How now, brown cows?

Organic and compostably packaged ‘cow-to-cup’ milk, sold direct from a family farm in south Devon, is changing the way we buy our daily pint, finds Julie Harding

- Julie Harding

FARMER Oliver Lee took an elocution staple and turned it into a call to arms for milk lovers. ‘How now, brown cow?’ A nonsensical phrase employed to encourage perfectly rounded vowels in classrooms down the decades, but also a catchy title for a dairy business. ‘The name came to me one night after a few beers,’ explains Mr Lee. ‘I started thinking about my brown cows and How Now Dairy was born.’

Today, these brown cows, mainly Ayrshires and currently between milkings in the robotic parlour, are cudding contentedly in a straw-floored barn at the 40-acre Ladywell Farm in south Devon. Ayrshires are Scottish natives, their brown hues the colour of conkers, with white patches often creamy like their milk.

‘This one’s Black Betsy,’ continues Mr Lee, filming his ‘girls’ on FaceTime and showing full-frame a somewhat misnamed bovine, whose large brown blotches may be darker than her herd-mates, but are far from coal-coloured. ‘Here’s Trixy, Betsy’s daughter. She loves to come up for a chat; and this is Bloom,’ notes Mr Lee, showing off a mainly white cow, as he clambers over a metal gate to get closer. ‘She was the first calf I helped to birth,’ he adds, rubbing her neck affectionately.

In terms of milk production, Potter is the most prolific. Her udder yields 34 litres on a good day, 14 litres more than the average from the 39 other cows here, 10 of which are Friesians. All of them (unusually in farming) are rented: the Ayrshires from Mr Lee’s mentor, Russell Ashford—a lifelong dairy farmer, who taught the 27-year-old the intricacies of dairying before the launch of the How Now cow to-cup milk-delivery business, 2½ years ago.