What happened when a Scottish dairy farmer decided to let his cows keep their calves – Philip Lymbery
Wilma and David Finlay are pioneering a radical new approach to dairy farming
Rain hammered down outside as a black-and-white calf entered the world. He lay on a bed of straw while his mother licked him clean, the bond strengthening between them with every passing minute.
This everyday scene on a dairy farm so often ends abruptly. Normal practice is that cow and calf are separated within hours of birth. But not here. This lucky lad had come into the world on a new generation of dairy farms where babies stay with their mums. And their world looks better in every way.
On a farm near Gatehouse of Fleet, dairy farmer David Finlay has spent the past three decades unlearning almost everything he was taught about modern agriculture. His farm, Rainton, is now home to Europe’s largest commercial cow-with-calf dairy, where calves stay with their mothers on pasture for months, not hours. The sight is striking and emotive: cows and calves grazing together, behaving as they have done in nature for millennia.
But Finlay is the first to say that ‘calf-at-foot’ is not the whole story. It is, rather, the visible outcome of something deeper: a complete re-think of how farming works with land, animals and people.
READ MORE: How a million-strong army of animal lovers has achieved a major breakthrough – Philip Lymbery
Organic transformation
Forty years ago, Finlay was schooled in the intensive agricultural creed that the only way we could ever feed the world was by “increasing the amount we extracted from the land and the animals,” he told me.
He described his current approach as “a 180-degree reversal”. The unseen infrastructure behind his system is pasture. Not as a scenic backdrop, but as a living engine.
When Rainton transitioned to organic in the 1990s, productivity initially crashed. Years of synthetic fertilisers and chemicals had depleted the soil.
But slowly, something unexpected happened. Yields recovered, even as inputs fell away. As the soil replenished itself, nature was given the scope once again to be the great provider.
Ten years into his organic farming journey, Finlay’s production was recovering and costs were shrinking. His farm started seeing the type of yields enjoyed previously but without applying a hundred tonnes of fertiliser, and thousands of litres of pesticides, weed killers and the like.
A nutrient-rich soil
The secret to Finlay’s success lay beneath his boots: a functioning soil microbiome. Healthy soils harbour microbes capable of unlocking nutrients. These are then traded with plants in exchange for sugars produced through photosynthesis in a symphony of productive life.
Rainton’s fields are now rich with grasses, clovers and herbs. Dandelions, once feared as weeds, blaze orange across the pastures each spring. Deep-rooted and nutrient-dense, they pull minerals from below, opening soil structure and feeding Finlay’s cattle.
This matters because animals reflect the land they live on. Deficiencies once common in his area have vanished. Soil, pasture, plants and animals all “co-evolved over billions of years before we came along and spoiled it all”.
“[Previously], we always had to feed minerals and vitamins to the cows and sheep to stop them from suffering from deficiencies – well, we haven't had to do that now for years,” Finlay explained.
Answering an awkward question
Calf-at-foot emerged not from ideology, but from people. Rainton started welcoming 70,000 visitors a year through its ice-cream business. Time and again, visitors asked an awkward question: why were calves taken away from their mothers?
Separating calves from their mothers after a day or two was just normal industry practice. But those questions that just kept coming made them think of trying something different.
Like so many farmers, Finlay assumed that keeping mum and calf together couldn’t work. But could it? That question gnawed at him. If dairy was going to face public scrutiny – and he was sure it would – perhaps the industry needed better answers. Encouraged by his wife, Wilma, he decided to jump in and try it.
The first attempt, in 2012, was a near-disaster. Cows refused to enter the parlour. Mastitis flared. Milk yields collapsed. Finlay realised, too late, that he had underestimated cow sentience, that these sensitive, intelligent creatures knew what was going on.
What became obvious to Finlay was that the animals understood the old rules of how things were done. Now the rules had changed, and they no longer trusted humans.
Based on previous experience, “they knew we were going to take the babies away, but they didn't know when we were going to do it,” Finlay explained. It took years of redesigning better routines and hard lessons before the system finally settled. Today, the calves thrive, disease is rare and antibiotic use is minimal.
A gently radical approach
So why does this matter beyond one farm? Because most people cannot see, let alone choose, how their milk is produced. Unlike eggs, dairy is largely unlabelled by the farming system. Milk is pooled. Packaging tells a comforting story whether cows ever see grass or not.
For many, milk arrives in a bottle. Pastoral imagery does the rest, selling milk produced, all too often, by animals indoors for much of their short lives.
What David Finlay has discovered is both deceptively simple and gently radical. Healthy soils grow healthy pasture. Healthy pasture supports healthy animals. And when cows are allowed to keep their calves, we glimpse a dairy system that feels more natural, more transparent and, ultimately, more trustworthy.
A Dairy Story, a documentary about Wilma and David Findlay’s determination to find a way to keep dairy cows and their calves together, is showing now.
Philip Lymbery is chief executive of Compassion in World Farming, president of EuroGroup for Animals and a UN Food Systems Advisory Board member. His latest book is Sixty Harvests Left: How to Reach a Nature-Friendly Future. He is on X/Twitter @philip_ciwf
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