Peter Skene · The man who chose the milk
The land under the milk.
On where our milk comes from, what regenerative farming really means, and what forty years in Australian dairy taught me.
Peter Skene is the man who chose the Australian organic A2 protein milk from grass-fed cows that is this drink's first ingredient. Organic here means the farms — pasture, herd and milk — are certified organic in Australia. The finished sachet is not certified organic, because the vitamins, minerals and DHA we add are not. We would rather tell you that than imply it.
The first thing you notice is the wind. It comes off the Southern Ocean with nothing to slow it between Antarctica and this paddock, and it carries salt, and the grass leans away from it. The second thing you notice, if you have spent your life around dairy, is the colour of the grass. Not the flat green of a fertilised monoculture. A darker, uneven green — clover and plantain and chicory pushed up through it — and the cows moving through it slowly, heads down, the way cows move when there is more to eat than they can finish.
I have stood in a lot of paddocks. This is the kind I was looking for.
— Peter Skene
Peter Skene
“The floor came first.”
Where I come from.
I was born in Camperdown, a dairy town in south-west Victoria, an hour inland from this coast. My father worked fifty years at the town's cheese and butter factory. My first job was sweeping its floors.
I learned to make cheese, then butter, then milk powder, the way you learn anything worth knowing — standing next to someone who could do it and getting it wrong until I got it right. Later came degrees in dairy science and in commerce, and later still the boardrooms and a stock-exchange listing. But the floor came first, and it is still where I learned the most.
In 2000 the factory closed after a hundred and ten years, and for a decade my home town had no dairy at all. In 2010 I started one, because the milk was still there and the people were still there and it seemed absurd to truck both away. It taught me the first lesson on this page: milk is made in the paddock, not the factory. Everything downstream — the driers, the blending, the testing, the export paperwork — can only preserve what the farm gives you. It can never add to it.
The farms I converted — and why our milk comes from them.
For most of my career, like most of the industry, we chased litres. More cows per hectare, more nitrogen on the grass, more grain in the shed — a kilo of grain gives you roughly a kilo of milk, and when the world price is high that arithmetic is hard to argue with. It works the way borrowing works. Then the soil sends the bill: compaction you can feel through your boots, pastures that need more fertiliser every year to give the same yield, water that runs off instead of soaking in. We were drawing on the land faster than we were putting back — and most of us knew it.
In the last chapter of my career I led a listed Australian dairy company that owned its own farms here in south-west Victoria — a handful of them, a few thousand cows. That gave me something most dairy executives never get: the power to change how the land itself was managed, not just what happened to the milk afterwards. We spent the better part of a year talking it through with the people who ran those farms. Then we changed how every one of them was farmed: the herd on pasture, no synthetic fertiliser or spray on the land, no routine antibiotics. And we changed how they were grazed — slower, rested, the soil treated as the herd's real employer rather than a surface to stand on. The milk from those farms went into infant formula, made for the most trust-sensitive customer there is, the parent of a newborn. At that end of the trust curve you learn that provenance isn't a story. It is the whole product.
Those are the farms our milk comes from. Grass-fed, naturally rich in A2 protein, on this coast, dried once — the same milk I spent a decade making fit for babies is what goes into every carton of Carrington & Finch. I know these paddocks, these managers and these driers personally, and I still walk them.
What regenerative means when you actually do it.
On a dairy farm “regenerative” comes down to four decisions. Not a slogan, not a religion — four things you either do or don't.
Many small paddocks. A day or two of grazing, then weeks of recovery, so the grass regrows from deep roots instead of being nibbled to the ground.
A living root in the soil every day of the year. Bare soil bakes, blows and sheds water.
Ryegrass alone is a lawn. Ryegrass with clover, chicory, plantain and cocksfoot is a pasture.
Legumes, compost and the herd's own manure instead of a bag of nitrogen. Slower, and stronger every year.
How the herd moves
I want to be honest about the evidence, because this is a subject with more brochures than data. The best recent Australian study, published in Nature Food in 2026, found that stocking rate and rainfall drive soil carbon and profit more than pasture diversity or grazing pattern on their own. Regenerative farming is not magic, and it does not excuse overstocking. What the research shows consistently is that well-managed multi-paddock grazing builds soil organic carbon, improves water infiltration and lifts the biology in the soil compared with continuous grazing. Do the four things properly, at the right stocking rate, on a coast where it rains, and the land gets better. That is the whole claim, and it is enough.
It starts with the soil.
Everything starts with the soil. Good soil grows good grass. Good grass makes contented cows, and contented cows give great milk. Great milk makes a product a parent can trust — and a child will finish. Every step on this page is one link in that chain, and none of them can be skipped.
Cows are grass, converted. What they eat shows up in what they give. The largest study of its kind — 1,163 milk samples over three years, published in Food Science & Nutrition in 2018 — found pasture-fed milk carried roughly two and a half times the omega-3 of conventional milk and more than double the conjugated linoleic acid, with an omega-6 to omega-3 ratio under one against nearly six. A 2019 review from Ireland's national agricultural research body reached the same conclusion across the literature, and added the reason grass-fed butter is yellow: beta-carotene.
Fatty acids in raw milk, g per 100 g — Benbrook et al., 2018
Now the honest part. Those are findings about milk. Our product is a Kids A2 Protein nutrition drink: the milk is dried, blended with other ingredients and stirred into warm water; we have not measured the fatty acid profile of the finished drink and we make no claim about what it does for your child. I include the science because it explains why I care so much about where the milk comes from. Soil, grass, cows, milk: that is the order it happens in, and it is the reason the milk is what it is.
Made in AustraliaWhy the world buys Australian dairy.
I have sold Australian milk powder to buyers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe for most of my working life, and I can tell you what they pay for. It isn't the flag. It is the system underneath it.
In Victoria no one may manufacture dairy without a state licence, and no one may export without a separate federal registration on top of it. And every year the national milk residue survey collects about a thousand samples of raw milk from farms in every dairying region and runs about thirteen thousand analyses on them for nearly seventy compounds — antibiotics, parasite treatments, feed and environmental contaminants. In the most recent years reported, no residue was detected above the Australian standard in any sample.
That is the sentence I would want a parent in Delhi or Mumbai to read twice. It isn't a company's promise. It is a national regulator, independently, every year, finding nothing. That is what “Made in Australia” means on our carton: a licence, an export registration, and a survey that keeps coming back clean.
My standard, and my signature.
I am not a doctor and I don't pretend to be one. I am a dairy man, and before we buy from a farm I check five things. If any one of them isn't right, we don't buy the milk. There is no sixth thing.
- IWhere the cows stand.The region, the pasture, the season.
- IIWhat they eat.Grass first. The herd's feed is written down, and I read it.
- IIIHow far the milk travels before it's dried.Hours, not days.
- IVHow many times it's dried.Once. Reconstituted and dried again, we don't buy it.
- VThe paperwork.The certificate of analysis, the farm's own records — every delivery, every one.
I have seen what the other way does to land, and to trust. I would rather my name went on this.
Peter Skene · The man who chose the milk · four decades in Australian dairy · led a listed Australian dairy company · designs the product and leads sourcing and production for Carrington & Finch
Sources
- Benbrook C.M. et al. (2018). Enhancing the fatty acid profile of milk through forage-based rations. Food Science & Nutrition 6(3):681–700. Wiley
- Alothman M. et al. (2019). The “Grass-Fed” Milk Story. Foods 8(8):350, Teagasc. MDPI
- Nature Food (2026). Regenerative agriculture improves productivity and profitability while reducing greenhouse gas emissions on Australian sheep farms. Nature — an Australian grazing study; cited for the stocking-rate and rainfall finding.
- Teague R. & Kreuter U. (2020). Managing grazing to restore soil health. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 4:534187. Frontiers
- Agriculture Victoria, Dairy Farm Monitor Project — South West Victoria 2023–24. agriculture.vic.gov.au
- Dairy Food Safety Victoria — regulatory framework and licensing; Department of Agriculture — Dairy in Australia. dairysafe.vic.gov.au · agriculture.gov.au
- Australian Milk Residue Analysis Survey — Dairy Australia programme page and annual reports. dairyaustralia.com.au · 2024–25 report
For children aged 4 to 9. For ages 4–5, use only under medical advice of a physician or certified dietician or nutritionist. Not for infants under 12 months. Contains milk. Not for medicinal use. Nothing on this page is a claim about what the product does for a child.