Staying with mum: cow-withcalf dairying

Helen Babbs finds out about the dairy method where cows get to keep their calves at foot

- By Helen Babbs

On a standard dairy farm, calves are removed from their mothers soon after birth. The calves are then hand-reared on bottles, while the cows are milked by machine for their entire lactation span. “Conventional thinking is that if you leave the cow with her calf, the calf will drink all the milk and you’ll have nothing to sell,” explains David Finlay, from Rainton Farm in Galloway. But over twenty years of running an organic dairy farm, David and his late wife Wilma came to feel this system was very unnatural compared to way they managed the rest of their farm.

NATURALLY HAPPY

“Like with our organic and regenerative methods, we wanted to see if we achieve a more natural life for the cows, without all the bought-in and artificial inputs, and still have a profitable farm,” David explains. Their pioneering experiments produced “The Ethical Dairy’, the first commercial scale cow-with-calf dairy farm in the UK. “The suckling from the calves, as well as the reduced stress at having their calf with them, actually encourages the cows to produce more milk. Our cows now produce 4000 litres per lactation, almost the same as the gold-standard for a conventional organic dairy farm, as well as feeding their calves.”

Switching the dairy herd to having their calves at foot brought rapid benefits in terms of cow well-being. “Their health and happiness hugely increased,” says David. “The cows are calm, confident and unstressed - a big issue as a stressed cow won't let down as much milk. We get far fewer health problems like mastitis, or weaning pneumonia in the calves, which in turn means fewer vets bills. Although we were initially concerned that the calves might be less tame, not being bottle-fed, they've actually turned out to be far more laid back and friendly.”

BRINGING UP BABY