Got Milk?

I grew up on a farm in southern Indiana where my family had a small heard of cattle with ten or so cows.  Some of our neighbors had larger operations, maybe twice to three times as many cows as we had.  These cows spend their days pretty much like the cows in the picture at the left.  Our cows had to be milked daily, a schedule that greatly restricted the lives of my dad and granddad.

Recently, on a road trip in New Mexico, I got a close-up view of the new factory farm method of milk production.  In 2009 NPR did a story on this area and called it Dairy Row.  “Located “along Interstate 10 between Las Cruces, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, more than 30,000 cows live in 11 farms located one after the other.”  As we drove, I smelled Dairy Row before I saw it.  The picture on the right (from the NPR site) is a typical view of these operations.  I don’t want to romanticize the past, but this is a far cry from the contented looking cows above. 

Odor and flies are a problem on these new farms, but even more serious are problems with water pollution.  The NPR article says, “The trend in the dairy industry, like the rest of commodity agriculture, is toward fewer and larger farms, which concentrates more manure in smaller geographic areas. Citizens are reporting dairies contaminating ground and surface water across the nation — in the Yakima Valley in Washington; Brown County in Wisconsin; Hudson, Mich.; and now Dexter, N.M.”  Our milk may be more expensive than we think.  The article also says, “Everyday, an average cow produces six to seven gallons of milk and 18 gallons of manure.”  That’s a lot of production for one animal.

Back in the day, when I had to help milk our tiny collection of cows, we milked them twice a day.  Cows now get milked three times daily and research is being done with four to six milkings for cows who have just calved.  I don’t want to anthropomorphize these beasts; I’m not against animals serving humans, but this sounds too much like animal slavery cruelty for comfort.