Barber's Farmhouse Cheesemakers cuts electricity bills by £72,000 a year with milk-source heat pumps from Arkaya Energy

Barber's Farmhouse Cheesemakers, which has operated from Somerset since 1833 and claims the title of the world's oldest surviving cheddar-maker, is saving £72,288 a year on electricity after fitting three milk-source heat pumps supplied by Arkaya Energy across its dairy farms^[1]. The installations also cut the business's carbon emissions by roughly 57 t of CO₂ annually.

The problem: energy as a balance-sheet line

With 2,500 cows across seven units, energy use is not a marginal cost - it is a business-critical line on the balance sheet, and controlling electricity consumption is as important as maintaining milk quality. Previously, energy bills on some units would regularly top more than £5,000, says Chris Barber, whose family has been making cheese for nearly 200 years.

The scale of the operation makes the exposure significant:

• 2,500 cows milked across seven units, with average herd sizes of 280-300 head and one larger 400-cow unit
• Two of the fitted sites are 24/48 herringbone parlours producing up to 12,000 litres a day
• Energy bills at individual units were already a recurring pressure before UK electricity prices spiked

How the technology works

Milk leaves the cow at about 32-36°C. As it passes through the plate cooler, the heat removed during cooling is retained within the system. A standard pump moves the captured energy through the system, similar to the way an ice bank would operate. Using Arkaya's Milk Source Heat Pump technology, the system upgrades the extracted energy to produce high-grade hot water at up to 92°C - enabling cooling and high-temperature water production with a single integrated system.

The outcome is that milk is cooled to 4°C as required, while enough high-temperature water is generated for daily washing - eliminating the need for separate electric heaters. The system meets the total cooling and hot water demand of a dairy unit, replacing traditional cooling systems such as ice banks and standalone water heaters with a single integrated platform.

The efficiency gain is notable because Barber's farms were not starting from a low base. Mr Barber's farm was already highly efficient; the Milk Source Heat Pump still saved him more than 50% on electricity bills. At one site, weekly energy consumption fell from 3,972 kWh before installation to 2,340 kWh after optimisation - a saving of 1,632 kWh per week.

The rollout

Barber's has committed to five systems in total across its farms. Two have been commissioned and have been operating since March 2023 and March 2024. The next installation is planned for the business's largest site, a 60-point rotary parlour. Fault detection and performance optimisation are handled centrally, improving reliability - a key hurdle in early development. Remote monitoring now comes as standard across all installations, ensuring consistent performance and early fault detection, explains Kumo Sharma, founder of Arkaya Energy.

The combined saving across the three live installations works out to £198 per day at a baseline electricity price of 25p/kWh^[1].

What to watch

The Barber's deployment is one of the more detailed public datasets for milk-source heat pump economics in UK dairy, and Arkaya is already using it as a reference case to attract other operators. The technology's replicability across different parlour configurations - herringbone, rotary, robotic - is the key variable for broader uptake. Whether UK agricultural energy policy, including any future support for on-farm electrification, accelerates the payback calculus for smaller herds will determine how quickly the model scales beyond early adopters.