Ex-civil servant Tim Pike has quit the urban life to return to his family farm on Hayling Island, where he has launched an ice-cream factory.

Using the milk from his 100-strong herd of brown and white Ayrshire cows, he has started blending and freezing ice-cream at the 250-acre Northney Farm, based in the village of the same name, and is now ready to begin selling the chilled treats at Stoke Fruit Farm in Havant Road next month.

The land, which has been farmed by the same family for more than 50 years, has been struggling thanks to the collapsed price of milk, and Mr Pike said they needed to think creatively in order to survive.

Until last month he had worked as a civil servant with the exams authority in Piccadilly for the last 10 years, but took voluntary redundancy to join the traditional family business and rejuvenate its fortunes.

'We needed to diversify in order to get income coming into the farm,' he said.

'Milk prices are very depressed at the moment; look at the way Dairy Farmers of Britain had gone into administration.

'The cost of input is continuing to rise but the price processors are prepared to pay is not, and the number of dairy farms across the country is shrinking extremely rapidly.'

Now with a nine-month-old son, he said he preferred the rural landscape and the lowing of his herd to the urban bustle of London.

The farm held its annual open day on Sunday, June 7, where the first batches of banoffee, mango yoghurt, and strawberry cheese-cake flavour ice-cream went on sale for locals to sample.

The farm also played host to a contingent of 50 French farmers, guests of the National Farmers' Union, who visited on Tuesday, June 9 to see operations first hand.

The £30,000 investment it has made in ice-cream making equipment came courtesy of funding from the European Union and Defra.


DAIRIES ARE DWINDLING

According to Defra, in 1950 there were 196,000 dairy farms in the UK.

Now, the agency's projection for 2010 is there will be just 16,479 remaining.

Britain is becoming more and more reliant on foreign dairy imports.

Figures for 1990 show £931m was imported and £455m was exported, a deficit of £476m.

The situation has grown worse since then and last year the figure stood at £1,992m exports and £794 imports, leaving a deficit of around £1,198m.


FIRM HIT BY COLLAPSE OF MILK CO-OPERATIVE

The farm has been hammered by the collapse of Dairy Farmers of Britain co-operative this month.

It is one of an estimated 1,000 suppliers hit by the milk processing co-operative's implosion, which has left hundreds of farmers out of pocket.

Dairy Farmers owed Northney Farm around £12,000 for 60,000 litres of milk, but fortunately the farm has found a new buyer for the milk. It has been told by administrators there is little chance of recovering any of the money.

Mary Pike, managing partner at the farm, said: 'It's very, very dire. We shall obviously try to continue the farm and we'll just have to bear it one way or another. There are people in the area who it's hit worse.

'It's a really astonishing situation. We knew they were in trouble but we had to give a year's notice to break with them. We've found another co-operative called Milk Link. We had to use a co-operative because they didn't mind us keeping some of the milk behind to make ice cream.'

But despite the potential which she and her son believe it has, the ice cream-making enterprise uses just a fraction of their total milk – an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 out of the roughly 700,000 litres the farm produces each year.