BUSINESS HAPPY COW MILK
Sharing milk with the calves Words by: Anne Lee Pictures: Emma McCarthy
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hris Falconer has been talking to potential customers for his farm’s milk and looking at how to practically operate with calves at foot for almost a year. He will be one of the first farmers to adopt the Happy Cow Milk system over coming months and plans to “feel his way” into the system on the 350-cow, once-aday milking, Waerenga farm where he and his wife Sheila have already gone bobbyfree and moved away from synthetic fertiliser. “I’ve been following Glen from when he began with Happy Cow Milk - I’ve always been interested in people doing things differently and how we can be paid for that, how we can capture extra value. “The way we do milk in New Zealand – it’s so homogenous. “The big companies take it and literally homogenise it but it’s also homogenous in the sense that they take milk from everyone’s systems and put it together. “That’s not to say any one system is better than the other, but if you want to do something different – it’s been very difficult to get rewarded for that,” he says. Glen’s new “milk factory in a box”
processing system has overcome a lot of the issues commonly seen in getting your own milk to market and allows the farmer to get on with farming, albeit with some marketing and building relationships with consumers and retailers. Chris has already been getting alongside cafés, retailers and schools to find out what their needs are and how delivering his pasteurised, whole milk to them could solve problems for them. He says he’s spent a lot of time in cafés in Auckland - not an unpleasant way to do market research – and found the system using stainless steel vats coupled with the smart dispensing system will solve a big headache in terms of dealing with hundreds of plastic milk containers. “That’s not to be under-estimated, they have crates and crates of them and there’s a growing move against plastic and a few concerns over recycling.” He’d found cafés using as much plantbased milk as cows’ milk and based on discussions with baristas and café owners found it was often because of a “feel-good” Below: Chris Falconer and a happy cow – selling direct will give Chris a chance to tell a positive story and get rewarded for that.
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | October 2021
