Our farming philosophy
We believe in fresh, local, animal- and environmentally-friendly milk. We always have done, but have only recently been able to dedicate the time to ensuring you are able to benefit directly from all our hard work as well.
Our milk used to be sold under contract to a big dairy company. They would only collect milk from the farm every two days and took it for processing over 70 miles away in Cambridgeshire. It can often be the case that milk taken to large dairies is stored in milk silos at the processing plant for several days before being processed. Supermarkets insist on long-sell by dates for their shelves, often 10 days, meaning mass-produced milk in your fridge could be 2 weeks old before it gets used. We think that fresh milk should mean fresh milk. Our cows are milked in the morning and that milk processed on the same day, ready to be delivered to your door or local retailer within 24 hours, or even that afternoon. It couldn't be fresher! And it has travelled no further than the distance from our farm to your doorstep - milk smiles, not food miles.
The price we were paid for our milk by the dairy company meant that we were being forced to decide whether to compromise on the time and care needed to sustain a healthy and happy herd. We refused to do this. We want our cows to be comfortable and healthy at all times, and don't think that forcing them to produce higher and higher yields to satsify "economies of scale" is fair.
During the winter months we provide a fresh bed of straw each day and muck out the whole lot at least every 3 weeks. We don't "push" our cows to produce as much milk as physically possible (up to 12,000 litres a year per animal for some "high-yielding" herds); instead, our cows produce about 8,000 litres each year. Also, our cows are fed on a mostly home-grown ration, so we know exactly what they are eating and where it has come from. And we reward each cow with around 2 months holiday per year (quite a bit more than we get!), which during the summer is spent on our grazing marshes and in winter in a comfortable straw-bedded pen. None of these choices is the cheapest way to run a herd and many large scale. intesnive dairy farmers would think we are crazy, but we think it's the best way. And selling our milk directly to you means we can now improve our welfare standards even further. Friendly farming, not factory farming.
