Dent Limited win Producer of the Year Award

Our client Dent Limited of Penrith was awarded Pig Producer of the Year at the Pig & Poultry Marketing Awards held on 14 May.

The awards ceremony took place at the Haymarket Hotel in London and are held each year to recognise individuals and companies operating in the UK food chain offering innovative solutions that help make the industry more sustainable, competitive and profitable.

Entries were received right across the chain: from primary farmer producers, processors, marketing groups, farm shops, retailers, butchers and restaurants.

Entrants in the Producer of the Year category had to show they had the highest standards of production, excellent animal care and high standards of business management including managing their own staff and their contracts.

The judges felt Thomas Dent had dramatically improved and expanded his business on several levels. The number of sows and size of the operation had increased in response to the requirements of processors and retailers. The vaccination of piglets had led to dramatic improvements in pig health and there was a marked improvement in growth rates and overall productivity.

This national award is a fantastic achievement for Dent Limited and shows they are really driving their business forward and looking for new opportunities.
David Allen

Carlisle United’s Great Escape

What a fantastic atmosphere at Brunton Park on Saturday where just under ten thousand fans turned up to support Carlisle United Football Club.

Only a win against Millwall and also relying on Leeds beating Northampton Town, would mean Carlisle were not relegated from League One, so to see and hear the support for the team was brilliant.

The game was fairly tense right to the end as we all knew how important the win was so when Graham Kavanagh scored early on in the first half then Paul Thirwell scored a second goal for the team, everyone in the ground was ecstatic.

Guest of honour at the match was Carlisle United Legend Jimmy Glass. Jimmy was the famous goal scoring goalkeeper at the club 10 year ago when he scored a last minute goal to save the team from relegation. We were all delighted to see him back at the ground to witness another great escape.

The atmosphere and support for the club at the weekend was amazing. It was a superb result and now we can look forward to success in League One next season David Allen

King of the Castle on the BBC

Now it's not every day that a website gets a BBC recommendation but that's what happened to medieval-castle.com last week.

What's so special about that you might ask? The answer's simple ... it's a Cumbrian website and it was designed and marketed by Dark Sea Web Design Limited who happen to our webmasters!

I spoke to Shelagh Caudle at Dark Sea Web about what it means to have a plug on the BBC and she explained that the site's visitors shot up from just over 1,000 to 2,500 per day immediately following the broadcast. Not only that but emails have flooded in with requests for coverage and links within the site.

"The marvellous thing about the BBC" said Shelagh "is that everyone knows they give an unbiased and independent viewpoint, so to be recommended as 1 out of only 4 sites in a Best of the Web review is credibility beyond comparison. It's the kind of advertising that money can't buy."

Go to the BBC News site to see the video clip (The 2nd item in the feature).

This isn't the only site from our Cumbrian webmasters that has attracted high profile attention - Shelagh is also Editor of ice-cream-recipes.com which has had over 1.2 million visitors in the last 12 months and resulted in her being offered the opportunity to write a book within the famous "Idiot's Guide To .." series. The site has sections in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and even Chinese and the visitors are from all over the world - no fewer than 231 countries/territories last year Shelagh tells me.

I didn't know there were that many!
David Allen