Fresh dairy directly from the farm at an honest price

Since the end of March, we have a subscription to local fresh dairy from a community shared agriculture farm Boer&Companie nearby the Abbey and Kabouter's school.

Our lot is 2 liter of fresh yoghurt, 300g cottage cheese, 300g fresh cheese, 250g of buttermilk and 250g of butter. That's quite a lot of dairy to consume for us on time so we are still searching and experimenting on how to consume it all on time.

But it feels great to get such fresh products from cows we see on a daily basis. The dairy production has just started up as some cows have just started producing after getting their first calves. Good thing is also that the calves are allowed to stay with their mom as we've witnessed ourselves ! Kabouter and Jan have even watched and participated already in the milking. Now and then we also get some fresh milk from the milk machine at the abbey. The subscription is a yearly pre-payment which feels like a lot of money to put on the table at once but when we'd calculate the weekly amounts we'd spend on dairy in the supermarket, we might spend 8 euro / week as well. I do realise I'll still buy now and then fruit flavoured little yoghurts and puddings for the children although we'd better learn to mix our own variations with fresh fruit. As I said, we still have to learn to consume our portions in the most optimal way :).  Thanks to the prepayments, the farmers are more certain about their income and are shielded off from market price variations or variations in income due to production variations.

Now and then we go and watch the milking of the cows at the Park Abbey and we're clearly not the only ones doing so

Apart from getting fresh products, at an honest price for the farmer, we've yet reduced our waste a bit more by buying less prepackaged yogurt and milk bottles. The effect won't be as significant as when we switched all our water consumption to filtered tap water and Soda Stream sparkling water, yet it's another step to reducing our foot print a bit. 

Apart from dairy, we've also subscribed in our enthusiasm for a meat package in the fall but that cattle still has to grow first   and we've also just participated in the self-harvesting part of vegetables. That'll teach me to eat more vegetables from the season , which will be a big challenge for myself.  But I'll write more about our experience on that when we've harvested a bit more.