Much of the conventional milk produced in B.C. is sold to the B.C. Milk Marketing Board which pools it and sells it to dairy processors like Avalon Dairy in Burnaby.
Avalon’s Traceable milk is an exception. Consumers know which farm it comes from and how the cows, that produce the milk, are treated.
“Nobody else is doing it. Just us,” said Carmine Abbinante, the production manager at Avalon.
The milk is processed and pasteurized at Avalon but they get the milk from three tightly controlled farms, including EcoDairy in Abbotsford. The cows are fed a patent-pending natural source of vitamin D and it’s that innovation that’s prompted the dairy board to allow Avalon to process the special milk.
The farm operations manager at EcoDairy, Peter Torenvliet, says it operates with transparency – and consumers are invited to come to their location to see how the cows are treated.
“Yeah, it’s kinds of a cow spa.”
Cows can roam freely in what he calls the “cow spa.” They wander in and out of the automatic milking machine, lie down on special mattresses and can even get a massage any time they want from an automated machine with extending bristles.
Torenvliet works hard to keep the environment relaxed.
“A nice relaxed happy cow produces lots of milk,” he says.
“When a cow lies down the blood flow to the udder is increased three times, which means more milk,” he replied.
The price is the same as other comparable milk products: $3.99 a litre but you get $1 back on the bottle if you take it back to the retailer.
EcoDairy, in partnership with Science World, is the first demonstration farm in Canada. It offers tours of its facility so you can see the milk being produced yourself. The two other Fraser Valley farms supplying the traceable are Dicklands and Legendairy. They have agreements to the adhere to the same strict standards as EcoDairy when suppling milk for the traceable product.
