Chapter 1
A Brief History of Dairying
Dairying in its most reductionist form—merely swiping some milk from a cooperative grazing animal—goes so many thousands of years back into pre-history that we can’t get a fix on it. It is known that Laplanders herded and milked reindeer eleven thousand years ago. Thirty thousand years ago, people in the High Sinai were confining and breeding antelope with the aid of fences, a human invention arguably as important as the spear. Wherever antelope, reindeer, sheep, camels, goats, or cattle have been brought under human control, they have been milked. The value of milk is obvious and doesn’t need to be taught or invented. Among the very earliest human artifacts are vessels containing milky residues.
Horses too have been milked. The hordes of Genghis Khan swept out of Asia eight centuries ago on tough, speedy horses. They triumphed everywhere on account of two important military advantages: they used stirrups, thus freeing both hands to employ weapons. And they had a lightweight, high-protein food source always handy: mare’s milk, ingeniously dried by their wives prior to their raids. Each day a horseman put about half a pound of dried milk into a leather pouch, along with a bit of water, and by dinnertime he had a tasty fermented yogurt-like food. No army travels far nor fights well without provisions. Because he didn’t have to wait for the quartermaster to catch up, Genghis Khan always maintained the advantage of surprise.
More peaceable folks milked goats and sheep. Sheep and goats have the advantage of being able to thrive on steep, rocky land, and they reproduce rapidly. Gestation takes only five months, they often have twins, and they are old enough to breed by one year of age. But wherever people have the choice, they choose the cow. The cow entered into a relationship with humankind at least ten thousand years ago, and she has been lovingly nurtured and defended throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe ever since. So long ago was she chosen and so much was she valued that her wild ancestors have vanished. The last known wild cow, called an auroch, died over five hundred years ago in Poland. The cow is the only domestic animal for which there is no wild population pool. Like corn, the staple of the Aztecs that now exists only as farm seed with no wild sisters, the cow now lives in symbiosis with humans.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have shown much greater interest in the role of grains in human history, speaking of what came before as “mere” herding. In fact, discussions of the modern diet seem oblivious to the long pre-history of herding. Arable farming (grain) began about ten thousand years ago. Most writers link arable farming together with animal husbandry, apparently assuming they sprang up together. Many otherwise well-researched sources state that dairy products are a comparatively recent addition to the human menu. To the contrary, grain is the recent inclusion in the human diet, not dairy foods. This false assumption about dairy foods appears to be linked to the widespread belief that milk production is dependent upon grain.
To produce grain in useful quantities requires rich, flat land such as floodplains. It also requires a huge amount of energy, available in antiquity only where complex cultures had developed. Slaves provided this energy. The more slaves you had, the more grain you could grow. And the more grain you could grow, the more slaves you could afford, thus giving rise to a wealthy class able to afford monumental tombs and other durable artifacts of civilization.
Grazing animals have been around for millions of years thriving on grass. They are not dependent on grain. For many thousands of those years they were herded and milked, tasks that require neither slaves nor even permanent dwellings.
Though it is not their natural fodder, cattle will eat grain. In fact, when a grain surplus occurs it can be fed to cattle, which thrive and fatten, as we know very well. This expedient has been practiced from antiquity and continues to this day in the American Corn Belt. If the price of corn falls, farmers may decide to “put it through cattle” instead of selling at a loss. In impoverished parts of the globe the animals then become walking food storage units, later to be eaten or, as in the United States, to be sold at auction.
Herding animals requires only the availability of shepherds and can be done on any kind of land from rocky mountainsides to kelp-strewn beaches. Wherever herbivores have been herded, their milk as well as their meat became an important part of the local diet. Herbivores convert grass, bushes, and weeds into high-grade, readily available food. They do this with enormous efficiency whether in captivity or not. But when herded, they free up a great deal of human time for other pursuits. Humans with extra time and energy tend to engage in commerce, the arts, invention, and war, not necessarily in that order. Dairying has played its part in these pursuits.
Dairying also led to the use of the fence, which in antiquity served less to keep animals from running away than to protect them from predators at night. Ancient Sumerian writings reveal that fencing also provided a means for keeping the best milk-producing animals close at hand. But fencing forfeits the transcendent advantage of grazing animals: that they find their own food. It is only feasible where there are servants to fetch and carry feed to the animals. Like grain production, the fence is evidence of a complex hierarchical culture, and both are natural by-products of the civilizing influence of dairying.
The fence served another function basic to animal husbandry: it permitted selective breeding of cattle, sheep, and goats. By confining smaller and more docile males and permitting only these to breed, at least ten thousand years ago people were manipulating animal genetics. Domestic breeds began to have smaller horns and to be of a more manageable size. This was particularly important in the case of cattle, which like all dairy animals were often handled by women and children—the wild cattle were huge and quite dangerous. Although in actual numbers worldwide there have always been more sheep and goats being milked than cows, with the selective breeding practiced by early cultures, the cow very quickly became the most prized dairy animal.
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The Cow, Premier Dairy Choice
The cow is the premier dairy animal because of her cooperative temperament, the comparative ease with which she can be milked, the volume she is able to produce, and the versatility of her milk. The cream is easily skimmed and made into much-prized butter in cold climates and ghee in hot climates. (Ghee is butter that has been heated and strained.)
The cow is a primary producer of wealth. She can support a family. She not only turns grass into milk in quantities sufficient to feed a family but also provides extra to sell and contributes a yearly calf to rear or fatten. The by-products from making cheese (whey) and butter (buttermilk) will support a pig or two. Her manure improves her pasture and when dug into the garden results in plant growth unsurpassed by other growth mediums. The family that takes good care of its cow is well off.
Cattle are the original stock in “stock market.” Ownership of cattle has always been a marker of wealth. This is not just because the cow is a primary producer of wealth, adding enormous value to grass. In a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” sort of way, it’s also because only families possessed of a hardworking, cooperative spirit are able to keep a cow, let alone build a herd. Cows require humans for their survival.
Other domestic animals can revert to a wild (feral) state with predictable success. Put hogs in the woods and they hardly look back. They won’t get fat, but they will immediately form a breeding population. So will horses on the plains. Many breeds of sheep can establish themselves in hill country. Goats are well known for this aptitude (so long as they are not too far from the sea; they have a high iodine requirement).
So Huckleberry Finn’s Pap might have had a pig or goat he could turn loose and still call his own, but a cow requires consistent responsible care. If she doesn’t get it she won’t give milk and she won’t start a new calf and she won’t live through much cold or drought. Farmers in the north put up hay for the winter. African herdsmen walk their cattle to water and defend them against lions. Even the great beef herds of South America and the American West have been dependent on humans to arrange things for their benefit; the wolves and mountain lions didn’t disappear by accident. But this story is about the dairy cow.
The dairy cow doesn’t ask for much, but she asks every day. People who are creating wealth with a cow either are hardworking and reliable or get that way in a hurry. This is the way it has been for a very long time. The fine farms of Europe, England, New England, and much of the rest of the United States were all established thanks to the wealth derived from cows. Wherever there is, or used to be, a big barn, it was likely built to store winter hay for the cows that once dotted the pastures. The need to milk the cow twice a day determined the location of many a church; people had to be able to walk there and back without disruption to the schedules of cows. Formerly, every district in Europe, England, and the eastern United States had a corn mill situated so that a farmer driving a horse and wagon could deliver his load and get home in time for milking. It is certainly no coincidence that such a large number of our finest statesmen were born on farms. Important virtues are nurtured on the farm, including a graphic understanding of the relationship between working and eating. Over my farming life I have bred and raised all of the traditional farm animals, and I love them all. But through association with the dairy cow I have come to understand and accept the words of that great nineteenth-century agricultural essayist William Cobbett: “When you have the cow, you have it all.”
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If Cows Are So Great, Why Doesn’t Everybody Have One?
Not so very long ago, a great many people did indeed keep a cow, and she was often an adored member of the family. Well-to-do families even in cities kept a cow well into the early part of the twentieth century. During the Victorian era, country homes of the wealthy included charming accommodations for their cows. Some of these were quite fanciful and included beautifully tiled dairy rooms for making butter and cheese. All this attests to the high regard in which the dairy cow and dairy products were held.
Peasant homes were built to take advantage of the considerable heat given off by a cow. In Scotland often the cottage was built to surround a stall in which the cow spent the winter; picture an arrangement like a playpen in the middle of a low-ceilinged room. In other locales, including Spain, the family lived in rooms above the cow byre, using cows like a furnace in the basement.
Some of the forces that led to the demise of cow keeping were the same ones that have stressed the American family. The automobile was important; it dispersed families and directed interest away from home-based activities. A desire for consumer goods that can’t be satisfied without focusing the whole energy of the family on acquisition was certainly a factor. That consumerist mind-set fostered a yearning for enhanced social status. We belong to a hierarchical species; our need for status is hardwired, but its expression is culturally determined. There have been eras where the cow accords status, and there still are places where that principle holds true. But nowadays status is more likely to derive from real estate in a good location. On a rural property, the high-status animal is the horse. But all these factors are as chaff compared to the power of the twentieth-century revolution in food production, processing, and distribution.
The food revolution is lauded in school texts, political speeches, virtually everywhere as an exemplary modern triumph that has showered us with endless choice and abundance. Nevertheless, warning bleats from people like me, pointing out that our food system is wasteful and nutritionally compromised, are mounting in volume. The most astonishing feature of this food system is usually overlooked: food has been commodified. We take that commodification for granted; it’s embedded into our cultural psyche. But for all of human history until very recently, and in a few places still, food is something you find, you grow, you fish from the sea, or you obtain locally from the actual producer. The purpose of this food is straightforward and obvious: it is to feed people. If sold, it changes hands only once. It goes directly to the people who will eat it. Designer food intended only as a source of profit has arrived late in humankind’s history.
The foods in our shining supermarkets were produced as a financial investment. They are not so much food as consumer goods. As such, the primary constituents of the majority of the finished goods—the wheat, corn, edible oils, soy, and sugarcane or sugar beets—are grown as a monoculture on millions of flat acres, the constituents broken down and reassembled into something that keeps nicely and resembles food. At each of the many steps in production, value is added. Yet the only entities to which this value yields profit are the corporations that manufacture the food products.
The Commodification of Milk
Because of its extremely perishable nature, milk initially presented a challenge to commodification. In the late nineteenth century, as American cities began to rapidly expand, the demand for milk was met in several ways. One enterprising solution was to position a great barn full of cows right downtown next to the inevitable brewery. The cows were fed the spent malt. In theory this production practice could have proven satisfactory; in practice it was disgusting. The cows were kept in filth and were milked by hand by anybody off the street. On top of that, the milk was routinely watered. Rural dairies had a better reputation and made a valiant effort to get milk delivered fresh and cold by train.
Milk trains moved through the countryside before dawn picking up the familiar milk cans that waited on platforms. The milk did not travel great distances, and it was bottled and delivered fresh to doorsteps every morning. Cans were kept cold by blocks of ice cut from northern lakes in winter, where ice cutting was an important industry. The big blocks were packed in sawdust, available in quantity from sawmills, and kept right through the summer.
Dairymen well understood that milk quality depends on healthy cows, clean milking practices, rapid chilling, and expeditious delivery. Milk itself tells the tale at the table just as unmistakably as does fish. There are two ways to achieve a safe, edible product. The first is by conscientious handling. The second is by sterilizing and preserving the milk (or fish or any other food), after which it matters a great deal less how it is stored or for how long. Small dairies able to exert quality control every step of the way, often even bottling and delivering their own milk and cherishing the one-on-one relationship with their customers, supported the first method. Larger, well-funded consortiums seeking control of dairying favored the second. Their approach was to pool larger quantities of milk, drawing it from greater distances and overcoming problems of quality by heat treatment. They called the heat treatment pasteurization, tapping into name recognition of the great French scientist Louis Pasteur.
The outcome of this disagreement—conscientious handling versus sterilization—was by no means a foregone conclusion. Heating changes the appearance, flavor, and nutritive and culinary properties of milk, and none for the better. As for its keeping qualities, everybody and his grandmother knew milk goes sour after a few days. It wasn’t expected to keep; after all, that’s why we make cheese. Everybody preferred fresh milk and understood perfectly well that pasteurization served as a substitute for quality. Dairymen who wanted to continue selling fresh milk geared up for more efficient delivery using ice and seemed about to make their case for quality control at the source. Quite apart from concern for their customers’ preferences, this enabled them to maintain financial control of their own product.
Then came the winter of 1886, when the lakes didn’t freeze. Lacking ice, the case for fresh milk was lost by default. Dairy farmers were forced to sell their milk to middlemen, as they do to this day. They have never been able to regain control over their own product.
Consumers had their minds changed about pasteurization by a fear campaign promoting the disease hazards said to be unavoidable from unpasteurized milk. Indeed, such claims are likely to be true for the modern dairy system, which pools milk from thousands of cows at a time. Although, then as now, it is perfectly possible for herds to be clean and disease free, what is not possible is for that milk to stay fresh when it is transported great distances and left on the shelf for weeks at a time. Pasteurization was instituted for the benefit of distributors; it keeps milk from going sour and becoming unsalable. But a nervous public accepted an array of new public health statutes fostering the concept of pasteurization. Indeed, America was in the mood to sterilize everything possible. It was the heyday of the hospital-white kitchen and bathroom. Dairymen were required to paint everything white too, as part of the mystical association of whiteness with health and cleanliness. To this day, dairy farmers must conform to public health regulations far more strict than those imposed on any other industry, including the very processing plants where milk is conveyed to be pasteurized.
What Happened to the Family Cow?
What was happening to the family cow while commercial dairying was being conformed to the twentieth-century model of food as commodity? Along with small farms of every sort, she was being priced out of existence. If you talk to old-timers you’ll hear them say, “It doesn’t pay to keep a cow.” American food is cheap, or at least appears to be. Starting early in the twentieth century, an elaborate system of subsidies has kept food prices artificially low, part of a cheap food policy that favors city dwellers. This policy has been continued by every administration. Most people are familiar with farm subsidies, payments to farmers that assist them in producing at predictable levels. Among the less frequently recognized effects of subsidies is the fact that because they cover part of farmers’ costs, they enable farmers to accept a lower price for their crops or milk so that we can pay less for food. Pointed out even less frequently is the program of government assistance for processors. Everything from special university research projects to tax-deferred production plants may be paid for wholly or in part by tax dollars. Highway costs are shared by all taxpayers but benefit truckers—and the food industry—disproportionately. This is sometimes referred to as corporate welfare. These are some of the hidden costs of cheap food.
With food costs comparatively low, even the formidable efficiency of the cow is hard put to offer an obvious fiscal advantage. Milk prices remain low because dairy farmers are paid at a rate that barely covers costs and they cannot market their milk freely. They must sell to consortiums under fixed contracts that are regulated by the government. And processors have certainly made milk conveniently available in markets. If a plot had been hatched to eliminate small farmers, place milk production and distribution in the hands of the few, and permit almost everybody to forget what milk was meant to taste like, a better plan could not have been devised. Consider also that in terms of buying power, American wages were high during the first sixty years of the twentieth century, when these government subsidy programs were put into place, and even today our dollars still buy more food than in any other Westernized country. So keeping a cow might indeed cost more than buying milk at the store, especially if the cost accounting is narrowly focused. (The up-front costs and prospects for profit of the family cow are analyzed in chapter 19, “Your Cow Economy.”) Most people considering a family cow are no longer motivated by the old-timer view that the object of a cow is to “pay,” reasonable as this may be. Instead, they’re often looking for quality dairy products and a more centered way of life.
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Treatment of Commercial Milk
Pasteurization has its critics and I am among them, but without it, there is no doubt that milk distribution as we know it would be impossible. Pasteurization destroys all bacteria, including benign (or even beneficial) strains, and it destroys enzymes, besides physically altering milk protein. In addition, since the 1950s virtually all milk has been not just pasteurized but homogenized. Since most people have not had the opportunity to become familiar with milk in its natural condition, these two terms, pasteurized and homogenized, which appear on every container of milk in grocery stores, have become confusing. Homogenized means the milk is subjected to pressure and agitation that knocks apart the butterfat globule and stops it from doing what cream would naturally do: rise to the surface.
Homogenization, too, was presented to the consumer as a great advance but first and foremost served the distributors. Before the days of pasteurization, cream was prized, but after heat treatment cream becomes lumpy and unimpressive. Homogenization offered the advantage of distributing the cream evenly throughout the milk “so everyone gets their share.” The advantage for distributors was less charming. Because pasteurization made it possible to sell milk two or even three weeks after it left the farm, there emerged a problem with a sort of sludge settling to the bottom of the bottle. (Don’t let me put you off store-bought milk altogether; worse things are found in ketchup and peanut butter.) This sludge consisted of dead bacteria, somatic cells, and the macrophages that consumed them, and the longer the bottled milk sat, the more evident the sludge. With homogenization the sludge became invisible, along with the cream.
This might seem reason enough to get a cow, but now we have bovine growth hormone, or BGH, to consider. Consumers have expressed virtually unanimous objection to the fact that milk may now legally contain BGH that has passed into the milk as a result of the cow’s daily injection. The history of milk distribution does not offer much reassurance that our concerns will end the practice.
BGH (rBST, rBGH)
In the dairy industry these days, there’s a lot of talk about rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone) or rBST (recombinant bovine somatotrophin); these are the names given to the genetically engineered version of bovine growth hormone. It is now being used in every state. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared milk from cows injected with rBGH to be safe and has advocated making it a federal offense for processors to so much as state on milk labels whether or not the milk is from rBGH-treated cows. Dairy farmers hoping to serve a niche market of discriminating consumers desiring rBGH-free milk offered legal challenges to this federal directive and were defeated. The courts found that any claim that milk is free of rBGH could be interpreted as implying that other milk produced through the use of rBGH is less safe, thus contravening the government’s position. The FDA has since relented sufficiently to permit dairies to label milk as BGH free, but they must also add a disclaimer stating the FDA position.
The stated objective of BGH treatment is to cause cows to produce more milk. That’s what it’s for. The value to the dairy industry resides in the ability of rBGH to induce cows to produce more milk than they had meant to . . . whether they want to or not, so to speak. This point may seem painfully obvious to those who assume that so-called factory farming (now usually referred to as confined animal feeding operations or CAFOs) already includes dairying. It does not. Factory farming is the practice whereby hogs and chickens live out their lives in such close confinement that sows cannot even turn around to see their piglets, which must suckle under a steel barrier, and a hen can’t even stand up and flap her wings after her egg rolls away down a conveyor belt. Factory farming is more profitable than traditional farming because less human labor is required and unskilled labor will suffice. Factory farming has become an investment opportunity, and traditional producers of pork, chicken, and eggs have everywhere been driven out of business by these aggressive giants.
Modern cows produce a great deal of milk, some exceeding ten gallons a day, but they do it as a result of selective breeding over many generations, much the way racehorses have been bred for speed. And even then, a cow’s milk production, like the racing success of the horse, cannot be expressed without scrupulous care and feeding right from birth. Whether the dairy cow lives her life lined up with a thousand others or the barn holds only thirty—or just one—she has to be kept happy. To stay in the mood to produce lots of milk she has to have appetizing food, fresh air, and a comfortable area to stand and lie, and she must be politely treated. Otherwise she won’t produce to her genetic potential. Otherwise she won’t let down her milk.
With these prerequisits for humane treatment in mind, dairying has so far avoided the worst characteristics of factory farming. Will rBGH force cows to produce milk around the clock while perpetually connected to a milking machine? Not exactly. In fact, dairymen using rBGH report the need for added personal attention to the cows because they become fragile. The rBGH does, however, compel the cows to divert more of their energy to milk production. It may be compared with drugging a racehorse to eke that extra burst from an animal already bred to run with speed and courage. BGH does move cows in that direction. As has already occurred with pork, beef, chicken, and eggs, huge centralized production facilities—let’s not call them farms—lead inevitably to bland, standardized food with no added assurance of safety. This is food obtained from animals living on feed compounded from by-products often so disgusting that euphemisms are invented by the industry to conceal their identity. Have you ever looked at a dog or cat food label and wondered what “poultry digest” might be? Chicken manure mixed with litter is also permitted in dairy feed.
A cow’s production peaks at about six weeks after calving and then begins a gradual decline until it is time to dry her off in preparation for her next calf. The use of rBGH prolongs the period of peak production, when nature would have her diverting feed to maintenance and to her fetus. Additionally, in order to speed cows through the milking line, commercial dairies often use oxytocin injections. Normally, cows require a few minutes of preparation before letting down their milk, and if they are stressed they will let down incompletely or not at all. Oxytocin causes immediate letdown.
That is rBGH from the perspective of the farmer and the cow.
Health Problems Associated with BGH
BGH was first marketed by the Monsanto corporation. Recent information from Canada, where Monsanto attempted to gain approval for the use of rBGH, must cause us to reconsider the claim of total safety that the FDA has made for BGH. This claim was made based on the representation that rBGH is broken down in the gut like any protein and does not enter the bloodstream, and thus cannot cause harm to the consumer. Canadian government scientists who reviewed Monsanto’s rat and cow experimental data concluded that the hormone does indeed enter the bloodstream, as evidenced by an elevated immune response. In rodent studies, there were reportedly cysts on the thyroids of male rats and damage to the prostate.
The Canadian scientists also reported that IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1) is elevated in the milk of cows injected with rBGH. The growth hormone IGF-1 is identical in cows and in humans.
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The Cow as Security
Does the future seem uncertain? One of the best ways to take charge of your own future and that of your loved ones is to grow your own food. This is a life-affirming choice and one that may well offer better odds than going about armed to the teeth. Inasmuch as this is hardly a new idea, many schemes for self-sustaining food systems have been devised. One method involves growing algae in vats on the roof. Another promotes earthworms and other insects as ideal basic food. There are systems for backyard fish ponds capable of growing many pounds of a fish called tilapia by adding manure and other waste to their water. Some people advocate planting family-size patches of soybeans along with other vegetables. All of these approaches offer food security of a sort, along with major problems. Algae taste awful, insects don’t appeal to the Western palate, tilapia are nourishing but boring. An all-vegetable diet is seriously boring and is extremely labor intensive. Furthermore, the oft-heard claim that the all-vegetable (all plant, no animal) diet can provide complete nutrition is not backed by research evidence. I recommend the cow.
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Maybe We Should Just Start with a Few Chickens
If the biggest animal you’ve ever known personally was a golden retriever, the cow may seem like a giant step into the unknown. Why not start with a pig, then, or maybe a few chickens, or a goat? Those are all fine animals, without doubt. Pigs are easily kept in a small space and provide a carcass with a high proportion of meat to bone. There is very little waste and everything you do with the meat is delicious. One consideration is that the food preferences of the pig are so similar to our own that in a very real sense it competes directly with us for food. Some historians believe this to be the reason wise leaders in some cultures, including the Muslim and Jewish ones, have proscribed pork. Nevertheless, in circumstances where there is often food that would otherwise be wasted, sometimes called default feed, the pig can be very rewarding.
Chickens are wonderful, and I would not be without them. They are extremely easy to keep, and I love having my own eggs, even though I rarely get up the gumption to kill one of the birds. Consequently my return on investment is diminished by having to maintain an aging population. But perhaps people are saying this about me.
Goats are appealing and with good management highly productive. In terms of production it takes about five goats to equal one cow. They must be penned behind excellent fence, or tethered. Unless penned in a huge area, because of their agility and eclectic tastes, they will soon have the ground reduced to a desert; then their food will have to be brought to them. Goats are very active. If tethered they must be well supervised to avoid entanglement and moved frequently to fresh browse; otherwise production will plummet. In rough, brushy terrain where there is no grazing, goats are ideal. But a goat is not easier to take care of than a cow, and cow’s milk is considerably more versatile than goat’s milk.
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Amazing Cow Magic That Most People Don’t Know About
“A young fellow wantin’ a start in life just needs three things: a piece of land, a cow, and a wife. And he don’t strictly need that last.” That’s an old saying that once annoyed me. Now that I’m an old lady with a cow but no spouse, I am prepared to concede at least the validity of the underlying premise.
An overarching truth about the cow is that she drives the domestic or small farm economy. She lives on a constantly renewing resource: grass. Her rumen microorganisms assemble complete protein from which she makes milk. With this milk she is able to not just provide for her calf but also meet the protein requirements of your pig and your chickens (neither of which can live on grass) and still provide milk for the house. The reverse is never true. No pigs or chickens or any other nongrazing animals can live on grass alone . And the cow does it on free resources: water, soil, and sunshine. Through her sovereign ability to convert grass, which otherwise has no value, to milk and meat, which do have value, the cow produces wealth. She thus vaults the domestic or farm economy into a self-sustaining mode. Even with the most exacting sweated labor in the orchard or garden, you can’t grow plants that will support reproduction in pigs or chickens or any other nongrazing species, including humans; you can fatten them, but growth will be retarded and fertility negligible. This key fact about cows should never be forgotten.
Circle of sustainability
The fact that fruits, nuts, grains, beans, vegetables, grasses, or any combination thereof will not support reproduction in nonherbivorous species has been forgotten by urban dwellers. Seemingly well-informed people appear confident that somewhere, somehow, growth, reproduction, and vigor can be sustained directly via the soil without recourse to animal intermediaries. Such beliefs would not survive a year on a farm practicing sustainable agriculture. Those few urbanites who have committed themselves to the attempt to feed themselves on a home-grown diet devoid of animal products find it exhausting. But add a cow and you no longer need to push nature uphill. The cow does the work of converting plant products to food of unassailably high quality. Fiber, upon which single-stomach (monogastric) species such as ourselves would quickly starve, is her preferred food. She thus serves as a bridge between the plant world and ourselves and all other monogastric species.
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Centering
At various times I’ve kept a cow in a suburban garage and grazed her on the lawn. It definitely can be done. But let’s say for now that you have a cow on five acres. Let’s also assume you really appreciate good food—its flavor, its variety, the way your friends rave about the quality. You also like knowing where your food came from and what isn’t in it and on it. Perhaps you’ve also read some old Adelle Davis books and have recognized that good health isn’t something left over after you eliminate all the risks. It’s something you build with real food, such as milk and meat and all the fresh fruits and vegetables that thrive on the composted cow manure you have out back. Probably you aren’t the son or daughter, or even the grandchild, of one of those old-timers who say cows don’t pay. Maybe, like me, you like to work at home, trading time back and forth between the computer and outdoor jobs.
This way of life is centered and rewarding. If there are children in the mix, they will be robustly healthy and will develop beautiful bone structure. And since it will mean one or both parents can be at home, they will also be happy. Later I’ll talk about how and where the money sorts out in this way of life. But of this you may be certain: it’s worth it. If you have plenty of money, it’s a worthy commitment, and you will be the envy of your friends. If you have very little money, it offers magic-carpet access to a lifestyle currently unattainable to most working couples, who often feel forced to choose between having children and paying the mortgage. It makes possible a very good life on one paycheck.
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No Land?
“I don’t have a farm. I just want my family to have healthy milk. So, can I keep a cow in my backyard?” Yes, you can keep a cow in the space you might need for a swimming pool. You can keep a cow on a large lawn and dispense with the lawn mower. This is literally true, and I have done it, but to manage flies and maintain the tidy appearance of your property, somebody will have to go around every day with a shovel and put the manure on the compost heap. So long as there is grass, cows will ignore most ornamental plants; however, they will lie down and mash them. A cow must have longer grass than do sheep or goats, which have a split upper lip that enables them to graze turf very closely. Cattle, sheep, and goats all lack upper incisors. Horses have upper incisors and will completely devour pasture right down to the dirt. They can also bite, something ruminants cannot do.
Now would be a very good time to get a cow even if you have only a backyard. The quality of all purchased food is declining in nutrient value while merely appearing to increase in variety. There is little reason to believe it is getting safer. Fresh milk adds a life-supporting dimension to the diet unmatched by any other possible food. Even without other dietary improvements, drinking fresh milk will bring about a striking improvement in family health. I have seen this many times.
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Let’s Get a Cow
Some small dairies catering to niche markets will survive to serve the discriminating customer. There is a rapidly growing market for organically produced milk and cheese, for example, but the higher prices discourage many customers. And in most states dairy farmers who sell milk directly to consumers face crushing fines. They must sell to processors or throw their milk away.
For an increasing number of people now, the answer is, “Let’s get a cow.”
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Cow Futures
Is there a future for the cow, or is she an anachronism, a leftover from a historical era best forgotten, albeit an era that has lasted perhaps thirty thousand years? Dairying as now practiced will continue its current trend toward corporate farms milking over a thousand cows. Smaller family farms will continue to disappear at their current alarming rate of over one thousand per month nationwide, with few young couples entering dairying. Dairy farmers have shown little aptitude for defending the reputation of milk against an onslaught of disinformation about its health properties, despite fully adequate supportive research. Health professionals obsess about fat and allergies to a degree that I find irresponsible, since they ignore the developmental outcomes of eliminating dairy products.
Dairy farmers own their cows but have no influence over the fate of the milk. The powerful food processors and marketing groups that own the dairy products lack incentive to set the record straight because real dairy foods are in direct competition with more profitable imitations that they also market. Among these are margarine, coffee whiteners, whipped toppings, fake cheese, vegetable oils, and milk by-products such as casein and whey. These and all of the many soy foods now prevalent in the marketplace not only compete directly with dairy products but are more profitable. Relentless promotion of low-fat milk is backed by dairy manufacturing interests that market cream more profitably in ice cream. The quality of commercial dairy products cannot be expected to improve under these conditions. Therefore new customers are few. The sum of these forces will ensure that the use of commercial milk will continue its decline.
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Making Our Own History
None of this need affect us. If you now have a cow or are considering one, you probably already appreciate her advantages. Further reinforcement for the pro-cow position will be found throughout this book, but if you keep a cow you will sometimes have more milk than any family could drink. This brings me to a philosophical point. Americans are very conflicted about excess. On the one hand, we are a wasteful people, taking long showers, driving two blocks when we could walk, and allowing more than one-third of all purchased food to end up in the garbage. On the other hand, we are abstemious, and many of us make a point of serving reduced-fat foods and avoiding many traditional favorites. We feel guilty about food and apologetic . . . ”Oh, I shouldn’t . . . well, perhaps just a tiny piece.” Food authorities constantly reinforce food guilt. As surely as reputable research dispels concerns about fat as a factor for one disease, the last paragraph of the report will quote another authority: “But this should not be interpreted to mean you can start eating [whatever] again, because there are still plenty of other good reasons not to eat what you would like.”
Real dairy products are now included in what has become a blanket condemnation of fats. In 1989 Thomas Moore published Heart Failure, in which he detailed three decades of political (not scientific) infighting among scientists that resulted in cholesterol and saturated animal fat being fingered as the major culprits in circulatory disease. By the time Moore’s book was published it had already become clear to researchers that the case against animal fat was shaky. At about this time evidence against fats from vegetable sources reached critical mass; most of them contain either carcinogenic factors (free radicals) or trans fatty acids (dangerously altered molecules introduced by processing). Unlike animal fat, many vegetable oils contain naturally occurring toxins such as gossypol (in cottonseed and canola) and erucic acid (in canola). They may also contain industrial solvents from the extraction process. We did not hear authorities apologizing for the error, saying, “Oops, we got all that fat advice backward.” Instead, there was an immediate campaign to persuade the public to simply avoid all fats.
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A False Economy
As a nation, we are not getting thinner. We are just feeling guiltier. So if eating is something to feel guilty about, then it must be virtuous to spend less on food. The family table is thus being made to bear the burden of the shrinking dollar. Other costs of living are often nearly intractable and little virtue attaches to their reduction. Housing, transportation, insurance, and tuitions require huge nonnegotiable sums. Food expenditures are expected to shrink to accommodate these fixed costs, and nutritionists who ought to know better offer carbohydrate substitutes for nutrient-dense meats and dairy products. Books and newsletters encourage strategies for thrift by authors who parrot popular nutrition ideas but know little about food except what it costs and perhaps how much fat is in it. Health outcomes are ignored in favor of immediate savings. I hate to see waste, and I don’t mind clothes from the thrift shop. But stocking the pantry with soy milk and macaroni dinners is a tragically false economy. Imagined reductions in fat are illusory; such food policy results merely in substituting cheap and unhealthful manufactured fats for better natural fats. It leads also to carbohydrates as a protein source. From these inferior protein sources the extra calories cannot be trimmed.
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A Psychology of Abundance Is Healthier and More Fun
No need to be stingy. With my cow, I am able to serve exceptionally fine food and I am not stingy with the butter and cream. My cow supports my chickens, so I always have eggs. She also gives us a calf, so there is no meat shortage. Her extra skim milk supports a pig, so there is no bacon and sausage shortage. And she provides fertilizer for the garden, so there is no vegetable shortage. The cow is a generous animal. She improves life for everybody.