Ash Amirahmadi of Arla: ‘I thought milk was boring. Little did I know’

theguardian.com:

Drinking a mug of tea, Ash Amirahmadi is musing on the similarities between humans and cows. “You wouldn’t think it, but the pregnancy period is the same, nine months; they have the same number of teeth as us; obviously they are mammals as well.”

Amirahmadi could be forgiven for thinking about our bovine friends more than most business leaders, given his role running the UK’s biggest dairy co-operative.

The boss of Arla Foods in the UK – to which a third of Britain’s milk producers belong – appears at home in wellies and a tweed jacket on a farm, even if in recent years he’s more likely to be found in a boardroom, negotiating milk prices with the country’s largest supermarkets.

Amirahmadi is sitting in a barn that looks more like a state-of-the-art conference centre, funded by Arla’s investment in its “innovation farm”, located at a dairy farm run by the Dyson family near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.

“We use it as a venue to educate people on the farm agenda, particularly in the context of climate and sustainability,” he says as he sips his tea (strong, with a splash of Arla milk). “This is the place that we can experiment and gather data.”

One project is trialling production of fertiliser made by adding nitrogen from the air to cattle slurry, to try to reduce ammonia and methane emissions. Another uses digital cameras to monitor the Dysons’ cows when they go for milking, looking for any behavioural changes or early signs of illness. “Cows are like us, they don’t like to show if they’ve got a problem. If they are limping they like to hide it,” Amirahmadi says.

This is perhaps not the job Amirahmadi envisioned for himself when deciding to study mechanical engineering at Nottingham University. It’s been

Age 52

Family Two