The Ministry of Primary Industries imposes a strict testing regime on raw milk, one that includes checking for pathogens – something not necessary with commercial herds where the milk is pasteurised. They do a once-a-day milking in the morning, the clients roll up during the day, and the dispenser is cleaned in the evening ready for the next day’s milk.
Glenda and Neil manage the raw milk operation themselves with the help of a part-timer. The roughly 1300 litres of raw milk produced weekly by Buttercup Dairies sells for $2.50 a litre, equivalent to a return of around $30kg/ms, compared to Fonterra’s commercial milk solids return of about $9/kg. They also supply two-litre stainless steel containers for $20 each. Buttercup Dairies’ clients can ll their own containers from the dispenser, but most take advantage of the one-litre glass bottles with a screw-lid that Grays sell for $4 each. The DF Italia dispenser was bought through raw milk consultant Richard Houston’s Takaka-based agency. From the small roadside shed the raw milk passes into an Italian-made dispenser from which clients upload quantities ranging from a single litre to 30l. The farm has two milking sheds, a modern 44-a-side herringbone in which the commercial herd is milked, and a restored 12-a-side HB shed for the raw milk cows. In doing so, Tom Gray beat the Livestock Improvement Company’s (LIC) introduction of crossbreed genetics by 30 years, and the family always has bred its own replacements, with the herd sitting in the top 10% of New Zealand herds for genetic merit. It was this that led to Neil’s father Tom Gray 50 years ago taking the then-unusual step of establishing a Jersey-Friesian crossbred herd of medium-weight cows to minimise the winter problems. The farm has been in the Gray family for over a century, sometimes struggling to keep the pasture cover on the pugging winter soils of the Hauraki Plains. Buttercup Dairies draws its client base not just from nearby towns, of which the biggest is Thames, but throughout the Coromandel and Waikato, with some clients from Auckland visiting the farm on the way to holiday homes on the peninsula. As such it has more than justi ed the investment needed to break into the increasingly popular raw milk market. The Grays’ 175ha farm at Turua on the Hauraki Plains gets most of its income from its 520 crossbred cows, but the raw milk sales from 20 other cows delivers about three times the returns per litre they get from Fonterra. 38 | nzdairy DAIRY PEOPLE » Buttercup Dairies Milk bottles all the rage at Buttercup Hugh de Lacy The old glass milk bottle that used to feature in home deliveries has come back to life as the container of choice for many of the clients of Glenda and Neil Gray’s Buttercup Dairies raw milk business.
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