Mon, 01/08/2022 - 15:28pm
Update One
Well, what can we say. We are absolutely blown away by the support from so many people for this project. Thank you so much. What an incredible response, we are truly humbled.
One of the things we haven't mentioned yet is that our book, ‘A Dairy Story’ isn't just a memoir. There is also a section at the end that explains our farming system in a fair bit of detail. We hoped such information might catch the interest of the odd farmer and encourage them to want to know more.
Over the last couple of days have had a few messages and emails from people asking whether we go into the detail of our farming system, and that set us thinking that maybe we should have written more. We do describe the cow-with-calf aspects of our farming system, but we don't go into much detail on everything else – and there's a lot of 'everything else' – farms are very complex systems after all.
So we've come up with a project for the winter. We're going to write a second book – this time an e-book that we'll make available digitally either free or as a very low cost download – we'll take advice on what’s best.
This second book will be written by David, but with the input of others in our farm team. We will aim to publish it in early 2023.
It will expand on the information we've already written in ‘A Dairy Story’, but in a lot more detail, and it will be more of a handbook of our entire system.
We will write it with farmers and agricultural students in mind, to explain how we do things here in detail, in order to make it easier to replicate.
As costs spiral upwards in the conventional dairy industry, ours are coming down. Making our full system as accessible as possible might help encourage more farmers and, perhaps, the odd policy-maker, to consider seriously cow-with-calf dairy, and to explore the benefits of a 100% pasture, regenerative approach.
We've added a couple of new rewards to this campaign for people who might want to financially contribute to this piece of work directly. There will be some costs to doing this - getting it edited, adding illustrations, getting it typeset and putting all the technology side of things in place to turn it into an e-book, for example.
Thank you to everyone who emailed and prompted this idea. And for everyone who has already pledged support for this campaign, we’ll also send you a copy of this e-book in addition to the reward you’ve selected.
Thanks again
Wilma & David
Update Two
4th August
Astonishingly the book is fully funded within a week. We are grateful beyond words.
When you get close to hitting a target Crowdfunder strongly encourage setting a stretch goal, which we did yesterday afternoon.
Here's a thank you from David, and a peek at the other project we've been working on that the stretch goal will contribute to.
The campaign will continue to run for the full four weeks as originally planned, so there's still plenty of time to order a book. Every pledge and book pre-ordered from this point onwards will go towards supporting the stretch project.
Here's the crowdfunder link again if you would like it: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/adairystory
The book will be going to the printer very soon, and we expect to be posting copies from early October.
Thank you again.