It’s very easy to get caught up in what’s happening on the farm especially in the last couple of months with the spring calving season, silage collection and finding our feet again after losing such a vital part of our team.
I would like to take a moment to pay my own tribute to Wilma, and to also give thanks to David, for their care and compassion over the last twenty-two years that I have known them. Not only in the development of a compassionate farming system but also the support and opportunities they have given to myself, my wife Laura and our two children.
I am passionate about our cow-with-calf dairy system. But it can sometimes feel that we are battling alone in a farming industry that doesn’t support us, sees us as the crazy outsider or perhaps just as a gimmick.
That was until I arrived in Thessaloniki on Wednesday afternoon, a busy city in northern Greece. It was certainly a different world from our quiet corner of Galloway. I was there to meet around 40 like-minded people, all interested in cow-with-calf dairy, and all facing the same challenges and looking for advice and support.
This was truly an international occasion. There were representatives from UK, Romania, Estonia, Italy, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and of course our wonderful hosts from Greece. We all gathered together for the first European Knowledge and Innovation Network, essentially the first conference of the TransformDairyNet project.
TranformDairyNet is a three-year EU funded project to encourage more dairy farmers to implement cow-calf contact systems. It was a great pleasure to attend on behalf of David and the team, and I was pleased to showcase what we have achieved and also the difficult and challenging aspects of developing the system that you see today. It certainly kept me busy over the last couple of days talking with individuals in more detail about how we farm at Rainton.
The facilitators from each nation also explained a little about their group, the number of farmers and researchers involved in each country, their areas of interest and the particular challenges they feel that they face. Case studies from individual farmers gave us an insight into some interesting farms who have been working towards a standard for other farms to follow.
This is something I would really love to see come from the project, not just for the UK but also as a European community. It raises some interesting questions in terms of definitions of a cow calf contact system, or cow-with-calf system as we tend to describe it.
Developing an agreed standard would be a way to provide guarantees to the consumer, a checks and balance system to ensure high standards of production, as well as the lobbying power as a group rather than an individual when stating the case to governments, and third-party distributors.
A fascinating aspect of the conference was hearing from Kalverliefde Milk in the Netherlands, which roughly translates as ‘calf love’. They have developed a wonderful product with an inspiring story and now supply cow-calf-contact milk through some of the biggest supermarkets in their area. A clever and innovative marketing strategy has grasped the Dutch people's attention and now over 25,000 litres of cow-with-calf milk is bought every week.
Is the UK ready for this? The people who buy the cheese from our farm probably are, but to get fresh cow-with-calf milk into supermarkets would be a big undertaking. Our farm may be a leading example of best practices in the field of ‘cow calf contact’ dairy, but it’s not at all clear whether there is an informed population willing to buy these products on a weekly basis in the UK. That consumer demand needs to be there for us to invest for the future.
My biggest takeaway from the conference is how far we have come as a business but also how far our industry still has to go - from farmer interest in cow-calf-contact production, academic research and producing scientific evidence for the wider farming community.
What I am very sure about is that there is a real passion for this type of system and a real energy from the group to inspire others and make leaps forward over the next couple of years of the project.
I also know that David, as a member of the advisory board of this project, and myself as part of the working group are keen to smooth the bumps for those beginning this journey and grow the community of cow-with-calf dairy farmers and researchers through collaborative working.
My trip to Greece wasn’t all work, work, work of course! With hosts providing us with fabulous food, entertainment and an opportunity to create new friendships, meet with old friends and colleagues, it was a truly inspiring event and, I hope, will help inspire the next wave of cow-with-calf dairy practitioners.
Charles Ellett
Dairy Manager at The Ethical Dairy