Happy Cow Creamery

Happy Cow Creamery

For many health aficionados raw milk is nutritionally a perfect food, but is a commodity that is not always easy to find and for some folks the health concerns of drinking milk straight from the udder is a little worrying from a disease standpoint.  So what is the next best thing to raw milk, one that alleviates the worry of bovine tuberculosis and brucellosis while maintaining its nutritional content  - answer: milk that is not heated beyond 145 degrees Fahrenheit and not homogenized; and that’s the milk you get from Happy Cow Creamery. SO how happy are the cows? Well given their lush pastures pretty much guaranteed year round life is quite good…for a dairy cow.   Milked twice a day these Holsteins are relieved of their 74lb plus load of milk in a procedure lasting not much more than ten minutes, so they fair quite a lot better than their industrialized counterparts who are usually milked three times a day. Dairy cows are worked harder than any other farm animal since tractors and ploughs became motorized.  Milk production is ten months of the year at Happy Cow Creamery leaving a two-month rest period in the final stages of a cow’s pregnancy. Famer Tom’s eighty or so milking cows have about 70 acres at their disposal and are corralled and moved around on a rotational grazing system.  On a not so “happy” note and to reiterate the sad demise of family farms - in the 1980s there were 44 dairies in the counties of Pickens and Greenville, now there is only one - the Happy Cow Creamery.

Tom Trantham the owner of HCC was formerly an ‘industrialized’ dairy man and tells a cute story  (apparently true) about how when at the end of his tether, down to his last dollar, and about to sell his herd before the bailiffs moved in, it was one of his own cows who showed the rest of the herd and Tom that all was not lost so long as there was fresh green forage to eat; that the lush pasture on the farm was all they needed to produce the richest creamiest milk, and that Tom didn’t need to be spending thousands of dollars on feed to produce milk that didn’t compare to the new pasture produced milk rich in GLAs and omegas.  "Here's this big 1,400-pound cow, and she's standing there in the lush April growth, and she just takes the top half of the plants, and then moves on," he says. "I said, 'Whoa, cow!”  And there began what Farmer Tom call’s his  “12 Aprils’ rotational pasturing – year round ‘April fresh’ forage.  There are 29 pastures at Happy cow Creamery and the dairy herd is moved daily to fresh forage, the cows eat the soft green tops off the grass and move onto the next pasture, by the time they get back to the first pasture again the forage has regrown and so the cycle moves on.   After each paddock has been grazed a few times it will be bush-hogged down and over seeded with a mixture of grass seasonal appropriate, and so continues the cycle of year-round green pasture for the dairy herd.  Farmer Tom does feed a little grain as a supplement and also as an incentive to get the girls into the parlor.  The parlor is small (only 4 cows inside at a time) therefore calm and stress-free so getting the girls to meander and line-up at the milking shed is not really an issue. 

After leaving his industrialized methods behind Farmer Tom Trantham was all ready to tear down his silage tower when his wife (seems like all the females at HCC have the best ideas – sorry Tom) suggested turning it into a bottling plant!  So the milk travels about a hundred yards from the cow’s udder directly to the bottles!

The concrete covered stalls where the herd wait their turn to be milked, was where they used to live 24/7 until Farmer Tom had his epiphany – thanks to his cows.

Happy Cow Creamery milk has a wonderful reputation in South Carolina, and the on-farm shop is as busy as any market. Unfortunately the milk is not available outside of SC because of bureaucratic red tape that Farmer Tom doesn’t need to get involved with as business is booming.  However, if you live in surrounding states HCC accommodates bulk buying from customers who want to call at the dairy and share in a personal co-op with friends and family back home.  So if you live in a neighboring state make a day of it – take a cooler and have a picnic in the lovely countryside at the Creamery and take home coolers full of fresh creamy milk.