Organic dairy farming -- putting quality before quantity

By Silva Kramer

[Sylvia, with her partner Noel Allen, runs a small organic dairy herd on the north coast. They have 35 Jersey cows. Silvia is interested in developing a net-work of small-scale organic dairy producers on the north coast.]

Our thoughts on dairy farming are slightly different to most farmers. We feel that most farms have too many animals to give them the right attention and we feel that up to 50 milking cows is a good number to be sustainable.

We also believe that it is not right to separate calves from cows shortly after calving, as it stresses both cow and calf and it makes no sense to us to feed a calf on a bucket with powdered reconstituted milk or even freshly milked cows milk. Cows are very social animals, they like licking their calves; they worry about them and get very distressed when they are separated.

It might not be as economically viable as milking twice a day, but we believe that milking once a day and leaving the calf with the cow for the rest of day is a viable option, as it is the natural thing to do.

We also run poultry with our cows, as they scratch the manure, pick off ticks and other parasites from the cows' bodies, consume dairy by-products and of course produce eggs. Cattle and poultry complement each other very well, both producing good amounts of manure, which then can be composted and used for tree crops or small crops. By having our eggs in several baskets we believe that should we have a problem with one farm output, the other farm products can take up the slack.

We have visited a number of farms in Germany and Switzerland and all of those had small dairy herds. These farms had farm income other than from the dairy; e.g. berries or small crops and all were viable.

At the moment there is a strong movement in Germany to encourage farmers to downsize their herds and look at quality rather than quantity. This attitude has arisen from the recent animal diseases, i.e. BSE (Mad Cow Disease) and Foot and Mouth Disease and the trend to downsize applies to all farmers, not just the Organic ones.

I would be interested in hearing from other farmers wishing to diversify into organic dairy and from dairy farmers wishing to downsize or go organic. There may be opportunities for us to link up, pool resources, buy out Norco etc!

Readers' Comments

From: "Nick Haddow" nickhaddow@bigpond.com
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 18:09:25 +1000

I agree with the authors approach and I wish her the best of luck with her farm and establishing a network. I am a cheesemaker who specialises in working with small farms and have had several years experience in Europe. I am currently working with a dairy farmer in Tasmania, but would be very interested in hearing if the author (or other milk producers in the area) are planning on value-adding their milk by making cheese. I would be very interested in helping anyone who needs some info on how to get started.

Nick Haddow

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