Farm

About raw milk products

/ dairymilkmaid / 8 Comments

A little boy the same age as our own Alex is dead after drinking raw milk sold as “bath milk”. I’ve reposted this piece about raw milk as some background. Please, don’t mess with raw milk. Do what we do on our dairy farm and make sure you only drink pasteurised milk. UPDATE: Actually, the best place to read about the Mountain View Organic bath milk tragedy is at Dr David Tribe’s blog: http://gmopundit.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/an-avoidable-child-death-from.html

UPDATE 28 June 2016: The latest findings presented to the coroner are at http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/raw-milk-probable-cause-of-victorian-threeyearolds-death-coroner-hears/news-story/96f70efbd39ae0d43a0a47e96cc5996d

 

dairymilkmaid's avatarThe Milk Maid Marian

Farmstead cheese

Did you know there is such a thing as “Real Milk Activism”? These activists believe the only real milk is unpasteurised milk.

Currently, it is illegal in Australia to sell unpasteurised “raw” milk but Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) is conducting a review that could (although it is unlikely, I suspect) see it hit the shelves.

Milk has caused very little illness in Australia over the past decade. According to the FSANZ paper A Risk Profile of Dairy Products in Australia:

Microbiological survey data for pasteurised dairy products in Australia show a very low incidence of hazards of public health significance in these products. Overseas data demonstrates that pathogens are frequently isolated from raw milk and raw milk products. Pathogens were detected in raw milk in 85% of 126 surveys identified in the literature.

In surveys of raw milk cheese pathogens were rarely detected. Pathogens are found infrequently…

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Skeletons in the dairy case

/ dairymilkmaid / 15 Comments

CowsDairyTrack

We know we are not perfect, we realise we must do better and we are proud of how far we have come.

Our cows live better lives than they did when I was a girl. Careful breeding has reduced the incidence of mastitis and lameness, while a new understanding of bovine nutrition has reduced the risk of calving trouble and helped us insulate the cows from the impact of both drought and flood. Our first generation of naturally polled (hornless) calves has just been born.

Even so, dairy farmers will one day earn a prime-time feature for all the wrong reasons. It could be someone doing the right thing that looks like the wrong thing: Continue reading →

How to grow Aussie dairy: fixed price

/ dairymilkmaid / 9 Comments

The refusal of Australian farmers to saddle up our cows and grow, grow, grow like our wonderful Kiwi cousins has been much lamented. In a recent blog about the subject, I suggested that we simply needed reliable profitability to do the same and followed it up with Ian Macallan’s integration vision.

In this second follow-up post, Fonterra dairy ingredients trader Scott Briggs answered a few questions about its innovative Fixed Base Milk Price, which promises to iron out some of the volatility in the price we get for our milk. Continue reading →

A Landcare foot soldier inspired by a true heroine

/ dairymilkmaid / 8 Comments
Alex's babies need watering twice a day

Alex’s babies need watering twice a day

Alex has 1000 babies that demand his tender ministrations twice a day. There must be scores more trailer-loads of trees like this getting twice-daily dousings across Victoria right now, judging by the frenzied timing of the government’s 2 Million Trees program.

We found out we were getting some trees three weeks ago after the local nursery confirmed it could provide stock that must normally be ordered nine months in advance. It wasn’t until two days before we collected them that we knew when they were coming or how many there would be. Crazy stuff!

Even more remarkable is the generosity of a lady named Kaye from our Landcare group. She raises thousands of seedlings every year for anybody who’s keen to get plants into the ground. Her garden is a wonderland of tubes sprouting everything from exquisitely delicate chocolate lilies through to one-day magnificent mannas. Continue reading →

New development in Australian dairy makes my stomach churn

/ dairymilkmaid / 53 Comments

Ningbo Dairy Group vice-president Harry Wang, left, and owner Yin Chong Zhang inspect farms near Phillip Island. Picture: Aaron Francis, published in The Weekly Times.

This is the blog post I hesitated to write. Yes, we need foreign investment, absolutely yes, but an article about a particular Chinese investor’s plans written by Sue Neales makes my stomach churn.
Continue reading →

How to grow Aussie dairy: vertical and horizontal integration

/ dairymilkmaid / 12 Comments

In last week’s post about what it will take to encourage dairy farmers to grow, I promised to follow up with some ideas. The first is a guest post from Ian Macallan, a project strategist and business architect who has operated in the Asia Pacific for over 30 years across a number of industries including dairy.

Whilst 97 per cent of Australian dairy farms are family-owned, there are smatterings of “corporate farming” that bring together large parcels of land and cows.

If left unchecked, this type of pure farm aggregation could swing to the extreme of looking like feudal farming, leaving no capacity for family dairy farming. These corporate farms are also still vulnerable to milk price fluctuations.
Continue reading →