Raw milk

I found a source of raw milk to use for making cheese. It's $2/litre, which is about 20c cheaper than the stuff from the supermarket.

This guy …


… is called Merrill McNeil; he has a farm over the other side of the harbour and sells raw milk to whoever wants it. The only drawback is that although his farm is quite close to my house as the crow flies, it's a long long way around by road. I've taken him a lot of empty two litre bottles, and will pick up the milk and drop off the next week's bottles on Fridays after work. We'll see how it goes, but I'm hoping I might be able to make butter every now and then too.

It'll be interesting to see the difference between raw and bought (standardised, pasteurised and homogenised) milk cheese.

Here are two of the girls in the paddock next to the milking shed:


Jersey, or Jersey cross, which have very high fat milk, and just look at the udders on them. Poor things, the bovine equivalent of an H cup, if there is such a thing.

Here are their wee calves:


So sweet, they're just a couple of days old. Merrill raises all of his calves; none of this sending them off to the works as bobby calves. He supplies a lot of "lifestylers" (people who have five or ten acres fairly close to town with a few animals but a proper job as well) with house cows. No doubt the bull calves are eventually turned into beef, but at least they're a decent age (i.e. have stopped being small and cute and pitiable) when that happens.