So, what's in the Name?
The story behind the name The Calf at Foot Dairy®️
-----
Terrified for the future of planetary health since my late teens, due to greed and our (the human race's) vulgar extractive behaviour, anxious and depressed about the cruelty within livestock farming, I had to do something ! The obvious thing for me to work on was to try to make the world a better place for dairy cows it was the least I could do, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were doing their bit for the welfare of battery hens/chickens and industrially farmed pigs, when no-one but no-one was addressing the dairy industry. I loved cows and all animals but I needed somehow to make my own life have some sort of meaning and having a couple of house-cows wasn't going to cut it - I need to sell milk to show people that dairying doesn't have to be cruel either and veganism isn't the only option.
This dairy had been my life's dream, i'd been fighting against factory farming for all livestock since the 70's but my dream in the face of the rise of the cruel mega-dairy was to set up a cow-kind, calf-friendly dairy, selling the best quality proper milk for the compassionate customer who is happy to pay a proper price.
From house-cows to 'Micro-dairy' My first lightbulb moment 2009
----
I remember - as I hopped out of my street food van on returning home from a festival where I was selling home produced organic dishes, and milkshakes - I was deep in thought about getting this dairy of mine off the ground.. The milk I bought for the shakes was from a tiny neighbouring dairy of native rare breed cows, the organic milkshakes sold at a good price and flew out like hot-cakes, I always sold out and actually made profit on the shakes but not the food !
This is when the realisation sunk in that maybe, just maybe now was the time to sell the van to buy a milking machine and a few more cows, to start to sell the best ever proper milk at a premium/proper price from just a few content wholesome healthy cows rather than a bottom price for low grade milk from masses of miserable cows kept in an unnatural unhealthy environment.
I had proved to myself that there are enough enlightened folk out there who like me are willing to pay a proper price for proper healthy responsibly produced food working with nature rather than against it and I wanted to prove that there are also more compassionate folk out there who care about the welfare of animals kept for food production and prepared to pay what it costs to produce.
So i needed to up my house-cow-keeping game to find a way of how to sell enough cows milk without the cruelty involved in regular dairy production to make a living - I wanted to work as a partnership with the cows as if we had a contract between us ie I keep the cows and their calves together without stress and as safe and comfortable as they could ever be, kinder and natural compared to conventional dairies, but even better than if the cows were free animals having to look after and protect themselves. We cater to their bovine needs and in return we take a share their milk knowing the calves were getting their share, just as we do as house-cow-keepers.
I didn't want nor should I need many cows, if I didn't take a bottom price for the milk, I would be a primary producer selling direct to the end consumer, no contracts, no middle men. i would be selling milk from a handful of house cows. I was fed up with fighting/protesting at the rise of 'mega' dairies it wasn't getting us anywhere I needed to walk the walk rather than just talking(moaning about it) the talk - and that's when it hit me a 'micro'-dairy gosh darn it to heck I would be a flipping 'micro-dairy', surely a 'micro'-dairy could be a thing, an antidote to 'mega'-dairy, after all a friend of mine had a very successful 'micro'-brewery selling his own craft beer, direct, no large corps or middle-men.
Brilliant, I was much pleased with myself.
Between then (2009) and 2012 getting to work on the ultimate dream, conception
----
I sold my street food van bought a few more cows and got to work. But i still didn't have a name for my dairy. i worked on building my tiny herd of house-cows, eventually finding a smallholding where I could live alongside my cows, I set up a basic little parlour and bottling room, working on the method of keeping a dual-purpose-herd of cows (producing milk and beef from the one herd) making lots of mistakes along the way. From here I transitioned from being a house-cow-keeper to micro-dairy and finally became registered as a dairy to sell raw milk.
The first 'Calf at Foot Dairy is born'
-----
I was wo/manning my stall at my favourite little market in Southwold in August 2012 - I had the best news to share with my fellow stall holders & customers, this was news they/we had all been waiting for - i'd passed the inspections and milk tests with flying colours so I was now registered by the milk police (FSA) to sell the milk from my 6 beautiful cows. My customers and fellow stall holders had all been waiting with baited breath for the day I was to bring milk along for them to take home for their families.
AND STILL I COULDNT THINK OF A Godamn NAME FOR MY DAIRY
------
I had all sorts of ideas for the name such as "Girls on Grass"(my cows were pasture for life) Or " Going against the grain" (doing something different/not feeding grain) but, although these said something of what I do, they didn't cut it not even close, I wanted to call it something that meant "The dairy where the cows are allowed to keep their calves" "producing milk with compassion" Because this was at the core of it all. However I still bought all the URLs of all the other things i could think of but none of them described the fundamental practice of dairy cows and calves being together. I had to find a name which coined this most important method I was trying to perfect. As with everything else I was discussing this with friends, customers and fellow stall holders (I tend to discuss most things on my mind), when one of my regular customers came to my stall, this lady explained to me that when in the French Alps she knew of a farmer/producer who sold *veal. She explained that unusually these farmers calves were raised by their dams on the wild flower meadows of the mountainous Alpine hillsides until about 8months of age, she was trying to remember the phrase they used for this method of raising these suckling young bovine animals the phrases went something (clumsily) like
"Vache d'herbe avec son veau à ses côtés" Roughly translates to "grass cow with her calf by her side "
Or "Veau courant avec sa mère" = "Calf running with it's mother"
Or "Veau aux côtés de la mère" = "calf by mothers side"
The Hallelujah moment
-----
Said customer left me with a head full of non-comprende French words it was blatantly obvious I was missing a trick here - I was trying to think how we in the UK describe cows running with their calves and all the different scenarios, firstly I was thinking about the scenario of suckler cows - beef suckler cows are commercial herds which raise a calf till weaning to be sold for fattening every year, or house-cows who generally keep/raise their own calves which are either raised for beef or if a heifer calf will be a milk cow herself to provide the family household with milk or beef, although this is not classed as a dairy as the produce cannot be sold to the public (it would be deemed unsafe due to being un-regulated) milk produced to sell has to be rigorously tested.
Thinking about it over and over, that evening as I unpacked my market stall i was comparing our own UK sayings with the french terms of calves being by their mothers sides it hit me all of a sudden like a bolt from the blue an epiphany Oh my gosh darn it.......it's cow with a calf at foot, it's so flipping obvious, I was ecstatic with excitement this wasn't just a lightbulb moment this was, a choir of angels, rainbows, stardust, unicorns and everything, At last I found the perfect name. A 'cow with a calf at foot' is an old fashioned term we used in the UK but not widely used for cow keeping in general, certainly not in dairying, or in beef herds. You only heard this phrase at a livestock market, when you were selling a cow with her calf or in the farming papers classified section/Livestock for sale - descriptions of the state of the animal concerned include 'in-calf cows or in-calf heifers', bulling or 'maiden heifers' or 'stores', etc The term cow with a calf at foot for sale describes a cow for sale with dependant calf. Obviously the complete term Cow with a calf at foot dairy aint gonna work it's too clunky and clumsy all it needed was a wee tweak - well there it was right there staring me in the face, et voila " The Calf at Foot Dairy®️" it said it all. needless to say I was singing hymns and dancing in the street.
"Sounds stupid" they said, "doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it?"..............Well me thinks, it does now!!!!
-----
"Don't be ridiculous you can't do that said the farmers and why would you want to, don't you realise the calves drink all the milk? You'll have nowt to sell."
"What on earth does that mean? I don't like it, said the ordinary non-farming folk, it doesn't sound right,"
"Dun exactly roll auff tongue do it?" (That's Suffolk speak btw for it doesnt' exactly roll off the tongue does it).
But i loved it - I loved that it was an Oxymoron (this was the militant vegans favourite word) Calf and dairy do not go together in conventional land! So like the bad girl I am I put the two opposing/contradictory together just as I had been doing in practice, because I believe cows and calves belong together in dairy herds as they do in beef herds and of course in the wild. Then thanks to social media and lots of sharing of each others #s (hashtags)/business pages on FB accounts of the farmers markets, other stall holders, customers etc sharing Twitter accounts sharing each others posts to get the punters into the markets. Social media has been a starter and saviour for so many tiny businesses throughout. It started to become a thing and now it simply trips off the tongue, not only locally but all over the UK, now even world wide. All I wanted was for others to copy/follow CAFD standards to a certain degree, using the term I hoped we would eventually see lots of little CAFDs popping up all over the UK serving their own communities.....
The Trademark - Protecting my name and method 2017 - 2019
-----
Unfortunately However, my good intentions backfired. Due to a few unscrupulous, lowlife individuals/dairies using my name as a cover for their bad practise. This forced my hand to protect my IP (intellectual property), as i couldn't afford for all the years of hardship and sacrifice to be ruined from watering down by the green-washing, welfare-washing fakes. These dreadful people brought me to my knees I was at breaking point, due to Calf at Foot being used to sell anything and everything they could lay their hands on.. A good Regen farming friend took pity on me and put me onto his brilliant Trademark attorney friend who advised me in no uncertain terms that I had to register the term 'Calf at Foot' itself as a trademark, even though I was strongly against it as 'CAF' itself wasn't originally my term (without dairy)but these welfare-washers forced my hand, they were using it as a prefix not only to dairy but to everything eg calf at foot milk/butter, calf at foot farm, calf at foot cafe, calf at foot deli, and the list went on even calf at foot butchery was being mooted. I asked the owner of one particular farm business to refrain from using my dairy's name as I discovered they were running a particlarly unethical livestock business, hand in hand with the dairy. This resulted in a the business owner a cruel and vindictive woman scraping together a tribe of trolls to attack me and my work. The online gang subjected me to a catalogue of nasty, systematic, bullying for weeks on my business page - The Calf at Foot Dairy, I found this completely disabling and to say it nearly broke me would be an understatement. Not only this but she was poaching my customers from my social media accounts in front of my eyes, goodness knows what she was doing behind my back. All this felt even worse than the death threats I'd been subjected to by the militant trolling vegans, and that was on top of the regular abuse i'd get from conventional dairies including the big boys over in the States. This local business owner in particular using and crapping all over my name CAFD which I found the most shocking and upsetting it brought me to my knees and nearly broke me as it felt at the time that the stealing of my name and corrupting The CAFD Method was more of a threat to my life's work, than any vegan or bad arse farmer. The worst thing about it was that originally I opened the doors of my humble peasant, cottage industry to her alongside other wealthy large landowning farmers, I trusted them, showed and taught them everything i had learned through my own HARD EARNT empirical knowledge, before they embarked on their own dairy journeys I even invited them to use my term CAFD these people were aware of how vulnerable I was at the time due to my farm tenancy/business CONSTANTLY being under-threat each and every year - I only ever could secure yearly FBTs.
Wreaking of Privilege
I was flabberghast, the shock of the ruthlessness and sense of entitlement these people must have to feel it's ok to steal someone else's hard earned life's work - it was originally what I really wanted. But my name and method was becoming trashed by THE MOST EXGTREME GREENWASH so I eventually took the medicine served by my counsel and trademarked 'calf at foot' as a term for selling dairy produce, it was such a great relief and I felt back in control of my work, my name and my business, if not my life.
. .......... ......NEWSFLASH..... iT'S RAISED IT'S UGLY HEAD AGAIN..... Due to recent findings, it's time The dirty culprit is exposed
to put a stop the abuse of my Intellectual Property
JULY 2024
...... Watch this space as I write this recent episode about the Abuse of my name Calf at Foot Dairy.
2024 Fiona's retirement from milking, Consultancy, Calf at Foot Dairy School®️
Accreditations and Other CAFD's
-----
Since I retired, there are now just a couple of dairies who are approved as CAFD's, a dairy has to be accredited by me Fiona Provan to be endorsed as a Calf at Foot Dairy or i'm afraid to even use the term in a hashtag on social media to sell their produce. But the more CAFDs there are the better imo.
There are other dairies who keep their calves at foot for to a fashion but don't comply with CAFD methods, most of these other dairies go under the term Cow-Calf-Dairy.
There are some absolute bandits out there which means we all need to do our research when buying what is claimed to be high welfare produce as some are no better than the worst conventional / factory farms.
I have learnt my lesson not to be so trusting and now will not allow just anyone to use my name without me seeing them in practise during both the summer and winter months, because I believe in utter honesty and transparency and I want my label to be a label that is known as a trusted label and i'll do everything within my power to protect my name Calf at Foot Dairy from the few ruthless individuals so I can keep it true to it's name. I'm determined for it not to become yet another organic which imo means sod all in regards to animal welfare
There are some dairies using my term but innocently don't realise that Calf at Foot is a protected term and that they need my permission to use it and if they want approval to use it then I can visit them to see if they comply with the CAFD methods and I'll be more than happy to give them accreditation.
There are only 2 accredited dairies now (since i stopped milking) in the UK, they are, Blundeston House Farm Suffolk, and The Rare Dairy Shropshire. There are 3 others in Switzerland, Australia and South Africa. The Netherlands has a few who use the term Kalverliefde milk but again not to CAFD standards.
I desperately want to see more CAFDs popping up all over the UK, able to serve their own communities but growth is slow as it is not easy work, I am doing my bit to help others.
So now I have retired from milking i'm able to offer mentoring support and advice remotely and have training courses, I'm available for hands on farm visits, this support includes help with house-cow-keeping, please go to the Consultancy page for details
* The word veal in this actually means meat/beef from an 8month or younger bovine animal in this context. Rather than the cruel white veal from calves taken from their mothers at birth, shipped over to the continent, kept in a tiny dark crate shackled by the neck for six months fed an unnatural diet to keep their flesh white.
~~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~
-----
Terrified for the future of planetary health since my late teens, due to greed and our (the human race's) vulgar extractive behaviour, anxious and depressed about the cruelty within livestock farming, I had to do something ! The obvious thing for me to work on was to try to make the world a better place for dairy cows it was the least I could do, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall were doing their bit for the welfare of battery hens/chickens and industrially farmed pigs, when no-one but no-one was addressing the dairy industry. I loved cows and all animals but I needed somehow to make my own life have some sort of meaning and having a couple of house-cows wasn't going to cut it - I need to sell milk to show people that dairying doesn't have to be cruel either and veganism isn't the only option.
This dairy had been my life's dream, i'd been fighting against factory farming for all livestock since the 70's but my dream in the face of the rise of the cruel mega-dairy was to set up a cow-kind, calf-friendly dairy, selling the best quality proper milk for the compassionate customer who is happy to pay a proper price.
From house-cows to 'Micro-dairy' My first lightbulb moment 2009
----
I remember - as I hopped out of my street food van on returning home from a festival where I was selling home produced organic dishes, and milkshakes - I was deep in thought about getting this dairy of mine off the ground.. The milk I bought for the shakes was from a tiny neighbouring dairy of native rare breed cows, the organic milkshakes sold at a good price and flew out like hot-cakes, I always sold out and actually made profit on the shakes but not the food !
This is when the realisation sunk in that maybe, just maybe now was the time to sell the van to buy a milking machine and a few more cows, to start to sell the best ever proper milk at a premium/proper price from just a few content wholesome healthy cows rather than a bottom price for low grade milk from masses of miserable cows kept in an unnatural unhealthy environment.
I had proved to myself that there are enough enlightened folk out there who like me are willing to pay a proper price for proper healthy responsibly produced food working with nature rather than against it and I wanted to prove that there are also more compassionate folk out there who care about the welfare of animals kept for food production and prepared to pay what it costs to produce.
So i needed to up my house-cow-keeping game to find a way of how to sell enough cows milk without the cruelty involved in regular dairy production to make a living - I wanted to work as a partnership with the cows as if we had a contract between us ie I keep the cows and their calves together without stress and as safe and comfortable as they could ever be, kinder and natural compared to conventional dairies, but even better than if the cows were free animals having to look after and protect themselves. We cater to their bovine needs and in return we take a share their milk knowing the calves were getting their share, just as we do as house-cow-keepers.
I didn't want nor should I need many cows, if I didn't take a bottom price for the milk, I would be a primary producer selling direct to the end consumer, no contracts, no middle men. i would be selling milk from a handful of house cows. I was fed up with fighting/protesting at the rise of 'mega' dairies it wasn't getting us anywhere I needed to walk the walk rather than just talking(moaning about it) the talk - and that's when it hit me a 'micro'-dairy gosh darn it to heck I would be a flipping 'micro-dairy', surely a 'micro'-dairy could be a thing, an antidote to 'mega'-dairy, after all a friend of mine had a very successful 'micro'-brewery selling his own craft beer, direct, no large corps or middle-men.
Brilliant, I was much pleased with myself.
Between then (2009) and 2012 getting to work on the ultimate dream, conception
----
I sold my street food van bought a few more cows and got to work. But i still didn't have a name for my dairy. i worked on building my tiny herd of house-cows, eventually finding a smallholding where I could live alongside my cows, I set up a basic little parlour and bottling room, working on the method of keeping a dual-purpose-herd of cows (producing milk and beef from the one herd) making lots of mistakes along the way. From here I transitioned from being a house-cow-keeper to micro-dairy and finally became registered as a dairy to sell raw milk.
The first 'Calf at Foot Dairy is born'
-----
I was wo/manning my stall at my favourite little market in Southwold in August 2012 - I had the best news to share with my fellow stall holders & customers, this was news they/we had all been waiting for - i'd passed the inspections and milk tests with flying colours so I was now registered by the milk police (FSA) to sell the milk from my 6 beautiful cows. My customers and fellow stall holders had all been waiting with baited breath for the day I was to bring milk along for them to take home for their families.
AND STILL I COULDNT THINK OF A Godamn NAME FOR MY DAIRY
------
I had all sorts of ideas for the name such as "Girls on Grass"(my cows were pasture for life) Or " Going against the grain" (doing something different/not feeding grain) but, although these said something of what I do, they didn't cut it not even close, I wanted to call it something that meant "The dairy where the cows are allowed to keep their calves" "producing milk with compassion" Because this was at the core of it all. However I still bought all the URLs of all the other things i could think of but none of them described the fundamental practice of dairy cows and calves being together. I had to find a name which coined this most important method I was trying to perfect. As with everything else I was discussing this with friends, customers and fellow stall holders (I tend to discuss most things on my mind), when one of my regular customers came to my stall, this lady explained to me that when in the French Alps she knew of a farmer/producer who sold *veal. She explained that unusually these farmers calves were raised by their dams on the wild flower meadows of the mountainous Alpine hillsides until about 8months of age, she was trying to remember the phrase they used for this method of raising these suckling young bovine animals the phrases went something (clumsily) like
"Vache d'herbe avec son veau à ses côtés" Roughly translates to "grass cow with her calf by her side "
Or "Veau courant avec sa mère" = "Calf running with it's mother"
Or "Veau aux côtés de la mère" = "calf by mothers side"
The Hallelujah moment
-----
Said customer left me with a head full of non-comprende French words it was blatantly obvious I was missing a trick here - I was trying to think how we in the UK describe cows running with their calves and all the different scenarios, firstly I was thinking about the scenario of suckler cows - beef suckler cows are commercial herds which raise a calf till weaning to be sold for fattening every year, or house-cows who generally keep/raise their own calves which are either raised for beef or if a heifer calf will be a milk cow herself to provide the family household with milk or beef, although this is not classed as a dairy as the produce cannot be sold to the public (it would be deemed unsafe due to being un-regulated) milk produced to sell has to be rigorously tested.
Thinking about it over and over, that evening as I unpacked my market stall i was comparing our own UK sayings with the french terms of calves being by their mothers sides it hit me all of a sudden like a bolt from the blue an epiphany Oh my gosh darn it.......it's cow with a calf at foot, it's so flipping obvious, I was ecstatic with excitement this wasn't just a lightbulb moment this was, a choir of angels, rainbows, stardust, unicorns and everything, At last I found the perfect name. A 'cow with a calf at foot' is an old fashioned term we used in the UK but not widely used for cow keeping in general, certainly not in dairying, or in beef herds. You only heard this phrase at a livestock market, when you were selling a cow with her calf or in the farming papers classified section/Livestock for sale - descriptions of the state of the animal concerned include 'in-calf cows or in-calf heifers', bulling or 'maiden heifers' or 'stores', etc The term cow with a calf at foot for sale describes a cow for sale with dependant calf. Obviously the complete term Cow with a calf at foot dairy aint gonna work it's too clunky and clumsy all it needed was a wee tweak - well there it was right there staring me in the face, et voila " The Calf at Foot Dairy®️" it said it all. needless to say I was singing hymns and dancing in the street.
"Sounds stupid" they said, "doesn't exactly roll off the tongue does it?"..............Well me thinks, it does now!!!!
-----
"Don't be ridiculous you can't do that said the farmers and why would you want to, don't you realise the calves drink all the milk? You'll have nowt to sell."
"What on earth does that mean? I don't like it, said the ordinary non-farming folk, it doesn't sound right,"
"Dun exactly roll auff tongue do it?" (That's Suffolk speak btw for it doesnt' exactly roll off the tongue does it).
But i loved it - I loved that it was an Oxymoron (this was the militant vegans favourite word) Calf and dairy do not go together in conventional land! So like the bad girl I am I put the two opposing/contradictory together just as I had been doing in practice, because I believe cows and calves belong together in dairy herds as they do in beef herds and of course in the wild. Then thanks to social media and lots of sharing of each others #s (hashtags)/business pages on FB accounts of the farmers markets, other stall holders, customers etc sharing Twitter accounts sharing each others posts to get the punters into the markets. Social media has been a starter and saviour for so many tiny businesses throughout. It started to become a thing and now it simply trips off the tongue, not only locally but all over the UK, now even world wide. All I wanted was for others to copy/follow CAFD standards to a certain degree, using the term I hoped we would eventually see lots of little CAFDs popping up all over the UK serving their own communities.....
The Trademark - Protecting my name and method 2017 - 2019
-----
Unfortunately However, my good intentions backfired. Due to a few unscrupulous, lowlife individuals/dairies using my name as a cover for their bad practise. This forced my hand to protect my IP (intellectual property), as i couldn't afford for all the years of hardship and sacrifice to be ruined from watering down by the green-washing, welfare-washing fakes. These dreadful people brought me to my knees I was at breaking point, due to Calf at Foot being used to sell anything and everything they could lay their hands on.. A good Regen farming friend took pity on me and put me onto his brilliant Trademark attorney friend who advised me in no uncertain terms that I had to register the term 'Calf at Foot' itself as a trademark, even though I was strongly against it as 'CAF' itself wasn't originally my term (without dairy)but these welfare-washers forced my hand, they were using it as a prefix not only to dairy but to everything eg calf at foot milk/butter, calf at foot farm, calf at foot cafe, calf at foot deli, and the list went on even calf at foot butchery was being mooted. I asked the owner of one particular farm business to refrain from using my dairy's name as I discovered they were running a particlarly unethical livestock business, hand in hand with the dairy. This resulted in a the business owner a cruel and vindictive woman scraping together a tribe of trolls to attack me and my work. The online gang subjected me to a catalogue of nasty, systematic, bullying for weeks on my business page - The Calf at Foot Dairy, I found this completely disabling and to say it nearly broke me would be an understatement. Not only this but she was poaching my customers from my social media accounts in front of my eyes, goodness knows what she was doing behind my back. All this felt even worse than the death threats I'd been subjected to by the militant trolling vegans, and that was on top of the regular abuse i'd get from conventional dairies including the big boys over in the States. This local business owner in particular using and crapping all over my name CAFD which I found the most shocking and upsetting it brought me to my knees and nearly broke me as it felt at the time that the stealing of my name and corrupting The CAFD Method was more of a threat to my life's work, than any vegan or bad arse farmer. The worst thing about it was that originally I opened the doors of my humble peasant, cottage industry to her alongside other wealthy large landowning farmers, I trusted them, showed and taught them everything i had learned through my own HARD EARNT empirical knowledge, before they embarked on their own dairy journeys I even invited them to use my term CAFD these people were aware of how vulnerable I was at the time due to my farm tenancy/business CONSTANTLY being under-threat each and every year - I only ever could secure yearly FBTs.
Wreaking of Privilege
I was flabberghast, the shock of the ruthlessness and sense of entitlement these people must have to feel it's ok to steal someone else's hard earned life's work - it was originally what I really wanted. But my name and method was becoming trashed by THE MOST EXGTREME GREENWASH so I eventually took the medicine served by my counsel and trademarked 'calf at foot' as a term for selling dairy produce, it was such a great relief and I felt back in control of my work, my name and my business, if not my life.
. .......... ......NEWSFLASH..... iT'S RAISED IT'S UGLY HEAD AGAIN..... Due to recent findings, it's time The dirty culprit is exposed
to put a stop the abuse of my Intellectual Property
JULY 2024
...... Watch this space as I write this recent episode about the Abuse of my name Calf at Foot Dairy.
2024 Fiona's retirement from milking, Consultancy, Calf at Foot Dairy School®️
Accreditations and Other CAFD's
-----
Since I retired, there are now just a couple of dairies who are approved as CAFD's, a dairy has to be accredited by me Fiona Provan to be endorsed as a Calf at Foot Dairy or i'm afraid to even use the term in a hashtag on social media to sell their produce. But the more CAFDs there are the better imo.
There are other dairies who keep their calves at foot for to a fashion but don't comply with CAFD methods, most of these other dairies go under the term Cow-Calf-Dairy.
There are some absolute bandits out there which means we all need to do our research when buying what is claimed to be high welfare produce as some are no better than the worst conventional / factory farms.
I have learnt my lesson not to be so trusting and now will not allow just anyone to use my name without me seeing them in practise during both the summer and winter months, because I believe in utter honesty and transparency and I want my label to be a label that is known as a trusted label and i'll do everything within my power to protect my name Calf at Foot Dairy from the few ruthless individuals so I can keep it true to it's name. I'm determined for it not to become yet another organic which imo means sod all in regards to animal welfare
There are some dairies using my term but innocently don't realise that Calf at Foot is a protected term and that they need my permission to use it and if they want approval to use it then I can visit them to see if they comply with the CAFD methods and I'll be more than happy to give them accreditation.
There are only 2 accredited dairies now (since i stopped milking) in the UK, they are, Blundeston House Farm Suffolk, and The Rare Dairy Shropshire. There are 3 others in Switzerland, Australia and South Africa. The Netherlands has a few who use the term Kalverliefde milk but again not to CAFD standards.
I desperately want to see more CAFDs popping up all over the UK, able to serve their own communities but growth is slow as it is not easy work, I am doing my bit to help others.
So now I have retired from milking i'm able to offer mentoring support and advice remotely and have training courses, I'm available for hands on farm visits, this support includes help with house-cow-keeping, please go to the Consultancy page for details
* The word veal in this actually means meat/beef from an 8month or younger bovine animal in this context. Rather than the cruel white veal from calves taken from their mothers at birth, shipped over to the continent, kept in a tiny dark crate shackled by the neck for six months fed an unnatural diet to keep their flesh white.
~~~~~ ~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~
Fiona Provan : The Calf at Foot Dairy®️, by Rob Elliott, 2013
"There are so many praiseworthy aspects to the work that has been done by Fiona in connection with The Calf at Foot Dairy that it is difficult to know where to start. But let’s start with the name. Evocative of a time before industrialised dairy production, it tells you much of what you need to know about this little dairy and its herd. It tells you that the person who runs the dairy cares for her animals and their welfare. The clear message in the phrase ‘calf at foot’ is that the calving cows in this herd can keep their calves until weaned – a far cry from what happens to the mercilessly exploited Holstein milk machines that feed the insatiable profit-driven industrial dairy industry. That is not to say, however, that the Calf at Foot Dairy is an exercise in nostalgia or the outcome of a sentimentalised attitude to farming. Though it may seem like the epitome of hobby farming to run a herd of less than ten cows, it is nothing less than the future of farming, a microcosm of the way in which we will need to produce our food in the future, if we are to redress the harm we have done to ourselves, our agricultural land and the ecologies that connect us to that land. Through the scorched earth of a planet brought to the edge of collapse by the insanity of industrialising our food supply, we see the tiny green shoots of change. Fiona, her beautiful Jerseys and the dairy that supplies their milk are part of that necessary change. Yes, but what use is a micro dairy, we might ask? How is that going to feed the world? The answer is that this tiny dairy is a living example of how the ‘world’ will eventually be allowed to feed itself, once all its peoples have reclaimed their right to their own food sovereignty. Over the last hundred years or so, those most keenly interested in the profits to be made from the control of our food supply have purloined the means of production. Wresting it from the hands of thriving rural communities, they forced the rural dispossessed in every country on Earth to seek work in burgeoning cities, decimating the communities that once supported not only those who lived the rural life but also the city dwellers that depended on them. The result is a global food supply system dominated by a handful of predatory trans-national corporations that put profit before all else, destroying the fertility of the land, poisoning it with unwanted chemicals, killing millions of small creatures along the way and filling retail warehouses with degraded factory-produced food that is very bad for us and dangerously bad for the planet, in more ways than it is possible to discuss here. By comparison, what Fiona is doing at the Calf at Foot Dairy is more than simply the exact opposite of this. It is taking everything farmers used to know innately about good husbandry, adding the lessons learnt from the bad farming practices that have defined the last half a century, thinking with the heart as well as the head and putting before us a small (but perfectly formed) example of how farming should be done. In defining what she does, Fiona uses the word ‘compassion.’ Some might argue that there is no room for compassion in farming but, quite simply, they are wrong. Though compassion so often takes a back seat in this egotistical age, it is vital as a fundamental idea, not just in farming, but in how we define ourselves in the greater context of life on this planet. Compassion is what will bring us back to our senses. At the Calf at Foot Dairy, Fiona’s compassion shows us a way to treat animals with respect, to nurture them and to care for the grassland that supports them. The natural source of food for these herbivores results in a natural, nutrient dense food that has helped to sustain our own species for millennia. Milk in this pure natural form is the only kind of milk that ever sustained us, and the only kind that will sustain us today. Commodity milk, that bland, thin, pasteurised, homogenised, standardised apology for real food is, frankly, worthless – as we are now seeing through the increasing numbers of people who have become ‘dairy intolerant.’ As soon as we start to meddle with natural processes, in this case by feeding cows on grain, heat-treating the milk and removing from it the vital nutritional core – the cream – we are creating another non-food. Fiona is doing the opposite. Fiona is producing a nutritionally vibrant real food that is so full of vitality that it has traditionally been used as a natural medicine. She is doing this whilst putting the welfare of her cows before anything else. Part of that welfare is allowing them the luxury of eating what nature intended – rich pasture. In doing that, she is helping the planet too, because pastureland is a wonderfully effective means of capturing carbon. By contrast, growing grain to feed to cattle is an equally effective way of contributing to our carbon emissions. Fiona’s way of farming requires no chemical fertilisers, pesticides or other poisonous chemicals. Industrial farming pours millions of tonnes of these harmful substances into the ground every year, causing damage that is studiously ignored by governments, the corporate lobby and the mainstream media. We need people like Fiona to show us there is an alternative. She may be running only a micro dairy, but she is flying a very big flag alongside others like her who have the courage to actually do something. Unbeknown to the man in the street, our industrial food system, committed to the most part to the growing of cash crops for the global market, is stretched to breaking point – something else you won’t see in the media or on the Government’s agenda. Just the total dependency of this system on the continuing supply of cheap fossil fuels puts it in jeopardy of predictable collapse within a few decades. The likely model to take the place of this global behemoth is a worldwide localised economy, particularly a localised food economy based on the idea of small-scale mixed farming.
Fiona and her Calf at Foot Dairy are in the vanguard of this change, and it is imperative that we encourage, nurture and protect her efforts to provide high quality nutritious food to her local communities. As the future unfolds, we will need more Fionas, not fewer. Although there is no way to predict accurately when the industrial food system will eventually unravel, we can say with some certainty that it is a truly unsustainable model of food production, and so its eventual demise is guaranteed, one way or another. Does it not make sense to anticipate this inevitability by thinking of ways of securing our own local food sovereignty? To invest in Fiona and the Calf at Foot Dairy is to invest in something priceless. Small is beautiful, as E F Schumacher pointed out exactly 40 years ago, and the world’s leading thinkers are now finally catching up with that idea. Small is also profitable, in that it can generate a comfortable living and a debt-free life for someone who understands the meaning of the word ‘enough.’ Small is self-contained, local, friendly, community conscious and environmentally sustainable. In Fiona’s case, this is not simply a nebulous concept – she is proving that it can work. Fiona is the future, and we will all need brave people like her to specialise in the production of nutritious food as a thriving part of our future localised economies"
"There are so many praiseworthy aspects to the work that has been done by Fiona in connection with The Calf at Foot Dairy that it is difficult to know where to start. But let’s start with the name. Evocative of a time before industrialised dairy production, it tells you much of what you need to know about this little dairy and its herd. It tells you that the person who runs the dairy cares for her animals and their welfare. The clear message in the phrase ‘calf at foot’ is that the calving cows in this herd can keep their calves until weaned – a far cry from what happens to the mercilessly exploited Holstein milk machines that feed the insatiable profit-driven industrial dairy industry. That is not to say, however, that the Calf at Foot Dairy is an exercise in nostalgia or the outcome of a sentimentalised attitude to farming. Though it may seem like the epitome of hobby farming to run a herd of less than ten cows, it is nothing less than the future of farming, a microcosm of the way in which we will need to produce our food in the future, if we are to redress the harm we have done to ourselves, our agricultural land and the ecologies that connect us to that land. Through the scorched earth of a planet brought to the edge of collapse by the insanity of industrialising our food supply, we see the tiny green shoots of change. Fiona, her beautiful Jerseys and the dairy that supplies their milk are part of that necessary change. Yes, but what use is a micro dairy, we might ask? How is that going to feed the world? The answer is that this tiny dairy is a living example of how the ‘world’ will eventually be allowed to feed itself, once all its peoples have reclaimed their right to their own food sovereignty. Over the last hundred years or so, those most keenly interested in the profits to be made from the control of our food supply have purloined the means of production. Wresting it from the hands of thriving rural communities, they forced the rural dispossessed in every country on Earth to seek work in burgeoning cities, decimating the communities that once supported not only those who lived the rural life but also the city dwellers that depended on them. The result is a global food supply system dominated by a handful of predatory trans-national corporations that put profit before all else, destroying the fertility of the land, poisoning it with unwanted chemicals, killing millions of small creatures along the way and filling retail warehouses with degraded factory-produced food that is very bad for us and dangerously bad for the planet, in more ways than it is possible to discuss here. By comparison, what Fiona is doing at the Calf at Foot Dairy is more than simply the exact opposite of this. It is taking everything farmers used to know innately about good husbandry, adding the lessons learnt from the bad farming practices that have defined the last half a century, thinking with the heart as well as the head and putting before us a small (but perfectly formed) example of how farming should be done. In defining what she does, Fiona uses the word ‘compassion.’ Some might argue that there is no room for compassion in farming but, quite simply, they are wrong. Though compassion so often takes a back seat in this egotistical age, it is vital as a fundamental idea, not just in farming, but in how we define ourselves in the greater context of life on this planet. Compassion is what will bring us back to our senses. At the Calf at Foot Dairy, Fiona’s compassion shows us a way to treat animals with respect, to nurture them and to care for the grassland that supports them. The natural source of food for these herbivores results in a natural, nutrient dense food that has helped to sustain our own species for millennia. Milk in this pure natural form is the only kind of milk that ever sustained us, and the only kind that will sustain us today. Commodity milk, that bland, thin, pasteurised, homogenised, standardised apology for real food is, frankly, worthless – as we are now seeing through the increasing numbers of people who have become ‘dairy intolerant.’ As soon as we start to meddle with natural processes, in this case by feeding cows on grain, heat-treating the milk and removing from it the vital nutritional core – the cream – we are creating another non-food. Fiona is doing the opposite. Fiona is producing a nutritionally vibrant real food that is so full of vitality that it has traditionally been used as a natural medicine. She is doing this whilst putting the welfare of her cows before anything else. Part of that welfare is allowing them the luxury of eating what nature intended – rich pasture. In doing that, she is helping the planet too, because pastureland is a wonderfully effective means of capturing carbon. By contrast, growing grain to feed to cattle is an equally effective way of contributing to our carbon emissions. Fiona’s way of farming requires no chemical fertilisers, pesticides or other poisonous chemicals. Industrial farming pours millions of tonnes of these harmful substances into the ground every year, causing damage that is studiously ignored by governments, the corporate lobby and the mainstream media. We need people like Fiona to show us there is an alternative. She may be running only a micro dairy, but she is flying a very big flag alongside others like her who have the courage to actually do something. Unbeknown to the man in the street, our industrial food system, committed to the most part to the growing of cash crops for the global market, is stretched to breaking point – something else you won’t see in the media or on the Government’s agenda. Just the total dependency of this system on the continuing supply of cheap fossil fuels puts it in jeopardy of predictable collapse within a few decades. The likely model to take the place of this global behemoth is a worldwide localised economy, particularly a localised food economy based on the idea of small-scale mixed farming.
Fiona and her Calf at Foot Dairy are in the vanguard of this change, and it is imperative that we encourage, nurture and protect her efforts to provide high quality nutritious food to her local communities. As the future unfolds, we will need more Fionas, not fewer. Although there is no way to predict accurately when the industrial food system will eventually unravel, we can say with some certainty that it is a truly unsustainable model of food production, and so its eventual demise is guaranteed, one way or another. Does it not make sense to anticipate this inevitability by thinking of ways of securing our own local food sovereignty? To invest in Fiona and the Calf at Foot Dairy is to invest in something priceless. Small is beautiful, as E F Schumacher pointed out exactly 40 years ago, and the world’s leading thinkers are now finally catching up with that idea. Small is also profitable, in that it can generate a comfortable living and a debt-free life for someone who understands the meaning of the word ‘enough.’ Small is self-contained, local, friendly, community conscious and environmentally sustainable. In Fiona’s case, this is not simply a nebulous concept – she is proving that it can work. Fiona is the future, and we will all need brave people like her to specialise in the production of nutritious food as a thriving part of our future localised economies"
