Big Dairy

Via Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias, I come late to an Atlantic piece on dairy genetics.  Choosing the right bull now considers life span and pregnancy, not just pounds of milk.  (We got about 11,000 pounds when I was growing up.)  Interesting that big data can now pick the best bull in the country.

Dairy Farmers Needed?

This is rather stale now.  I have seen pieces saying dairy farmers are in trouble because the law covering their current program expires at the end of the year.   Who to believe? 

In other policy related news, Rick Barrett reported on Sunday at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online that, “Thirsty for milk, and the money that comes with it, South Dakota has ramped up efforts to recruit dairy farmers from other states and countries, including England, Ireland and The Netherlands.

Farm policy 

Dairy in California

From today's Farm Policy quoting from a Wall Street Journal article:

“Some 100 California dairy farmers are shutting their doors this year, according to the Milk Producers Council, a group representing dairy farmers. Many of the state’s roughly 1,600 dairy farms are wrestling with financial difficulties. And many farmers point their finger at California’s ‘Class 4b’ milk regulation, which governs the prices cheese makers pay,” the Journal article said.

When I was growing up, the small poultrymen were being put out of business by vertical integration and contract growing.  I don't know what has happened to egg prices over the last 50 years, but I assume they've been more stable since supply has been more regulated/coordinated.  I guess that sort of revamping of the dairy industry isn't quite as practical: too much capital involved perhaps.

Anyhow, things continue to change.

Dairy and Evolution

Via Marginal Revolution, a very interesting Slate piece on the evolution of lactase-tolerance.  An excerpt:

Milk, by itself, somehow saved lives. This is odd, because milk is just food, just one source of nutrients and calories among many others. It's not medicine. But there was a time in human history when our diet and environment conspired to create conditions that mimicked those of a disease epidemic. Milk, in such circumstances, may well have performed the function of a life-saving drug.

You can't be a dairy farmer and deny evolution.

Technology and Dairy: the Use of Cellphones

Almost forgot to link to this post on the benefits of cellphones for the dairy farmer: when the cows get out and get lost you can coordinate your search and driving efforts using cellphones. :-)

Of course these days the number of dairies putting cows out to pasture is dwindling, but every bit helps.  ("Threecollie", who runs the site, also uses a birder app on her iPHone.)

Technology and Dairy Flourish in Small Countries?

The NYTimes has a piece on a technology test in Switzerland: managers of dairy herds can be notified by text if their cows are in heat (based on temperature of vulva and cow activity). (For those benighted souls reading this who never grew up on a dairy farm: you have to inseminate the cow within x hours of when she comes in heat.  If you don't catch her heat, or she fails to become pregnant, you're facing a month of payments for feed that's pure waste, except of course for the cow.) The story says it's harder to tell when a cow is in heat with modern dairy cows. Without challenging that assertion, I'd suggest the high ratio of cows to people in modern dairies also makes it more difficult.

I do wonder if down the line PETA will protest this mistreatment of cows. 

Another development on the technology front is the modification of bovine genetics so their milk is less likely to trigger allergies. Interesting that the development comes from New Zealand.  I wonder about the level of anti-science feeling there.

Robot-Ready Cows? Humane Dairying

Having just posted on dairy, I might as well go whole cow.

Here's an interesting piece on the extensive adoption of robots in dairying (I owe a hat tip, but not sure to whom).  Some excerpts:

Many dairy kids [like me] leave the farm because they see their parents slave away in milking parlors twice a day, seven days a week, with never a vacation or even a break for the children's baseball games. With robots, a mechanical arm handles the milking and each cow chooses its own routine, leaving farmers with more time for family and flexibility for other chores.  

Groetsch says the gamble was worth it. The family's small squadron of farm droids, which includes a mechanical cow-back scratcher and an automatic feed pusher, has turned their barn into a 24-hour operation, with less hired help.

The 3,000-pound, red robo-milkers work around the clock, except for twice-daily cleaning sessions. They also eliminate the chore of corralling cows for milking: After being trained to accept the robot, cows get milked whenever they please. The robot measures their production and knows if a cow needs to be milked more or less often

Immigration has a role here; the Dutch are pioneers in dairy technology, Hispanics have more and more come to find their place as hired help on dairy farms.

Feminist Vegans and Dairy

From a letter to the editor of Book World (which I initially couldn't find through navigating the Times website, so retyped, and then found the link by a Google search.

Andrew Delbanco [in a review of The Victims' Revolution] classifies as "cant" the statement that "dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother."  I wonder which of these facts about dairy production he disputes: (1) mammals produce milk only after giving birth (2) female cows produce milk only if they have recently calved (3) people cannot take the milk if the calf drinks it; (4) dairy farmers therefore remove calves from their mothers within days of birth; (5) both mother and child resist and protest this separation; (6) mothers often bellow and moan for days thereafter; (7) mothers sometimes go to extreme lengths to locate and reunite with their calves; (8) dairy farmers utilize restraints to prevent them from doing so.

Dairy is the product of the exploitation for profit of the reproductive capacities of female bodies.  To consider this a feminist issue is a defensible political position.  Cows share with us the basic brain architecture responsible for emotion.  The idea that mother cows do not grieve when their children are removed from them, and are not grieving still as machines suck the milk from their bodies -- that is cant. 

signed: Patrice Jones
Springfield, VT

The writer is a co-founder of VINE, a feminist animal sanctuary that shelters, among others, survivors of the dairy industry.

The context of the quote referred to is: "A couple of years ago, Bawer [the author of The Victims' Revolution] made a trip home to see what’s happened to the academic world he left behind. He attended a few conferences for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and Chicano studies, where he heard plenty of cant, as when a participant at a “Fat Studies” conference explained her veganism by declaring: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.”"

Based on my childhood on a small dairy, I would dispute the following:

(2) Cows produce milk for roughly 300 days after calving, not just "recently calved".
(3) Cows produce more milk than any calf could drink. 80 pounds daily in the first month after calving if memory serves, and that figure is probably twice as high now.  We fed our calves about 14 pounds of milk a day, gradually weaning them to hay and grain.  The calf was probably 3 months old, or so. Now if left together, would the calf have continued to suckle? Perhaps, though cows get tired of suckling and are willing and able to use their hooves on their offspring, so I wouldn't expect a prolonged babyhood.
(6) I'd say some cows bellow (never heard a moan) for a couple days, but the majority don't.
(7) We never had any cows go to "extreme lengths" to reunite that I remember.
(8) So we never used any restraints on "grieving cows" which weren't a part of the normal routine--i.e., stanchions to hold them from milking.

A Fat Tax

Sarah Kliff has a post at the Post on a possible "fat tax" on milk--boosting the price for the high-octane stuff.  I know the difference, but I remember my father checking the butterfat content of our milk; was it shown on the milk check, or was it a separate process--however it worked it affected the price we got for our milk.  As she writes in the post, butterfat is an expensive part of the milk.

The study on which she writes looked at supermarkets which priced low fat milk lower than full fat milk. 

Farming Is Dangerous

This post at Northview Dairy is a reminder that farming can be is dangerous.

Input and Output: the Milk-Feed Ratio

This post reports a long time low in milk-feed ratio (comparing the cost of feed and the price of milk--low is BAD). [Note: a delayed post.

"
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a preliminary milk-feed ratio of 1.29 for July. That was down significantly from June’s ratio of 1.38.
None of the milk-feed ratios on record, going back to 1985, have been this low. The lowest ratio recorded in 2009 was 1.45."

What Does a Modern Cow Look Like?

Northview Dairy has a picture of the udder of a dairy cow, along with terms used in the judging standards.  A modern cow likely produces twice the milk of a cow in my boyhood.

Climate Change Bad News for Dairy

The "standup economist" has gotten links from Prof. Mankiw and Paul Solman at the Newshour.  He's funny, but he does serious research, including this paper projecting the decreased production of dairy cows resulting from higher temperatures of climate change.

The research has been so strong that it inspired progressive students to rally in support of Holsteins, as described here.

Big Organic and Dairy

NYTimes has two pieces today:  an article on how big food has taken over many organic food operations, along with a claim they've used their influence on USDA's organic standards board to approve ingredients which shouldn't be included in "organic food"; and a Mark Bittman diatribe against milk.  Yes, I realize my bias is showing in calling it a "diatribe", but Mr. Bittman's bias is also showing: he blames milk for years of his own health problems, which makes a strong case that nobody should drink milk.

They're currently 2nd and 3rd most popular NYTimes articles today.

The Chobani Paradox

Stealing from the Wall Street Journal bia Keith Good, just because I'm interested in NY dairy (the background is the rise in popularity of "Greek style yogurt":

The Journal article noted that, “Meanwhile, the long-struggling dairy farmers of New York aren’t seeing their bottom line soar thanks to the Greek yogurt boom—and they aren’t adding to their herds to meet the demand.
“So instead of expanding his plant here—in a region trying to reverse a trend of population and job loss—Mr. Ulukaya is building a factory in Idaho, in part because he can be sure of a steady supply of milk there. The New Berlin plant will remain open, but Mr. Ulukaya said he might have expanded it instead of opening another if he knew he could get enough milk.
“Milk production in states such as Idaho has surged in the past decade. Land is cheaper and dairy farms tend to be larger than in New York, making it easier for farmers to grow their herds. New York farmers say they are weighed down by property taxes and the high cost of land. Since their herds are smaller, expansion tends to be riskier.”

 Much of upstate New York is hill and valley country.  In the old days, your hay fields would be the valley and lower slopes, the pastures would be the steeper slopes.  But farmers have discovered that cows waste energy walking to and from pasture, so that sort of dairying is less economical.    If you can grow or buy corn, you can feed your cows all year round.  I assume those are some of the facts behind NY's loss.

Another factor would be interstates: presumably Idaho yogurt can be economically shipped around the country, just as Wisconsin cheese can be. That's unlike whole milk, where getting it to New York City was the big hurdle, first solved by the railroads, then by trucks.

South Pacific and a Cock-Eyed Optimist

Wife and I saw a revival of South Pacific the other week.  One of the early songs is "Cockeyed Optimist".  That's all I could think of when I read about this dewy-faced dairy farmer proposing, in the barn.

Good luck to them.

Small Dairy Help

Cornell U. extension has some things to help "small dairies", which have been going out of business in New York forever.

They use a 100-cow dairy as an example of "small", which still strikes odd because 30 or so was the average when I grew up (we had 12).  Though in surfing the web the other day I ran across claims of being able to handle milking of 200-300 cows with one person (maybe on the Wikipedia talk page, not sure).   That's not Moore's law of transistors, but it's a better improvement in productivity than higher education.

Cornell also has a map showing "Small Plants for Pasteurized Milk, Yogurt, etc.).  and a set of benchmarks (size of farm, milk per cow, acres per cow, etc.).  I'd think breed would be important: one farm has 25,000 lbs per cow, which has to be Holstein, another has 13,000 lbs, which has to be Jersey or Guernsey or whatever.

Big Dairy

One fact I didn't note when looking at this report: more than 50 percent of total US production comes from dairies with more than 1,000 cows.

That's an amazing number--when I was growing up 50 cows seemed big, about all one person could handle with a bit of hired labor.  While productivity has grown, I'm sure these dairies depend on hired hands, these days probably a lot of immigrants.

Also see the ERS page.

More on Big Dairy

It seems the NYTimes Magazine has a piece tomorrow on 3 generations of a dairy farm,, going from hand milking to 135 cows. The daughter, the fourth generation, developed a summer camp on the farm to put herself through Cornell.

Women and Haying

I stumbled across a site, Hay in Art, which I recommend to all feminists who grew up on dairy farms.  I was searching for images of haying for another blog, and found this site which apparently has collected all the paintings showing haying. You'd be surprised how many there are (6700+).  A subset of the collection is women doing haying. The site owner, Alan Ritch, finds a pattern: women raked and men used forks.  And apparently it was common to ted the hay (i.e., turn the cut hay over so it would dry faster). Where I grew up in Broome County, NY that wasn't normal: the hay wasn't dense enough and the conditions moist enough to require it. 

The sheer number of pictures of women in the fields provides a different picture of what life was like in previous centuries.

My sister, who likes to brag about driving the team pulling the hay wagon and hay loader when she was maybe 13 or so, will be disappointed--I didn't see any such images in the database. 

I strongly recommend the site: it doesn't seem to have been updated recently, but it has all sorts of special essays, as Ritch calls them.  Unfortunately, the images are limited in size, and the type's a bit small for old eyes, but it's still fascinating.