The Healthiest Milk in Britain?
 

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Ben Mead’s Cornish farm looks very different from most British dairy farms. For a start his pasture fields are filled with wild plants like bird’s-foot trefoil, plantain, yarrow and chicory along with clover and a variety of different grass species - the very plants most farmers have done their best to eliminate. Then there’s a notable absence of chemical fertilizers. Ben doesn’t use them any more. Instead he sprays the land with “compost teas” – liquid supplements containing beneficial bacteria and fungi extracted from nutrient-rich compost. Their purpose is not to supply plant nutrients but to boost the biological activity of the soil ensuring better nourishment of the grasses and herbs.

Ben’s aim is to create a “super-turf”, one so rich in minerals and vitamins that the cows in turn will produce large amounts of nutrient-rich dairy foods, in dry seasons and in wet, all without the need for chemicals. Ultimately the plan is to improve the tarnished image of milk, making it what it once was – a truly healthy food. Ben sums up his philosophy as one of “seeking nature’s approval” for whatever he does to the land. He has found that natural processes are invariably the most productive, supplying better food in larger amounts. He explains: “I’m intrigued by the old stories of the early European settlers in north America. There was something in the land that enabled it to carry huge numbers of livestock, far more than modern industrial agriculture can support.

“These are the conditions I’m trying to reproduce. You could call it biological farming. It’s a return to natural processes because our experience has shown them to be more efficient. And it’s my belief the nutrient-dense foods they produce are healthier.” Ben runs a herd of 130 pasture-fed dairy cows on his farm at Pengreep, Ponsanooth, near Truro. With his wife Catherine, a marketing specialist, he diversified into cheese-making in 2001. The couple built a milk-processing plant which now operates in collaboration with the Lynher Dairies Cheese Company, makers of the famous Cornish Yarg cheese.

Ben’s quest for higher quality foods began much earlier when he returned to the family farm after a career in motor industry journalism. He began to question the practice of producing milk with the aid of bought-in feeds especially grains. His reading of the great grassland scientists such as the French biochemist Andre Voisin led him to believe that pasture was both the most healthy and the most productive feed for livestock. Yet his attempts to produce large amounts of high-quality milk from chemically-fertilized monocultures seemed always to fail. That’s when he made the decision to try biological farming.

In 2005 he won a Nuffield scholarship to look at grassland farming in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. He found a growing interest in “nutrient-dense” foods – especially pasture-fed products – and the biological farming that produced them. In New Zealand he met a biological dairy farmer whose soils had become so fertile he hadn’t bought in any feeds, sprays or fertilizers for five years, yet he was making double the profit of most farms in the district on half the average area.

Now Ben is applying the techniques on his farm in Cornwall. The key elements are a fertile soil and a species-rich pasture to provide the cows with all the nutrients they need. The cows themselves are not the usual high-yielding Holsteins. Ben has bred his own type - a three-way cross between Friesians, Jerseys and Ayrshires. An attractive dark brown in colour, they’re long-living, fertile and great converters of grass into nutrient-rich milk. On the day I visited Pengreep they gathered round to inspect us, their coats shining in the autumn sunlight. The ailments that bedevil most modern dairy herds – lameness, mastitis, infertility – scarcely register with these cows, though many are 10 years old or more.

Fertility rates are extraordinary by dairy industry standards – more than 90 per conception within six weeks. The jury’s still out on whether the milk from these super-fit cows can do the same for human conception rates, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Apart from anything else it tasted utterly delicious.