Nuffield #20 How Now Dairy

I made it to Australia, landing in Melbourne late on Sunday night and spending Monday driving north and having lunch at a winery with Sarah Bolton, an Australian scholar who did a very similar Nuffield to me pre-pandemic. I saw my first kangaroos of the trip lying in the shade near a wetlands area and was pretty happy to find out that Australian magpies still sound as lovely now as they did in 2017 and 2011 (my previous trips here).

Today I visited How Now Dairy, a cow calf contact farm run by Cathy on a farm tenanted from Ken and his brother. Retired dairy farmers, Ken and his brother do six of the week’s seven milkings and Cathy has an office in the nearby town as well as processing facilities.

The business has been in its current location for about two years and has a herd of around 70 cows. All of the milk produced is pasteurised and either sold to small shops/cafes in Melbourne or processed for cheese. Cheese is sold via farmers’ markets but Cathy is working on online retail.

The herd is a mixture of cow breeds coming from different farms, and breeding is now AI on a handful of best cows and a Speckle Park bull on the rest. The beef calves move at six months to Cathy’s partner’s farm where they will be finished for a beef scheme that will run alongside their milk and cheese sales.

This being Australia the cows graze all year round and have a tree belt to provide shelter. It is particularly hot at the moment- 35 degrees- so the cows are milked slightly earlier to avoid milking in the heat of the day. The calves also drink more when its hot- and cows produce less milk- so yields are lower.

While the cows were milked the calves waited in the collecting yard, as the farm previously housed a much bigger herd the set up allows plenty of room for the calves to wait. In some purpose built CCC systems the collecting yard is a pressure point as calves don’t like being in it which necessitates a kindergarten area.

Weaning is done abruptly and by nose flap, the OAD milking doesn’t fit with staggered contact. The calves are a minimum of 12 weeks of age when weaned. The mix of breeds makes it hard to wean on a specific size so weaning is done more on feel.

I watched milking and there didn’t seem to be any issues with milk let down. All cows are milked out completely and heifers start to come in to the parlour before they calve so that they are used to the system and to handling. In the parlour the cows receive around 2kg of grain and some were given an additional mouthful on exit!

The demand for milk outstrips supply, and Cathy now feels that the system is scaleable as long as calvings are spread through the year (to avoid having too many calves in the herd at any one time). There are no other dairies in Victoria selling cow calf contact direct to consumer so How Now is the only supplier for people who want to buy milk or cheese from this sytem. Cathy kindly passed on details of a local farmer who has started CCC but sells to a processor, and I am going to visit them later this week.

The farm team also includes Gigi the dachsund, who worked hard getting the cows in from the field. She supervised milking from her office chair.