FARMER Oliver Lee took an elocution staple and turned it into a call to arms for milk lovers. ‘How now, brown cow?’ A nonsensical phrase employed to encourage perfectly rounded vowels in classrooms down the decades, but also a catchy title for a dairy business. ‘The name came to me one night after a few beers,’ explains Mr Lee. ‘I started thinking about my brown cows and How Now Dairy was born.’
Today, these brown cows, mainly Ayrshires and currently between milkings in the robotic parlour, are cudding contentedly in a straw-floored barn at the 40-acre Ladywell Farm in south Devon. Ayrshires are Scottish natives, their brown hues the colour of conkers, with white patches often creamy like their milk.
‘This one’s Black Betsy,’ continues Mr Lee, filming his ‘girls’ on FaceTime and showing full-frame a somewhat misnamed bovine, whose large brown blotches may be darker than her herd-mates, but are far from coal-coloured. ‘Here’s Trixy, Betsy’s daughter. She loves to come up for a chat; and this is Bloom,’ notes Mr Lee, showing off a mainly white cow, as he clambers over a metal gate to get closer. ‘She was the first calf I helped to birth,’ he adds, rubbing her neck affectionately.
In terms of milk production, Potter is the most prolific. Her udder yields 34 litres on a good day, 14 litres more than the average from the 39 other cows here, 10 of which are Friesians. All of them (unusually in farming) are rented: the Ayrshires from Mr Lee’s mentor, Russell Ashford—a lifelong dairy farmer, who taught the 27-year-old the intricacies of dairying before the launch of the How Now cow to-cup milk-delivery business, 2½ years ago.
Esta historia es de la edición May 26, 2021 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición May 26, 2021 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds