At Regather, we’ve been working with local, family run dairy Our Cow Molly since June 2019. When we first started ordering from them we spent less than £500 per month, now we spend more than that every single week! Through us, over 600 units of Our Cow Molly milk makes its way to the people of Sheffield, half of that being reusable glass pints. This post brings you some important updates from Our Cow Molly including sustainability projects with University of Sheffield, renewable energy and a price increase.
As part of the University of Sheffield’s drive to source local, sustainable produce wherever possible, they have stocked exclusively Our Cow Molly milk in their cafes for over five years. This means all the milk used on campus only travels around four miles and is under 24 hours old when it is served. Our Cow Molly and the University are taking their sustainability aims one step further using stainless steel milk churns in 3 of their cafes. Working with the University, Our Cow Molly has invested in 70 churns which can be washed and refilled at the dairy for this innovative project. This eliminates all plastic & reduces the milk’s carbon footprint by 65% – that’s equivalent to about 6.5 tonnes of CO2 every year!
The dairy already has 15kW of solar panels to provide some of the energy to power the dairy & heat the water to wash the reusable glass milk bottles, which helps protect Our Cow Molly from the steepest energy rises a little.
Just like us at Regather, Our Cow Molly has been busy testing out electric vans. Unfortunately there aren’t any available that can carry & refrigerate 3000kg of milk at the moment. As it stands it would take 3 electric vans & 3 drivers to replace one diesel van so it’s not something they can do just yet.
Our Cow Molly’s aim for the future is to digest their cow’s muck & harvest the methane from it, using that to power a generator to power the farm. This would remove the need for fossil fuels and protect the company from crude oil price increases. It would also produce a much better fertiliser for the grass.
Throughout the pandemic although the volume Our Cow Molly could deliver dropped, they stuck with their prices & never failed to supply. Energy, Fuel & the plastic bottles are big costs for Our Cow Molly. As we all know, fuel is at a record high going up in price 8 consecutive times, energy is going up & the price of plastic bottles has increased almost 20%. Our Cow Molly usually fix their price for two years but with such volatile prices, this time it’ll just be one year.
This means that prices of Our Cow Molly milk will be increasing for Regather customers, although glass pints will not be affected:
1 litre bottle was £1.15, now £1.20
2 litre bottle was £2, now £2.15
The University of Sheffield has just completed the early part of a study to measure carbon stored on Our Cow Molly’s farm. Fields which have cows grazing in them are holding up to 20% more carbon than fields left to ‘rewild’ which is really positive. The next stage is to work with the University to increase the levels of carbon Our Cow Molly can take from the atmosphere & store in the soil.
Protecting soil and storing carbon are high on our climate action list. Our farm land in Moss Valley is 25% more effective at storing carbon because we farm it organically. You can find out more about Regather’s climate pledges in this post on COP26’s goals
