'taint just antibiotics, but hormones too. Used to up the yield of ordinary cows to try to make it profitable in the current circumstances.
Organic every time.
Hormones to boost milk production are illegal and unavailable in the eu.
Semi-skimmed standard milk is skimmed milk with exactly 2% milk fat added back in. Organic semi skimmed from a small bottling plant will be milk that has some of the cream separated off, often by Gravity rather than the mechanical process of larger dairies.
Cravendale Milk is a marketing scam, pretty much all standard milk is homogenised (physically treated by forcing through a fine filter to make the fat globules smaller and the fat not rise to the surface).
No farmers use antibiotics in feed for dairy cows. Dry cow therapy (feline's description pretty accurate) is not because the cows aren't looked at daily, but because dry cow mastitis is hideous and way worse than in lactating cows. Mechanical milking means the teat sphincter is often damaged and so there is an easy entry route for infection. The mammary tissue should be recovering from the previous lactation but instead is attacked when weakened leading to major damage. I've seen cows with summer dry mastitis which has necrotised the tissue so badly the entire udder has been a collapsing sore, despite treatment. Prevention is better than cure, surely.
Uk dairy production is more intensive than NZ but IME this means the individual animals are treated better. Smaller farms tend to have better animal care than larger, as their livestock become individuals who are known, rather than just a number.
The organic status makes less difference than the individual herdsman's attitude to the cows.
Buy direct from the farm would be my recommendation.
Here endeth the lesson.
Farmer boab, BSc Agric Sci. Aberdeen 1993, Dairy Specialist. Herdsperson 1989-2006