A small family company from north Pembrokeshire has become a worldbeater in the field of hi-tech systems for dairy farmers. Arbel Electronics of Rosebush exports its unique systems to 14 countries. Dairy farmers in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are among those who use the world's first remote milk cooling tank control system.
This enables a farmer or cheesemaker to look after - and adjust - the temperature of his raw material from anywhere in the world using a computer or mobile phone.
The system is the idea of Keith Elcomb, who operates Arbel Electronics with his wife and daughter and two staff in a software design office in Zaragoza, Spain.
The company has been designing and manufacturing control systems for the dairy industry and other customers for over 25 years, ever since Essex-born Mr Elcomb retired from the Merchant Navy - he was based at Barry - and decided to stay in Wales.
'We fell in love with the place,' he says of the former farmhouse at Rosebush. Now every public toilet in Pembrokeshire is opened and closed daily by a remote locking system operated from the small workshop and office in Rosebush and the company recently expanded into all aspects of the food industry.
Its range of temperature monitoring modules are designed to meet food safety regulations introduced in England and Wales in 1995 requiring accurate and continuous temperature monitoring for the safe storage of food and to demonstrate due diligence
'A typical freezer warehouse, school, restaurant or bar environment may contain foodstuffs stored in coolers, freezers or deep coolers at a variety of temperatures and manual temperature monitoring can be time-consuming and subject to human error,' said Mr Elcomb.
'But if monitoring is not continuous, fluctuations or temporary faults and failures in equipment may go completely undetected, and any such compromise on food quality can affect your business, your customers and ultimately put people's health at risk.
'All of our systems offer sophisticated warnings so that in the event of cold stores or ovens not complying to the determined settings, someone will actually know about it and can do something to rectify the problem.'
The company's fortunes have varied with the state of the farming industry. Trade took a knock when the BSE crisis kicked in, made a small recovery and was then hit by the foot-and-mouth epidemic.
'Now the problem is the price being paid for producing milk,' said Mr Elcomb. 'Because the dairy side went quiet, we decided to branch out into new and exciting technology - using the internet and the mobile phone system to talk to machines on the other wide of the world.
'Now we are able, from here, to communicate with a dairy farm in Australia and, if necessary, change the way the machinery there works.'
The system can automatically control the amount of detergent used to wash out bulk tanks, or monitor and if necessary change the temperature of pasteurisation tanks or cheese vats.
MORE: The system at work for a Welsh cheesemaker, pages 6&7
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