Down the back roads through the rolling hills of Galloway, Scotland lies popular ice cream dairy Cream o' Galloway. Visitors can spend almost a day here by taking one of the cheese or ice cream-making workshops, a farm tour, crazy golf, playground games (currently closed), nature trails, and other events. There is a cafe on site as well, and it serves hot and cold food (with a very limited selection of choices at present due to staffing issues), and visitors can enjoy the ice cream in the parlour.
Rainton Farm is an organic farm with 20 years of operation, and they are concerned about the welfare of the dairy farming and keep calves with the mothers whereas many farms separate them soon after birth. I had a tour of the farm to see how it compared to the family dairy farm growing up.
Quite a few families were playing the crazy golf, which was located below the visitor centre. The playground area was roped off.
I had the soup, which I found to be really nice. The previous week, there was a large menu with hot food, but it was not available during my visit. I had the soup before going onto the farm tour.
We started by looking over the fields that the cattle occupy, and there are different herds of the cattle. A lot of the tractors and other machinery are older ones but are easier to repair.
A walk down the hill led us to another part of the farm where the cheese-making takes place. Nothing was happening then, but we had a look in the windows.
Due to the high rise in price of timber, the farm are saving money by cutting their own.
The milking station can milk ten cattle at a time, and the cattle are used to their own routines. There are 113 cattle to milk, and 40 get milked twice a day and yield 1280 liters of milk a day. The types of dairy cattle are Holstein (which is a typical breed for dairy), Swedish Red, and Montbeliard. The cattle were very late to come in for a milking during the visit.
Some of the cattle had the preference for a certain stall to get milked in and do not like the last stalls as perhaps they can see visitors looking at them.
After being milked, the cattle exit the milking parlour and enjoy the brush that they can rub up against for a good scratch. Some of them like to hog the brush, and the other exiting cattle push them out of the way as they want a turn on it.
After having a quick glimpse of the cattle being milked, we walked back to the ice cream parlour where we could enjoy a free ice cream as part of the tour. I had the cinnamon flavour.
I made another visit to Cream o' Galloway later in my visit of the area. Ice cream sundaes are a popular item available at the parlour. I had the "Sugar Rush" sundae on this second visit, which contained three types of ice cream: honeycomb, toffee, caramel shortbread, and chocolate. They were out of the toffee flavour, so I had to select another flavour, but I cannot remember which flavour I selected. I had had a small pot of the toffee flavour at one of the restaurants that I visited, and I enjoyed it. The chocolate was very good as well. The sundaw came with a chocolate straw and wafer.
The farm tour is family friendly and is perfect for families of children who are interested in learning about the life on the dairy farm.
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