A Future in Dairy

Stuart Rogers is a dairy farmer. He milks a herd of high-yielding Holsteins at Longmoor Farm in Dorset, working with the same cow families his father and grandfather worked with before him. Farming wasn't something he set out to do so much as something he grew up in and looking after those cows has always felt like a responsibility passed down to him.

Fifteen years ago, that responsibility meant a big move. To secure the family's future in dairy, Stuart and his wife Helen moved the whole herd 100 miles from Oxfordshire to Longmoor, taking on a tenancy with the Duchy of Cornwall.

The Duchy of Cornwall is a private landed estate that was established in 1337 by King Edward III. The Duchy land consists of almost 53,000 hectares across 20 counties in England, mostly in the South West. This is where Stuart farms alongside his team of four and trusted advisors.

Stuart didn't come to regenerative farming through one big moment. As he puts it, “Regeneration was a natural progression from the way we were farming. We were already doing some good things. Allan Savory's holistic management course and farmers like Gabe Brown helped to spring us to the next level.”

Back to Life

While Stuart rents the land, the fifteen years of work he and his team put into regenerating it would make you think that he and his family plan to be there forever.

“When we arrived at the farm, there was no life here at all,” Stuart remembers. “The hedges were cut back hard every year to about 5.5 feet. The fields were routinely sprayed with herbicides. When we took it over in 2010, it felt barren and quiet.”

The big shift at Longmoor came when Stuart stopped looking only at the cows and started thinking about the whole farm as an ecosystem. He expanded beyond holistic grazing and started working with the landscape.

He let the hedges grow back, added wide field margins, and restored ponds that had been filled years earlier. He planted trees and hedges through the grazing paddocks and replaced flat, single-species grass with diverse swards and herbal leys. He hasn't applied synthetic fertilizer on the grazing for seven years and hasn't plowed the maize ground for nearly as long, drilling instead into cover crops he's grown for almost a decade. With better grazing and closer herd management, even wormer and fly treatment use has decreased.

The results surprised even him.

Soil structure is better, organic matter is increasing, water soaks in rather than runs off, and wildlife has returned above and below ground. In 2025, he was named Carbon Farmer of the Year. “Soil health is now improving at a much faster rate than I had believed possible although we still have a lot of work to do” he says.

More Than Just the Herd of Cows

Today, Longmoor runs 250 milking cows, about 425 head in total, including young stock, all high-yielding pedigree Holsteins grazing for at least six months a year across 191 hectares. The milk has gone to Waitrose for 26 years.

Stuart notes how transitioning to regenerative has been good for the bottom line. “We are achieving good yields and higher quality feeds,” he says, “So, overall our finances are better off.” He's honest that the pressure never fully goes away: a dairy still has to produce enough volume to pay the bills. The cows need to be milked everyday.

Stuart is keen to pass on what he's learning.

He welcomes farmers to Longmoor, shares his work on LinkedIn and on podcasts, and is part of Waitrose's Farming for Nature group, which is working to get all 2,000 of the retailer's suppliers farming regeneratively by 2030. He likes being around like-minded people who are pulling in the same direction. That same appetite for learning is what drew him to Top 50 Farmers.

“Knowledge exchange is one of the most important ways to learn,” he says, “Being part of this cohort is an amazing addition to my farming journey.” He's especially keen to reach farmers with big, high-yielding herds who assume regeneration isn't for them. “If I can be a pillar of hope to the many with doubts and fears,” he says, “then I believe we can secure a better farming future.”

A Pillar of Hope

Stuart is the first to say he's still on the regenerative journey. His goal is to farm without plowing at all and to go organic. He's realistic about the time it will take and enthusiastic about what’s possible. “I've seen the way the farm and the soil are responding,” he shares. “It makes me excited about what’s next.  

Stuart wants to keep building up the soil, to measure the nutrient density of Longmoor's milk, and one day be paid for quality rather than just quantity. He also wants to open up a space on the farm where groups of children and adults can come and learn.

It's a long-term vision for rented land, but for Stuart, that's the whole point. “We're a third of the way through the tenancy,” he says. “Imagine where we could be when we're right through it.” He isn't farming to take what he can while he's here. “If every day you think about giving back rather than taking from the land, we can make a big difference,” he says, “This is how we ensure a better future for our children and grandchildren.”

Working with the cattle that his father and grandfather stewarded, Stuart is carrying on a family tradition and a connection with the natural world finding a way forward that works for us all.

Written by Top 50 Farmers and Helianthi Psaropoulou Heilmann