Every morning I wake to the din of a blackbird in a tall roadside Maple. Have I missed something? Some mornings the tractor windscreen is touched with frost – but not many. The temperature wanders around 8 to 10 centigrade, which is hardly wintry. Snowdrops already build up a smooth froth on the south facing banks – and I have seen a russet glow forming on the willow.

I am wrestling with  timber ‘firring pieces.’ Our local joiner has machined down some lengths of 4-by-2 to provide a straight guide for us to lay the floor screed to. The firring tapers from 2” down to 1 1/2” over its length to give the finished floor a slight run, or flow, towards the drain. That’s another local craftsman pulling his weight behind this enterprise.

The International Harvester 574 tractor is due to have its handbrake mended next week. I dare not start milking before the power source is totally reliable. Fortunately I have found someone with the knowledge and the will, and someone with brim-full enthusiasm for the more Bronze Age tractor.  Again, we must – all of us, small-holders and townsfolk alike, marvel at and encourage great men and women engineers and husband/people to continue their vital work in getting us all fed. When the dairy is finished and the fresh milking is gushing through the system, we shall publish a list of everyone who was involved in bringing it off; lets marvel at just who is behind a pint of milk on a supermarket shelf or on a damp doorstep in Hampshire.

A small farm near us keeps Swiss Brown cows and they process their milk for cheese. I hope to meet them next week and  find out more. I do already feel part of a ‘movement.’

We are in discussions with an energy company to try and find a system to power the dairy entirely from the sun.

Secretary of State Caroline Spellman (D.E.F.R.A) told us last week that her Department used only 18% British food to feed itself - the remaining 82% was sourced from abroad. What sort of example is that for other Departments?

Notes on the Side: 

I have a book on the go at the moment called "England in Particular" by Sue Clifford and Angela King (2006) of Commonground  (www.commonground.org.uk), which brings together all my interests and talks with deep knowledge about everything from the Dorset Coast to Dew Ponds. The trouble is I just want to sit and read it ! 

G.K Chesterton in "What’s wrong with the World" says, "All men in history who have really done anything with the future had their eyes fixed upon the past" - eg, the Renaissance.

Watch out ... the food runs away so fast. The nutrient stream runs thin, and we have bought in round bales of ‘haylage,’ which is a strike between early cut juicy silage and a later cut of hay. It is much drier, but wrapped like silage. It smells like an exotic tea, and the small holding has the scent of  a Shri-Lankan plantation in summer. My friend Gerald has loaned me a Ring Feeder, which provides a kid’s climbing frame ring around the precious bale so there should be no waste. The International Harvester 574 (68hp) beast with the ’Quicke’ fore-loader  is so used to this kind of grunt work. Feeding time is now seldom, and painless.

Awful storms beat upon the barn and caravan, last week, to the point where sleep became impossible. The cows and calves buried their heads up to their shoulders in the hedge and presented their narrow backsides to the northwesterly torrent. The pigs gave up and took a long lie in. The fouls hardly noticed and stayed inside for two days. Lets not grumble – we have only had 4 frosts this winter, and the shortest day is long passed.

Geoffrey has worked out the final answer for fitting out the ‘bail’ with vacuum lines, pumps and ... even the total answer to the power-take-off ancient ‘bronze age’ spline. Nothing is too much trouble. Everyone involved in this really wants it to work.

I think farmers work constantly against unexpected and overwhelming odds, and they learn a natural inclination to cooperate with other people in similar situations.

The calf pen is finished and ready to trap the teenagers to start the weaning process. This can’t start until the ‘milking bail’ is ready to take over the milking from the calves – will the change-over be smooth and painless? Will the mothers, bolshily, hold back their precious milk from the intervening human? Very soon we shall find out.

NOTES ON THE SIDE 

We have run out of Martin Flour. This is ground from wheat (Solstice variety), which is grown by a village farmer/craft grower in a field called ... ’Well Ground’ ... no, I  didn’t make it up!

Back-of-a-bus-ticket interesting figures: Martin consists of 164 households. If each family use 2 loaves of bread each week – Martin Parish will need 17,000 loaves per year. Each loaf, roughly, comes from a square yard of ground devoted to wheat. That means the Parish needs 4 acres to provide it with the staff of life for one year (4840 square yards to the acre). The other thing is that  our craft grower has been growing ‘bread quality wheat’ year in year out for 15 years in southern Britain; in  damp chalky soils, there you go. We have had the flour tested and baked by great bakers, and there is no need to add hard wheats from Canada or the Ukraine. Martin wheat from ‘Well Ground’ is absolutely fine; it performs perfectly well.

My friend gave me a book called "Wildwood" by Roger Deakin. I walk around in a winter trance. You must, please, read it. You simply don’t know what will happen next ... you might be given a fab book.

I have a nephew-in-law living in Han Province of China, and I hope he is going to help me with stories and with beautiful photographs of rural China. It's difficult not to be excited in 2012.

I thought I would go back over the principles of the ‘Microdairy’ just to be sure.

I suppose it steals its name from the very successful Microbrewing movement borne out of the work of CAMRA and its resistance to the monolith brewing companies and their remote, industrial ‘brews’.

The Dairy business is quite similar in that  4 vast companies do all the processing of fresh milk.

Maple Field Milk intends, like many before us, and alongside us, to produce a self-employed living from fresh milk production from 15 to 20 cows. The milk will be pasteurized and bottled in our new dairy room and sold direct to families within a 10-mile radius of the farm. The milk will not be organic or homogenised. The cows will graze on grass grown without chemical fertilizers. The milk will be delivered twice a week and will be a maximum of 3 days old.

The new homemade two-birth milking bail arrived from the makers last week. CC Fabrication from our own Parish have built it to the scale drawings produced by me. CC Fab, for short, are indeed ‘fab’ and have interpreted the blueprint perfectly, finishing the vehicle off in a beautiful green, which we shall call Maple Field green from now on. I towed the bail here with a friend in a 4-wheel-drive truck, and it rolled behind us like a Winebago motor home. The pitch black roof looks like a moth with folded wings.

Dairy engineer Geoffrey will fix up the vacuum lines and make it fit for a cow’s teat.

The ‘test’ cows watch the contraption with mild interest and a little dread.

We are finishing off the small corral/shelter where we shall keep the calves overnight to try and effect the milk share between us and them. It may not work, in which case we’ll give in and separate the calves from their mothers. Next week I shall get Sue Cole’s advice on this manoeuvre.

As it gets nearer to the ‘test milking,’ I am impressed by the help and advice I receive from eager agricultural men quite prepared to adapt and modify dark looking agricultural spares found in the bottom of tea chests full of  ‘things that might come in useful,’ not to mention the language of ball peen hammers and American Fine spanner sets. The power-take-off driven air pump I inherited from my late friend Bill Parker has a spline fitting only to be found on ‘little grey Fergy’ tractors. We have to somehow adapt this. They say that farmers were driven off the land and into the factories of the Industrial Revolution taking their ingenuity and their box of spanners with them. Perhaps we can get them to return.

I am keen to meet and talk to as many small-scale craft dairymen and women as I can, not least because it brings me comfort on a rainswept December morning with next to no daylight  - comfort to think of them with their heads pressed against the rainsoaked flank of an English dairy cow.

I spoke to Matt Dale in North Aston, Oxfordshire, yesterday. He and his business partner, Josh, have a herd of 18 Ayrshire cows, and 10 are in-milk at this moment.Their enterprise is 4 to 5 years old now, and Matt has been a great help to me.

Over the county boundary in Wiltshire we have Tim Wilcox of Wilcox Milk, Mere, Wilts. With 300 customers taking pasteurized milk from his electric milk float, he has created an extra job place for one and a more secure future for the family farm. Tim took an engineering degree but has returned to the family dairy farm .He has set up a Dairy processing room in a ship’s container. He and his father milk 75 cows and process a certain amount whilst sending the remainder to the wholesale market.

My mentor Ian Crouch at Chettle, Dorset has gained a ‘Raw Milk Licence,’ and you can buy fresh, raw (unpasteurized) milk at Bowerchalke Saturday Market.

I’m going on a bit now ...

BOOK OF THE WEEK: Put Your Heart In Your Mouth by Natasha Campbell-McBride.

If you have ever wondered why fresh milk, particularly ‘whole milk’ with the cream still in, has become such a dangerous drink, then you must read this.

NOTES ON THE SIDE 

I can’t believe the sprouts and leeks coming from Futurefarms (our village Community owned farm) (www.futurefarms.co.uk). The potato crop was the best since we began in 2004, with even difficult-performing Pink Fir Apple coming in at a good size. Our soil in the valley is not deep fen peat – its not Lincolnshire. It is quite shallow, quite stony stuff over solid chalk. It must be the fantastic veg growing crew.

My friends and particularly brilliant small-scale milkers – milkers of Goats by the way – who have a goat’s cheese business in Lymington, Hampshire, with a degree of hygiene in their process that is used by the local EHO as an ‘example’ to the rest of us. What I think is absolutely fascinating is that Clare is a top flight ‘Marine Pilot.’ She can meet a super-tanker out in the western approaches and bring it tidily into a  berth at Fawley Refinery, nosing it through the busiest shipping lane in the world. I imagine her on the bridge of the mighty tanker ‘bringing her in,’ and the goats on the farm listening out for the mournful note of the super-hooter as the super-milkmaid makes her way up the solent.

(www.newforestgoatdairy.co.uk)

I want to answer Chris, who emailed the site to say that he wanted perhaps to milk a small herd. We can help in this endeavour and would most definitely like to talk through the finances with him.

We had (a co-director and I) a very interesting meeting with Tim Jackson – the Principal of Sparsholt College of Agriculture (Hampshire ), who wanted to talk through the microdairying business model. For us it may mean an immediate ‘link’ to the student population with training, experience in small scale dairy farming, and the hope of encouraging many more self-employed farmers to get going.

The processing room – the ‘dairy’ – is the super-clean room in which we shall pasteurize, separate and bottle the fresh milk prior to sale on the doorstep. This week we have ordered the materials and equipment to lay the floor screed. The room within the timber barn is 6 metres by 6 metres. Down the centre of the room we shall cut the concrete and insert a floor drain with removable parts for washing at intervals. Then we shall set the floor levels to allow the screed (50mm thick) to drain into the central gulley. The surface of the sand and cement screed (grit sand ) will be carefully trowelled and left to dry. The final ‘hygiene‘ coat will be a gritty, (for traction) Epoxy resin covering laid on  with a trowel to 4mm thickness. 

Meanwhile, we can start the studwork walls which will be covered in Dairy Board (PVC sheets 2400x1200 and 3mm thick). The dairy board comes with clever jointers and cover strips which ensure seamless cleanliness throughout. Prices for the room will follow and will include labour to fix. I have met an ingenious refrigerator man who will help us with the walk-in cool room and who will direct us while we try to construct our own ‘clunky’ fridge doors. The savings are enormous. Details to follow.  

One of the cows has developed a scratched teat from the sharp teeth of the calf. I shall have to deal with this, as when we switch to machine milking through the new milking bail she may, with reason, kick up merry hell. What about the switch over from purely calf rearing to full-on milking husbandry – how will it go? So much to learn. I need to talk to Sue Cole in the New Forest, who is a deft expert in such matters, and I have Caroline Moody (www.moodycow.com) to provide training. Mentor Ian Crouch (source of the Jersey cows) is selling ‘raw’ milk to customers – how good is that? You can now buy fresh, raw (unpasteurized) milk at the Bowerchalke Market every Saturday. 

I think things are really moving. I think more and more people wonder about where milk comes from and who produces it.

Read, at once, The Untold Story of Milk  by Ron Schmid ND (with an excellent ‘forward’ by Sally Fallon, President of the Weston.A. Price Foundation).

And there is no better person to grapple with on this subject than Graham Harvey. Start with his The Killing of the Countryside, and move on to The Carbon Fields, and then all his other work. 

I want to give credit where credit is due. The Prince’s Countryside Fund have been full of support and encouragement and have introduced me to Mark Allen, CEO of Dairycrest, and Paul Whitehead, Director of Operations- Dairycrest, who are constantly on hand to advise us with this new venture.

The Plunkett Foundation provided Jane Ryall as an adviser with whom to talk through our early ideas and financial budgets. She was terrific (a dairy farmer’s daughter) in helping me to form the company and in providing a solid look at the figures with nothing left out or overlooked. Plunkett  is devoted to encouraging all aspects of local agriculture and employment and was founded in the 1930’s.

Notes on the Side:

This addition to the blog allows me to stray ‘off’ track and comment on other things in the village and on the small holding.

I have started a flock of meat chickens along the lines laid out by Joe Salatan in the USA. They live in a fox-proof contraption which is moved every day onto fresh grass.The idea is that they should follow the cow herd and gobble up intestinal parasites before they can even think of completing their grizzly life-cycle!

Next Time:  A look over the County border at Wilcox Milk

History – a talk with Rex Paterson’s grandson – the great milking bail pioneer of the 1940’s.