THOSE who want to drink milk that tastes like real milk should get themselves along to the Johnson’s Farmgate stall at the Newcastle City Farmers Market.
Glen William’s Karl and Cathie Johnson sell an award-winning pure jersey milk line called Over The Moon.
The cows are milked one day and the milk is bottled and sold the next.
‘‘It’s real milk,’’ Karl Johnson told GT.
‘‘It’s all from one farm and it’s gently pasteurised, not nuked like the big guys do.
‘‘We just pasteurise it and put it straight into the bottle.’’
Over The Moon’s milk recently won seven silver medals at the Sydney Royal Cheese and Dairy Produce Show.
‘‘Jersey milk is richer because it’s higher in butter fat,’’ Johnson said.
‘‘They’re a smaller cow, so they’re better for the environment.
‘‘And they might produce less milk but it’s far better quality, it’s excellent.
‘‘It’s pure, fresh, natural milk.
‘‘It’s all back to basics for us.’’
Johnson, who also sells farm-fresh vegetables including heirloom varieties at the Newcastle markets, decided to sell milk through his business after watching some of his dairy-farming neighbours struggle to make a living.
‘‘I live up near Dungog in dairy country and a lot of the farmers up here were going broke,’’ he said.
‘‘They were just not getting a sustainable dollar for their milk, some of them are actually getting less than what it costs to produce.’’
And most of the milk you found at the supermarkets was full of water, he said.
‘‘When the milk goes from the dairies into the processing house they take out cream and things to make other products, and there’s this byproduct that’s just like a watery substance left over,’’ Johnson said.
‘‘They put that back into the drinking milk unfortunately.
‘‘That’s why milk doesn’t taste so good any more.’’
Johnson recently hooked up with fifth- generation farmer Ian Lindsay from Wauchope to produce Over The Moon milk.
‘‘He’s a pure jersey farmer and we’re paying him much more than he was getting off the big processors.’’
Lindsay had been supplying the Hastings Co-op with milk for many years but for the past 18 months the pay he’d been receiving had been ‘‘shocking’’.
‘‘It has been way down,’’ Lindsay said.
‘‘Karl asked me a couple of years ago to supply him with some milk but I was contracted to the co-op so I couldn’t, but when we came off contract I approached him and we’ve struck up a deal.
‘‘Because I’m only a small operation – I only milk around 50 cows – I decided to go that way with Karl and hopefully we’ve done the right thing.
‘‘It’s all a gamble.
‘‘I just felt that the bigger companies these days don’t want the little farmer, they want to drive into a farm and pick up 10,000litres of milk, whereas I might only have 2000litres.
‘‘And I’ve always thought the jersey milk, because it has a premium butter fat and protein content, always had that edge on the other milk as far as flavour is concerned.
‘‘The other reason I get cranky at these ads on TV for milk being two litres for $2 is because what they’re selling is not real milk, it’s played with.
‘‘I’ve always been against companies playing with milk.’’
Lindsay hopes the public backs Australian producers across the board.
‘‘These big supermarkets are not only doing it to the diary industry but to everything,’’ he said.
‘‘The producer has no say, we get whatever is left.
‘‘I hope the public backs us and says, ‘We don’t want cheap milk, we want good milk’.
‘‘Because if the big supermarkets continue down the track they’ve been going there’s not going to be any dairy industry.
‘‘They’re saying it won’t affect the industry, but it will because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
‘‘The money the big supermarkets are losing by keeping the price of milk down, they’ll make it up somewhere.
‘‘I’d like to see good wholesome milk back on the shelves, but you have to pay for quality.’’
Johnson agrees.
‘‘People do need to change their attitude to milk, and to fruit and vegetables. If they want to keep buying Australian fruit and vegetables they’ve got to buy them, because all these supermarkets just want to bring it in from overseas.
‘‘That’s why the Newcastle City Farmers Markets are becoming so huge.
‘‘The customers who come are all dead-set against the supermarkets.
‘‘What market organiser Kevin Eade has done down there has been absolutely amazing for small farmers.
‘‘I’ve been there for five years and there’s more and more farmers coming in, more people are growing things because they can get a fair price for their produce.
‘‘It’s really generating a nice little economy.’’
The Newcastle City Farmers Market will return to the showground on March 27 after Newcastle show.
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