Walk & Talk: Cream O’Galloway Farm / The Ethical Dairy

Cream O’Galloway Farm, also known as The Ethical Dairy, is spread across 800 acres, and is 100% organic. The farm has 125 dairy cows, and 250 breeding ewes.

Topics to be covered at this event include:

• Farm Diversification
• Agroecology
• Pasture fed model
• Net Zero
• Production without Antibiotic
• Cow-with-calf dairying

The farm won the Innovation in Farming Award at our own Helping it Happen Awards in 2021 for their "cow with calf" method. The radical method itself involves keeping calves with their mothers to suckle as opposed to the traditional removal of the calf within a few hours of their birth. Although the initial trial was financially challenging, the impact on cow contentment was astounding. All the animals became markedly calmer and confident whilst developing an independence from their mother akin to that of a teenager within two to three months. Seven years into this project - they have found that suckling stimulates milk production by 25% allowing calves to grow more quickly with greater throughput and overall production.

Organic farming has allowed the soil health to recover, and they are now getting the same amount of silage/forage as when using fertiliser. They have been doing Carbon Audits for 25 years and are Net Zero. The farm is sustained through its cheese production (90%) and ice cream production (10%), and has been able to maintain margins by selling cheese online.

This event is kindly sponsored by Savills and includes tea/coffee on arrival and a Cream O’Galloway ice cream at the end.