About our cows
Our herd is small (just 70 cows, compared to a national average of nearer 100), meaning we have the time to care for each cow individually. Each has a name, not just a number, and most are distant descendants of the handful of cows who made up our original herd. Diana 24th and Daisy 20th are the great-great-great grand-daughters of those first few animals! Our cows are kept outside on grass during the warm summer months and are given cosy straw bedding inside during the frosty and wet winter months. They are cared for and milked twice a day by our experienced team of stockmen and women, and fed nutritious home-grown food whenever possible.
How now Brown Cow!
At the moment, the Nortons' dairy herd is a conventional Holstein Friesian mix (i.e. black and white), but very soon brown cows will be appearing in a field near Frettenham. The brown cows will be Brown Swiss and Swedish Red crosses, known for their tasty milk and robustness. Do stop and say "how now!" when you first see one of our new brown cows!
One of our new brown swiss arrivals, born on 27 December 2006. She should be entering the herd sometime during summer 2008.
So, why the change?
Traditionally we have used Holstein Friesian bulls to father our cows, producing the well-known black and white animals that everyone is familiar with. But being a little bit different from your average dairy farm, around two years ago we decided that having only black and white cows was no longer for us.
Using a cross breed system has various advantages. One of the main ones is that Holstein Friesians are increasingly prone to foot problems. Anyone who lives in the area near the farm will tell you how stony the soil can be in their back gardens, and it sadly doesn't take much for a cow to injure herself on a piece of flint or hard rock. Each time this happens, we have to take extra special care of the cow until she is better, which sometimes means she can't go out to graze with the others and misses out on her natural herding instincts. Swedish Reds and Swiss Browns are both much hardier breeds - used to mountain climbing in their native countries! - and so hopefully better able to cope with the short stroll out to the fields each day during the summer months.
Another advantage is that Swedish Reds and Swiss Browns are "dual purpose" breeds, producing good muscly beef calves as well as great milking cows. Each year, we aim to have 8-10 new heifers enter the herd to replace animals who have had to leave the herd. To achieve this, the best milking animals in our herd are put to a dairy-type bull. However, we don't know whether this will result in little boy calves or little girl calves, so we have to put twice the number of animals we need as replacements to a dairy-type bull to ensure that we have enough girls entering the herd in 2-3 years time. It's a long term process! Other animals in the herd are put to a beef type bull (such as an Aberdeen Angus, Charollais or Limousin) to produce dairy-beef cross calves that eventually produce a good beef carcass. 
One of our new Brown Swiss heifers (middle) grazes with the rest of the herd
For some years now, male black and white calves have been virtually worthless, tragically resulting in some dairy farmers having them shot at birth. This is because Holstein Friesians are bred for milk production alone, so have little muscling and poor frames, resulting in a poor beef carcass. Beef farmers, having to compete with cheap foreign imports produced under extremely variable or non-existent welfare regulations, have to be commercial about which animals to buy to rear on, preferring pure beef breeds or dairy-beef crosses rather than pure dairy-type males. Recent changes to the subsidy system exacerbated the problem of worthless male black and white calves, although the lifting of the beef export ban has meant that a limited market for these calves is now available on the continent, where lean animals are preferred for veal.
All of our beef calves, both our male dairy-type calves and our dairy-beef crosses, are sold to a neighbour just a few hundred yards up the road. He rears them very slowly, producing a beef so good that it is the star attraction of our local farm shop! However, he too is under financial pressure now that the subsidy system has changed, so rather than resort to sending our male black and white calves abroad or having to dispose of them some other way, we thought we'd be creative and avoid the problem to start with. Under our new cross-breeding system, all of the animals we sell to our neighbour will be great beef animals, hopefully producing an even higher quality meat.
