"Wow. What a genius of marketing that was," says our milk industry source.

"The milk industry has made us think milk is good, then bad, then almost like a medicine," he said, referring to the new lines of high-calcium/high-vitamin.

"And they charge a premium."

At a suburban supermarket recently, Coles ownbrand milk was $1.35 a litre while a litre of Anlene, a milk product with extra calcium, and extra vitamin D to help absorb the extra calcium, was $2.69.

Labels catch the eye and extol the virtues of the product inside, but the animals that produce it rarely rate a mention.

On a farm in Fish Creek, near Wilsons Promontory, cow No. 356 has just given birth.

Soon, her daughter slowly rises from the ground on unsteady feet and, eventually, finds her mother's udder and takes her first drink.

No. 356's name is actually "Hind".

Farmer Ron Smith names all his cows.

He cites research from the UK that shows that contented cows give more milk.

He is a biodynamic farmer and has created a habitat for cows that looks like bovine heaven.

There are copses of shade trees, waist-high grass dotted with pink flowering clover and cornflour-blue chicory.

Hind's daughter will soon be taken from her, so the Smiths can have the milk.

She will rejoin her mother in the herd in three years when she has her first calf.

"Milk is an extension of the cow's blood," says the quietly spoken farmer.

"What she eats goes into her blood, then into the milk. For quality milk, you need quality grass."

A jug of icy cold milk from that morning's milking sits on his kitchen table.

It is raw milk.

It has not been homogenised or pasteurised, just chilled. The first thing you notice is the colour.

It is not the pure white of what we pour from the cartons, but a soft, pale, pale yellow.

There are aromas of pasture and a sweet, attractive smell of — well — cow.

The texture is soft, and delicate fat in raw milk doesn't coat the tongue or mouth.

Milk straight from a cow can contain, depending on the breed and the season, between four and 5.6 per cent fat.

Regular milk in a carton, by law, has to be a minimum of 3.2 per cent.

But, generally, it is "standardised" to 3.8 per cent so it tastes the same regardless of the season.

So where does that fat go?

Dr Frank Sherkat, a senior lecturer in food science at RMIT, says some or all of the fat is removed using a centrifugal separator, a technology that will be familiar to many older dairy farmers, and injected back to the milk to produce standardised milk.

"The rest is used to make butter and cream," he says.

Since 2000, when federal and state governments deregulated the milk industry, takeovers and acquisitions have left just two big players in the market:

• Italian-owned Parmalat (Pauls, Rev, Skinny Milk) and

• Japanese-owned Pura.

Smaller companies such as Warrnambool Cheese and Butter jostle for the remaining space on the supermarket shelf.

The upside has been the emergence of small, independent dairies that produce milk of high quality and sell it at a premium.

The Gretschmann family, at Elgaar Farm in Tasmania's north, produce exceptionally good milk from a single herd of mainly Jersey cows using organic farming methods.

It's the kind of milk our forebears drank.

With the distinctive band of deep yellow cream floating on top, the milk is sold in glass bottles.

Like times past, the containers are returned to the place of purchase for a refund and the bottles are reused by the dairy. (Victorian stockists are listed at elgaarfarm.com.au.)

One of the most contentious specialty milks on the market is A2. The name A2 derives from the protein beta casein A2.

A2's general manager, Peter Nathan, explains: "Once upon a time, all cow's milk was A2 milk.

"But several thousand years ago a mutation of the amino acid chain occurred in European dairy herds that caused a protein fragment called BCM7 to be released upon digestion of A1 milk," he says.

"This is a powerful opioid and narcotic that is thought to cause some intolerance responses including skin rashes, irritations, mucous build-up, bloating and digestive."

Nathan says that A2 milk has been beneficial to many people who have reactions to normal milk.

He points to the book Devil in the Milk that demonises big-name supermarket milk by examining links between A1 and heart disease, Type 1 diabetes, autism and schizophrenia.

Australia's top food safety body FSANZ, however, disputes that drinking A2 milk will help people with these conditions.

It says it cannot "proceed with regulatory action on the basis of the available evidence".

Nathalia farmers Mark and Lyn Peterson produce some of the best white milk in the nation.

They sold their milk to Parmalat, who put it on the supermarket shelves under their Bio-Dynamic label until last year, when Parmalat discontinued the line.

The Petersons have subsequently teamed up with BioDynamic Marketing Company and now receive about 70 cents a litre for their milk, producing just 1100 litres a week.

(Most conventional farmers are locked into contracts of between 25 cents and 50 cents a litre.)

Lyn Peterson says price was not what motivated them to set up the label.

"We wanted to make sure there was a high-quality milk on the market that tastes as close as it can to natural milk.

"It's handled very gently, only travelling 40 kilometres before it's pasteurised, and it's not standardised, so at present the milk on the shelf is around 5.3 per cent fat.

"I think you can taste the difference," she says.

The BioDynamic Marketing Company's Craig Holloway says: "The retailers are telling me that the customers who are conscious of quality in taste, health and animal ethics are relearning how good the simple things are, such as milk, which is such a day-to-day thing.

There is an understanding developing with certain parts of the community that quality milk comes from good pasture and well-treated cows."

Healthy, well-treated animals from good breeding stock give the best milk – they also live longer.

Back in the paddocks at Fish Creek, Ron Smith and his wife, Bev, are with the cows that will soon give birth.

The empathy they have with their herd is obvious.

"Our cows will live productively until they are up to 18 years old, with the average being around 12 years," he says.

And what about the life expectancy of a cow in a conventional herd?

"Four years," he says.

Richard Cornish grew up on a dairy farm in Shoreham on the Mornington Peninsula and drank raw milk at breakfast until he was 12.