When it comes to milk, Tammy Acton-Adams is pretty particular.
“There are certain brands, and very popular brands, that we just don’t even buy,” she told Country Life.
“If we’re away and we need milk, we won’t even try them.”
Tammy Acton-Adams pats Ira, one of the herd’s friendliest cows.
RNZ/Anisha Satya
A 24/7 milk machine: The Good Cow
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It needs to be creamy, but not so creamy it’s no longer milk. Lucky for her, that’s exactly the stuff she’s milking from her small herd of dairy cows.
Acton-Adams shares the taste of raw milk with her community through The Good Cow, a 24/7 milk vending station on her North Canterbury farm near the Ashley river.
“Nothing’s taken away. It’s got all the goodies. It’s got all the vitamins, all the minerals, prebiotics, probiotics. Everything’s in there. It’s 4.8 percent fat.
“And the taste is unbelievable; it’s very rich. Even in your coffee, you can tell, it just makes it that wee bit creamier.”
The beef, calving and contracting farmer first tried her hand at dairying to help out a former client.
“We had baled their hay for 20 years. Their grandson needed help, so he asked us to come over one afternoon to help milk the cows.
“I hadn’t been in a cow shed since I was 15 – within 10 days he had gone, and so they asked us to take over.”
Four years milking 120 cows – a sixth-generation Friesian pedigree herd – taught Acton-Adams a lot about the business.
Most of the 35 dairy cows who supply The Good Cow have names.
RNZ/Anisha Satya
“When we finished farming [there], we had two cows left over.
“And we just thought, you know – we loved the taste of the milk. We just didn’t like the idea of going back to supermarket milk.”
Enter The Good Cow – a raw milk business supplied by Acton-Adams’ 35-strong, mostly Friesian herd, which sells its milk on the farm.
The 9-aside herringbone milking system used to source The Good Cow’s raw milk.
RNZ/Anisha Satya
Cows are milked in a nine-aside herringbone shed. Just a few steps beyond the shed, the milk is stored in small vats and transferred to a vending machine.
Customers bring their empty milk bottles and pay $3.50 a litre for the unpasteurised milk.
The vending machine that pumps out The Good Cow’s raw milk – just a few steps away from the milking shed.
RNZ/Anisha Satya
As Acton-Adams’ cows are all high producers, she also supplies some milk to Fonterra.
The Good Cow’s raw milk gets tested every 10 days, to meet MPI standards for cell count and pathogens, like E coli.
“For raw milk your [cell count] has to be under 160, not allowed to sell anything over 320. We’re quite lucky, we’ve got a good herd, and so it sits around that 60.”
There are machine cleanliness standards and other requirements Acton-Adams has to meet the ensure the milk is safe for selling – but it’s worth it to her.
“Other people do it for health reasons, and they’re very passionate about the fact that it hasn’t been pasteurised.
“Our passion is the taste.”