A new documentary, A Dairy Story, is here to gently suggest that maybe, just maybe, ripping newborn calves away from their mothers hours after birth isn't the only way to run a dairy farm. The film focuses on Rainton Farm in Dumfries and Galloway, where owners David and Wilma Finlay have pioneered cow-and-calf farming at commercial scale - a practice so radical it's apparently the first of its kind in Europe.

Instead of the industry standard of separating calves from their mothers shortly after birth, the Finlays let them stay together until the youngsters are five or six months old. This breaks dairy-farming orthodoxy, which generally refuses to waste lucrative milk on calves. Unsurprisingly, neighboring farmers were skeptical, and even the cows were initially confused: in a 2012 pilot, the animals were stressed by the sudden change of routine when confronted with needy offspring they had expected to disappear. Milk yields dropped at first, but rebounded to a 25% increase in subsequent trials, as the mums settled down and extra suckling stimulated production. The film also highlights the damaging routines imposed on dairy farmers by old-style methods - a stressed-out factory milking schedule that, ringfenced by intensive veterinary and crop fertilization, has ecological repercussions in the fields.