This is what I do....

I have a dairy farm, on the farm we have 220 cows some of which are friesan, some are jersey and some are crosses of both breeds. We have these cows because they are good a producing milk from grass, and our farm is good at growing grass.
I have farmed here with my wife Liz for the past 15 years, our daughter Harriet was born just before we moved here and Rachael followed 21 months later.
We moved here from our old family farm which was smaller, I lived there with my parents and brother for most of my life before I got married.The farm was 112 acres with 90 cows when we left.
I really love living here at Hilltop Farm, and even when we were not making much money we have never wanted to leave. We have tried new ways of making the farm yield more money, for example we made yoghurt on the farm with our milk and sold cheese for a while, but at the moment we are concentrating on producing milk and making compost from garden waste delivered to us by the local council. this is used b other farmers locally to grow their crops.
Over the past 4 years we have been converting the farm to be organic. I agree with organic principles about animal welfare and using home produced feeds for our cows.However, I have not been able to find someone to buy our milk as organic so we currently supply The Fresh Milk Company who make Seriously Strong cheese in Stranraer. Our milk is very good for cheese making as it is high in fat and protein.
I am concerned that I don't know the customers who ultimately buy my milk and what they want from it so I have applied for a scholarship to travel the world to find out "consumer attitudes to how milk is produced" this blog will be the story of that study tour. I have travelled around the UK over the summer to speak to consumer groups, milk processors, supermarkets and farmers to get an idea of what is going on in the United Kingdom. In 6 weeks, I am off to China for international research. China is the biggest growth market for dairy in the world. Later, I am going to Australia and New Zealand where milk is sold as Free Range.
Next spring I am going to Africa, a lot of our vegetables are grown in Africa- might this be where milk comes from soon?
Finally, next summer i am off to see for myself the mega-farms in the USA as well as their resurging market for Raw unpasteurised milk.