About our cows & calves

Zero antibiotics or medications are used on our farm - very few farms can say this, even organic ones. The microbiome is all-important to us.

What our animals eat is as important as what we eat. A cow's primal diet is a diverse range of grass types, supplemented by naturally occurring herbs, legumes and tree browse.

Our calves naturally suckle milk, some with their own mothers and some with 'nanny cows' - basically some of the cows have more maternal instinct than others, so we allow these to focus on suckling their own calf plus 1 or 2 others (depending on how much milk they produce), whilst the cows which are less strongly maternal, are milked (just once per day) to produce milk for our products. 

Any calves born here are reared on the farm, some to join our dairy herd, and the rest are grown for meat to be sold to our customers (it's an integrated system). As standard our calves are kept suckling naturally for 6-9 months which correlates with when wild ruminants would naturally wean by themselves (for context - most dairy farms conventionally would feed formula milk and then wean calves around 6-8 weeks, by comparison). Very occasionally if we get a calf who doesn't have a suitable mother or foster mother, we will rear that calf by hand, but always using our own raw milk for several months (plus some of our kefir for an extra probiotic boost!). The gentle transition we practice means our calves are very well grown, naturally healthy, and well-adapted for a life eating their natural diet with no need for energy supplements or medications.