IN THE 1980s, over-production of dairy produce under the European Union Common Agricultural Policy led to what newspapers described as "butter mountains" and "milk lakes". By 1987, it was deemed necessary to put a cap on milk production, which was bad news for the nation's cows: hundreds of healthy cattle were slaughtered.

Meanwhile, Uganda, a country emerging from a civil war, was suffering from a critical shortage of milk.

David Bragg, a third-generation Devon farmer, remembers joining the dots. "There was obviously an opportunity to move dairy cows out of the UK to somewhere," he said at the end of last month. "Anthony Bush, the chairman of Billy Graham's Mission England, had been invited to go to Nigeria. He came back with the idea that if we trained priests in dairy management . . . we would be bringing changein people's lives physically and spiritually.

"Nigeria was inappropriate, but we had a God-inspired moment when Francis Gonahasa, from the Church of Uganda, heard about this crazy idea. He told Anthony that they were already placing dairy cows, mainly with widows from the Ugandan civil war, and they needed more."

The first cows - about 300 - were flown to Uganda in July 1988. Among them was "Flower Girl" from Mr Bragg's herd.

Twenty-five years later, Send a Cow estimates that it has touched the lives of about one million people in Africa, chiefly women, orphans, child-headed households, and people living with HIV/AIDS.

The principle of the charity, which now has an income of almost £4 million a year, remains the same: to give vulnerable groups in rural Africa the means to achieve self-sufficiency and, eventually, a surplus to sell. Some areas are ill-suited to cows, so other animals are provided, including goats, poultry, and sheep.

Staff, all of whom are African, provide not only training in the management of livestock and fin-ances, but social-development courses as well. These tackle issues related to gender, health, nutrition, and education. Send a Cow typically works with each group for three to five years. Under the "pass it on" principle, these families then give young livestock, seeds, or training to others in need.

"The whole aim is to build alevel of self-sufficiency that means there will no longer need to be intervention in the lives of these people," Mr Bragg said. "They need to develop resilience to mitigate the effects of a crisis, and recover from it without Send a Cow's assistance.

"A very fundamental understanding that has grown up at Send a Cow is that if you don't change minds, you don't change anything. We seek to break a dependence mentality, and replace it with a self-help mentality. They are their own future."

To mark the 25th anniversary of the first cow air-lift, the charity has published a report measuring its impact. It is based on a study of 413 families, randomly selected from the thousands that Send a Cow works with in Uganda and Kenya.

In Kenya, almost every farmer in the study (96 per cent) was confident that he or she could provide enough food and income for the family's needs. In Uganda, 97 per cent of the families reported that they now ate at least two meals a day. By selling surplus farm produce, a family's income increases, on average, six-fold. Data from Uganda suggests that three times as many children from families supported by Send a Cow are in secondary schools compared with the national average.

Notable is the charity's impact on the relationship between the genders. Most of the farmers supported directly are women, as they are generally the poorest people in a community. Data from Uganda suggest that 73 per cent of women involved in the project say that they and their husband are "fully" equal partners in deciding how to share workloads, compared with just 17 per cent before joining. These women are seven times more likely to go to university than the national average.

The charity is currently operating in seven countries (Lesotho, Zam-bia, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Cameroon), and hopes to expand into Burundi and South Sudan.

Send a Cow trains farmers in "natural farming methods", using manure to make compost and enrich soil, and making pesticides from animals' urine. It stopped sending cows from Britain in 1996, in the wake of the BSE crisis, and began sourcing animals locally.

The past 25 years have changed Mr Bragg's own perspective on farming in the UK. "There are better ways of farming that concentrate on the whole level of soil health and fertility," he said. "We need to be looking at farming that optimises production, not maximises it, and that is conscious of the needs of animals."

Mr Bragg sold his cows after being "totally inspired" by a visit to Africa in 1995, and now works at Send a Cow, supporting programmes in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Twenty-five years after bidding farewell to Flower Girl, he believes that his job remains, in some senses, the same as it was then: "Good-practice agriculture".