![\"Tammy](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4JIKLRM_Country_Life_Good_cow_4_JPG.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nWhen it comes to milk, Tammy Acton-Adams is pretty particular.<\/p>\n
“There are certain brands, and very popular brands, that we just don’t even buy,” she told Country Life.<\/p>\n
“If we’re away and we need milk, we won’t even try them.”<\/p>\n
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Tammy Acton-Adams pats Ira, one of the herd’s friendliest cows.<\/p>\n
RNZ\/Anisha Satya<\/p>\n
A 24\/7 milk machine: The Good Cow<\/p>\n
Follow Country Life on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a>, iHeart<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “And the taste is unbelievable; it’s very rich. Even in your coffee, you can tell, it just makes it that wee bit creamier.”<\/p>\n The beef, calving and contracting farmer first tried her hand at dairying to help out a former client.<\/p>\n “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.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Four years milking 120 cows – a sixth-generation Friesian pedigree herd – taught Acton-Adams a lot about the business.<\/p>\n Most of the 35 dairy cows who supply The Good Cow have names.<\/p>\n RNZ\/Anisha Satya<\/p>\n “When we finished farming [there], we had two cows left over.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n Enter The Good Cow – a raw milk business supplied by Acton-Adams’ 35-strong, mostly Friesian herd, which sells its milk on the farm.<\/p>\n The 9-aside herringbone milking system used to source The Good Cow’s raw milk.<\/p>\n RNZ\/Anisha Satya<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Customers bring their empty milk bottles and pay $3.50 a litre for the unpasteurised milk.<\/p>\n The vending machine that pumps out The Good Cow’s raw milk – just a few steps away from the milking shed.<\/p>\n RNZ\/Anisha Satya<\/p>\n As Acton-Adams’ cows are all high producers, she also supplies some milk to Fonterra.<\/p>\n The Good Cow’s raw milk gets tested every 10 days, to meet MPI standards for cell count and pathogens, like E coli.<\/p>\n “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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “Other people do it for health reasons, and they’re very passionate about the fact that it hasn’t been pasteurised.<\/p>\n “Our passion is the taste.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When it comes to milk, Tammy Acton-Adams is pretty particular. “There are certain brands, and very popular brands,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[138,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-597657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Most](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/4JIKKZZ_Country_Life_Good_cow_5_JPG.jpeg\")
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