Each year the Gurneys' Friesian Holstein and Holstein/Brown Swiss crosses produce 2.2 million litres of milk. The herd consists of 200 milking cows and 130 young stock.

Their milk is sold through Dairy Crest and ends up in supermarkets, proudly bearing the Red Tractor symbol. Dairy Crest milk is also used to make Country Life butter, one of an increasing number of well known food brands using ingredients from Red Tractor farms.

Do you enjoy being a dairy farmer?

Sometimes farmers don't appreciate the countryside but I enjoy living there. I love the miracle of nature and I love cows – I always have done since I was a little child.

What's your farming philosophy?

I believe that to be a successful farmer you need to have unlimited energy, be really patient and have a well developed sense of humour. I try hard to run a happy ship, and I want the business to work for the people rather than the other way around. We try to be environmentally sound – we need to make a profit from producing milk but there's no reason why we can't look after the environment at the same time. We care a lot about the local community, so we discuss many of our projects with the villagers and host school visits to the farm.

You grow wheat and maize on the farm as well as having a dairy herd. How are the two connected?

The farm is on the site of an old glacial lake, so it has a fertile, silty soil. On the lower part of the land we have our farm buildings and an area of permanent grassland for the dairy herd. Around the outskirts we grow winter wheat and maize in a three-year rotation. A combination of these two crops and grass sileage ensures that most of the herd's winter feed is grown on the farm. The cows return the compliment – their slurry is used to fertilise the grass, and we use composted farmyard manure to help fertilise the wheat and maize.

The government chose your farm as the place to launch its Milk Road Map to help dairy farmers reduce their carbon footprint. What kind of things are you doing to protect and enhance the environment and save energy?

We've rejuvenated hedges, cleaned out watercourses and planted trees to help wildlife like the barn owls and deer that happily live around here. We've also attracted in otters, which is very exciting. We've created a wetland area that floods in the winter and has plenty of insect larvae for birds to feed on in summer. It's a great place for ground-nesting birds like lapwings.

We use the water from a borehole on our land to cool our milk, which saves a lot of electricity. The water we use for the cooling process becomes warm, and we then give it to our cows to drink. This saves them energy because they don't have to warm the water up inside their bodies. We're also hoping to save energy and cut costs by increasing the amount of feed that we grow on the farm. We've experimented successfully with growing some of our maize under a starch-based plastic that degrades naturally, creating greenhouse-like conditions that lead to earlier harvesting and higher yields.

What about animal welfare?

Animal welfare is uppermost in my mind because I want to have happy cows. We invested £20,000 in new matting and other changes to upgrade our cow cubicles and make them more comfortable. It was so successful that the cows ended up lying down for 18 hours a day instead of 12, improving their rumination and making their feet a lot healthier.

What does being a Red Tractor farmer mean to you?

I'm really proud to be producing good-quality food in a pleasant environment to such high standards. By buying Red Tractor products consumers know that every aspect of production has been rigorously checked, and they can have complete confidence that their food has been produced from healthy animals with great care for the environment.