The unconventional practice paying dividends for one farmer

We love coming to work here. It’s true. We’re happy, the animals are happy. It’s nice and calm. It’s such a great environment. And we got here after quite a long, holistic journey. From feeling our way in something not a lot of people have been doing – essentially writing the book as we went, learning from experience, bitter or otherwise.

We first started looking at alternative ways of working, moving away from an industrial model, more than 30 years ago when we were an ice cream maker. And we were coming into contact with people who were talking a totally different language to us. It was all ‘biodiversity loss’ and ‘animal welfare’ and ‘pollution’. This was a bit ‘out there’ for conventional farmers at the time.

But slowly, slowly we started to experiment with organic, even though converting wasn’t easy. On the back of that mindset change, we started to think about everything else we were doing on the farm and how to make it better.

Around that time, we were finding loads of people wanted to do farm tours with us and the only negative comment we got back was being asked why we separated the cows from the calves. It really upset people and they were clearly shocked. My late wife, Wilma, found that emotional. For me, it was a marketing opportunity.

How could we crack this nut? Nobody in the UK was doing cow with calf farming at the time, so off we went to Europe, visiting farms there to see what they were up to. We came back thinking, ‘we can do this’. It wasn’t, let’s say, smooth sailing. We thought the cows would thank us for leaving their calves with them. They’d be relaxed. The opposite happened! The cows got really stressed. We got stressed. They were getting their calves back every day after milking and were so upset, we couldn’t understand it. They wouldn’t come into the parlour, and we abandoned it after five months in 2012.

The thing we realised later was cows are sentient beings. They knew what the rules were; they’d go into the parlour to get milked and the calf would be gone. But in our new system, the calf was still there. They hated that. I’ve never seen anything like it.

When we came back to it in 2016, we needed to get the routine right and be consistent about it. We changed the layout of the building and cracked the management side of things, increasing the number of feed stands for calves to feed themselves with our sileage during overnight separation, and putting in rotary brushes for them, which they love. They’re with their mothers in the day, and in their own space overnight.

Once we got into the rhythm of it, something strange happened, and honestly, other people didn’t think it was possible. What we found was in the traditional set up, with 100% pasture fed cows, we were getting 4,500 litres of milk per cow, of which 500 litres was taken by the calf, leaving us with 4,000 litres. But when we went to cow with calf, a handful of cows gave us 4,000 litres while raising a calf. We thought they must be stealing milk; there’s no way a cow could be feeding a five-month-old calf , which can drink 2,000 litres easily. It would mean we were producing 6,000 litres of milk from forage and that’s unheard of!

It’s incredible. We know that with selective breeding we can get a herd giving us 4,000 litres per cow while raising a calf. And the calves are growing more than twice as fast and maturing for finishing or breeding much earlier. That allows us to move them on, releasing them from eating forage. It means we can increase our cow numbers by 2025%, having 25% more cows, giving 25% more milk per cow, and 25% more cattle to sell.

It’s not a gimmick. It’s not crazy. It’s a very efficient farming system, but so counter-intuitive when you first look at it. There’s now over 200 farms doing cow with calf in Europe, including more than 30 of us in the UK.

It’s not going away, it’s going placing and growing, even though it’s still small. Now we’ve just got to convince the industry it’s not a joke. This is something worthwhile.