensures the finest fresh dairy products are available to local communities – and helps the environment – through a partnership with FareShare South West.
For more than four decades, Langage Farm in Devon has been producing clotted cream, as well as yoghurt, ice cream and other goods.
As the business grew, managing partner Ben Harvey found they were sometimes having to dispose of large quantities of good dairy because there was no outlet for passing on surplus products.
Until he partnered with us. Now, any good-to-eat excess from Langage Farm is taken at no cost to the business and shared with people across the south west who need it most.
Langage Farm is the first UK carbon neutral dairy and, as part of the collaboration, we pass on food that isn’t fit for human consumption to go into their anaerobic digestion facility where it gets turned into green energy.
The by-product of this facility is bio fertiliser, which fertilises the fields for the herd of Jersey and Guernsey cows to graze at Langage Farm.
Talking about why he wanted to work with us, Ben said: “It was frustrating that we sometimes had pallets of waste that we had to just get rid of because we didn’t have an outlet for disposing of it, or for giving it to food banks or charities.
“Sometimes we get products that don’t meet our exacting requirements, so there might be too little fruit in the bottom of the jar, or even too much fruit in the bottom of the jar, or too much chocolate in the mix, or sometimes even just overproduction. And that can then go to FareShare South West.
“FareShare South West enable us to deal with pallet quantities and the small quantities.”
Ben continued: “One of the big benefits that we get from working alongside FareShare South West, which is very mutually beneficial, is that we can supply surplus food to FareShare South West that they can then distribute.
“But also, FareShare South West sometimes has food coming to them that isn’t of a quality that they are able to send out, and we can accept that into our anaerobic digestion facility where it gets produced into green energy. So it makes a nice little green loop.”
