Pay more for milk and eggs to help the animals retire happy

SHOPPERS are being invited to pay £2.45 a litre for milk and £2.99, or 50p each, for six eggs, in order to fund long life and retirement for the cows and hens.

The prices are being charged in Selfridges in London from Monday for products from vegetarian entrepreneur Isobel Davies, who runs the Izzy Lane fashion house at Richmond, North Yorkshire.

She said yesterday she had customers in Yorkshire for the same products, which will cost considerably less when ordered alongside organic vegetables through her doorstep delivery business Farmaround.

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The idea for her Cow Nation and Hen Nation ventures grew out of charging enough for her clothes to pay for natural life spans for the 600 Wensleydale sheep which provide wool for the Richmond business.

She and a sympathiser, Liz Jones, author of Liz Jones’s Diary, bought a mixed bag of 60 cows of all ages, mainly Jerseys, from a struggling dairy farmer in Suffolk, and hired him to keep the cows as long as they could keep going without suffering. Then they found an organic eggs producer in Surrey willing to run a flock of 1,680 laying hens on the same basis.

Through Farmaround, the milk will be £1.99 a litre and the eggs £1.99 for six.

At Sainsbury’s, Jersey milk is £1 a litre and six large organic eggs £1.98. A small business called Ahimsa Milk already delivers milk in the London area from a farm run on Buddhist principles in Kent and charges £2.40 a litre for doorstep delivery. However, Martin Burtt of Glaisdsale, near Whitby, a dairy farmers’ representative in the NFU, said: “It sounds like a luxury for those who can afford nonsense.

“It costs £10 a week to keep a cow, milking or not.”

Most of his would be kept until they were eight.

Cow Nation says normal life expectancy should be 16-20.

See www.goodfoodnation.co.uk for more details.

Hear more on this story in the Country Week radio programme from the Yorkshire Post