My name is Matthew Elphick and together with my partner Betsie we founded Nutfield Dairy in Surrey in 2020. We are small scale dairy farmers milking just 25 traditional Shorthorn cows. We are passionate about nature friendly, regenerative farming and how cows play a really important role in the countryside.
Farming regeneratively means we manage our land and cows in a way that improves the health and function of our most important asset, the soil. In the effort to combat climate change, our number one priority needs to be restoring soil health. Here at Nutfield Dairy we don’t use any unnatural fertiliser or chemical sprays and we move our cows daily to prevent overgrazing and improve biodiversity. This creates a landscape capable of efficiently capturing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil where it feeds microbes, making the soil nutrient dense and providing us with nutrient-rich food. This is also incredibly important for our ecosystem. To benefit all wildlife, we need to start at the bottom and work our way up the food chain.
Like most farmers, the welfare of our animals is our number one priority. We have managed to adapt our system so the cows and their calves can stay together, rather than being removed soon after birth. This does, of course, mean we get less milk but it takes that stress away from the animals and makes for very happy and healthy cows and calves.
Why are we Crowdfunding?
It has been a difficult couple of years for us. We’ve spent a vast amount of money setting up Nutfield Dairy, which we’re very proud of, but with large increases in the cost of production we haven’t managed to create a viable business.
Our vision is to convert our old electric milk float into a mobile shop so we can return to selling our milk directly to our customers. The float will house a specially designed milk dispenser which will contain whole and semi skimmed milk, and it also gives us the means to make milkshakes. We would then park in a few locations during the week and customers could come to us to refill their glass milk bottles. This is a much more economically viable method of selling our milk, particularly as we wouldn’t be spending hours washing bottles nor have the expensive running costs of the machinery. Our customers would wash their own bottles before their next refill. We would also like a yoghurt dispenser to work in the same way so our natural yoghurt can also be sold in reusable glass jars.
By farming the way we do we are improving the environment, meaning we are going above and beyond in terms of our food production. However, now we want to ensure that the way we market our produce is also sustainable. As well as being able to significantly reduce packaging, the milk float will be fully electric and have an inverter and a solar panel on top to charge the battery.
As you can imagine, all this does not come cheap, and we’re not in a position where we can borrow yet more large sums of money. We have been very fortunate to be getting some help from a local grant, but we still need to pay for this project upfront before receiving any grant money. The money you are kind enough to donate to us will not only help us convert our milk float, but will also mean we can improve our processing equipment to make it more efficient, plus buy a few more cows to keep up with demand.
We would be incredibly grateful for any sized donation you feel you can make, and please check out the rewards we can offer in return for your generosity.
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