They now hope to be back in action in late August.
The American couple, who emigrated to New Zealand in 2001, were facing closure for up to six years by the Ministry for Primary Industries when one of their young non-milking heifers tested positive to a Tb test in May.
Initially Merrall couldn’t see a solution other than to send his whole herd to the meatworks for slaughter since it would have been impossible to move them off the farm to pasture or sell them.
«They were scheduled to go,» he says.
«That was devastating. This is not a commercial herd as such. I’ve raised just about all of them and raised a lot of their mothers. It’s a big connection. We spend a lot of time together.»
But loyal customers of The Holy Cow stepped in and set up a support page on-line which has now raised over $15,000. Other financial and practical support, including feed donated by local farmers, has ensured the herd will live to milk another day.
«Community support has been exceptional,» Merrall says. «It was customer support that kept the cows alive. It won’t last forever, but I have enough feed either lined up, donated or paid for to go into October and that is all I ask for.»
Meanwhile the MacNeilles have had a positive meeting with MPI and they are working through a management plan that will require a mountain of paper work, inspections and verifications before they can continue selling milk directly to the public.
They have completed a lot of the paper work but the farm will need to install a vat pasteuriser to heat treat milk and have some building work done before sales can resume.
Ideally they would like to use the alternative technology of an electronic pulse machine to kill any bacteria in the milk without heating it, but the cost is not realistic for such a small-scale operation.
But Merrall is confident with a vat pasteuriser they will be back in business selling milk by August.
«Ideally the physical side and paperwork will come together. I was shooting for late August. That may be optimistic but we’ll see. It’s possible.»
The MacNeilles worked on a dairy farm in the United States that sold raw milk in 1970 and have been «working towards that ideal ever since really,» he says.
They had a small farm in the Massachussetts high country and kept a few cows, with Merrall supporting their farming lifestyle with alternative work architectural draughting and building when milk prices tanked there in 1984.
When they read a magazine article on New Zealand dairying, with pictures of cows grazing on pasture in winter, they decided to sell up and leave the waist-high snow of a Massachussetts winter behind them.
«We didn’t think about it too hard,» Merrall says, adding the presidential election of George W Bush to office in 2000 played a part in their decision to leave the country.
They couldn’t bring their cows with them so they packed their belongings in a 40-foot container and shipped a horse, three dogs and a cat to the other side of the world for a fresh start.
The couple bought a small dairy farm overlooking Otago Harbour in March 2002.
Their farm was one of 11 small dairy farms that once supplied Cadbury’s chocolate factory, but when that and Dunedin City’s town milk supply closed down there was no longer a market, other than selling their raw milk.
Since then the couple have established a niche market supplying raw bottled milk to a loyal core of customers from Port Chalmers, Waitati, Purakanui and some regulars from further afield.
Their market has grown steadily, with a queue of up to nine people waiting at the milking shed some days for them to bottle milk.
Merrall enjoys regular contact and conversation with customers, who drop by the milking shed all day, every day, often stopping to give their favourite cow a pat.
«It’s our social life,» he says.
Some customers originally came for a regular supply of raw milk, but now most come because they love the cows, know them by name and look forward to coming back.
The MacNeilles’ bright and airy cow barn is a flashback to dairying in New Zealand, or perhaps the United States, 40 or 50 years ago.
The herd is milked all year round, each cow strolls in from the paddock to its own personalised stall with its hand-written name tag above. Overhead is a canopy of grapevines to filter sunlight and make it cooler for the cows in summer.
At this time of year, milking is a leisurely process for several hours morning and evening to the tune of clanging cow bells as the cows feed on lucerne hay or grain in their stalls before returning to winter pastures.
«We work bankers’ hours,» Merrall says, tongue firmly in cheek. They are up at 5am, milk late in the morning and again late evening finishing around 9pm, with some free time through the middle of the day and a 7am start in winter.
It’s a labour-intensive business with feed still carted to the cow shed by wheelbarrow, but the farm has relatively low overheads in terms of mortgage, electricity, chemical, equipment and hygiene costs.
«We were solvent and doing well on an average of 15 or 16 milking cows,» Merrall says.
The pair are no strangers to hardship and Merrall has in the past turned to other skills to support the farm, «cranking up a sawmill» to mill timber and firewood, architectural draughting or building post and beam houses with a construction crew while Alex taught at the local Steiner school.
They are currently feeding their cows a diet of lucerne hay, balage and grain pellets from a local cereal mill.
«I’m feeding the best feed I can even though I can’t sell the milk, but it’s not cheap,» Merrall says. The surplus milk is fed to calves grazing next to the milking shed.
«We’re still milking, we’re still feeding cows and cleaning the barn. The only thing we are not doing is washing bottles and bottling milk,» Merrall says. «We have dried off all the cows we can so we don’t have as many cows in milk as there were.»
Alex says in some ways it was a blessing the positive Tb test occurred in winter, because they didn’t have cows calving.
«If this had happened around Christmas time, which is a big time of year for us, that would have been a nightmare,» Merrall says.
In the meantime the MacNeilles are working as hard as ever without material reward, confident they will be able to sell their milk again by late August.
The Friends of Holy Cow have set up a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/rawmilkfriends/?fref=ts and have organised a fund-raising dinner to support the MacNeilles in the Port Chalmers Town Hall on July 9. https://www.facebook.com/events/249793525391612/
Source: Stuff
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/81596453/Holy-Cow-what-a-great-community
