Rainton Farm marks ten years of cow-with-calf dairying in Dumfries & Galloway
The Ethical Dairy, the artisan cheese brand from Rainton Farm in Dumfries & Galloway, has been presented with a Higher Welfare Award (Dairy Cows and Calves) by Compassion in World Farming (CiWF), ten years after the farm moved its whole herd to a cow-with-calf system. The award was presented at CiWF’s 2026 Farm Animal Welfare Awards in Brussels on Wednesday 4 November. The Ethical Dairy was one of 44 winners worldwide and one of six from the UK.
At Rainton, calves stay with their mothers rather than being separated shortly after birth. For the first eight weeks they are together 24 hours a day, then separated overnight before a gradual weaning process at five to six months. The cows are milked only once a day and share their milk with their calves. The farm is certified organic, 100% pasture-fed and operates a near-closed loop system, producing food from sunshine and rain with very few bought-in inputs.
The farm introduced the cow-with-calf system across its whole herd in late 2016, following an initial pilot in 2012. David Finlay, who co-founded The Ethical Dairy with his late wife Wilma, is a fourth-generation dairy farmer who spent many years as an agricultural consultant advising farms to intensify, before converting Rainton to organic nearly 30 years ago.
Cows in the milking herd, not counting first-time mums, now produce an average of 6,000 litres each, including the milk their calves drink. Each calf drinks roughly 2,000 litres, compared with the 420 litres each calf was given when Rainton reared them on buckets, and on average each calf’s suckling is supporting an increase of around 1,500 litres in its mother’s yield.
Milk from the herd is made into artisan cheese on the farm under The Ethical Dairy brand, mostly using unpasteurised milk. The cheeses have had a successful year with awards: Fleet Valley Blue won Silver at the British & Irish Cheese Awards, Carrick and Rainton Tomme both won Silver at the Great British Food Awards, Carrick won Silver at the Scottish Dairy Championships at the Royal Highland Show, and at the Border Union Show Fleet Valley Blue took Gold and Best in Show with Gold for Carrick.
Credit: Ian Findlay
Dr Tracey Jones, Compassion in World Farming’s Global Director for Food Business, said: “Compassion in World Farming is delighted to present The Ethical Dairy with a well-deserved Higher Welfare Award (Dairy Cows and Calves) award. Their pioneering cow-with-calf system shows the art of the possible, demonstrating how extensive, nature-friendly farming with animal welfare at its heart can help create a better food system.”
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David Finlay said: “We’ve been doing this for ten years now, in fact some of the cows due to calve in the next few weeks had their first calf here in autumn 2016, when we made the change. The early years were undoubtedly tough, but they taught us so much. We would now never go back to separating the dairy cows and calves.”
David sits on the advisory board of TransformDairyNet, an EU-funded project coordinated by University College Dublin, and is a Fellow of Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC). In 2025 the International Dairy Federation invited him to speak about Rainton’s model at the World Dairy Congress in Chile. The farm’s ambitions include an independent scientific study of the system and a centre of excellence for visiting farmers, and more than 30 UK farms are now operating as cow-with-calf dairies or transitioning to the system.
The farm is the subject of A Dairy Story, a feature documentary about the transition to a cow-with-calf dairy management system, currently touring cinemas, with community screenings due to begin later this month and a global online watch party for potential screening hosts on Thursday 19 November 2026.
