Along comes the young idealistic farmer-to-be, making a call to an established dairyman and looking for a cow to buy. The dairyman sees his opportunity to unload an unwanted cow at a higher-than-auction price. He may be honest and fair and sell a cow that can’t produce enough to earn a spot on the high-productivity farm and which would be a perfectly good cow for a small farm, or he may take advantage of the situation and sell as a viable milker a cow that actually belongs in the slaughterhouse. The problem is that to the inexperienced eye, cows all tend to look the same. In fact, some cows are really pretty, endearingly pretty.
With that said, a bit of cajoling, some homework on bovine health and a great deal of luck can lead to finding a great cow.
Another way to buy a cow is from a farm that only breeds and raises heifers and is not in the dairy business. These farms have an interest to sell only healthy cows; their reputation is at stake. They will still sell the best animals to known buyers and more likely sell the newer farmer their lesser quality, but are more likely to be honest about it.
The last and worst way to buy a dairy cow is at a livestock auction. In fact, it shouldn’t even qualify as a way to purchase a cow. Auctions are dumping grounds for sick animals. There is no reason for a healthy dairy cow to be at a livestock auction. Possible reasons for auctioning are an inability to breed, extreme mastitis that cannot be cured, very low productivity that doesn’t cover eating expenses, lameness or chronic disease. A young male cow in good health could be for sale at an auction, but never a female.
The basic idea of a dairy is this: a female cow is bred and nine months later she will produce a calf. Two months before she is to calve, her body will begin producing milk in anticipation of her offspring. When she calves, her body is ready with milk to feed her calf, sustaining the young animal through its early months. In a dairy, the young calf is taken from the mother to be raised with other young calves and the mother will continue to produce milk, her body thinking that a calf is drinking the milk as the udder is emptied every day by the dairy. Slowly, over the course of a year of twice-daily milking, the cow’s production of milk diminishes, mirroring the smaller needs of a phantom calf that would have moved on to grazing grass for nourishment.
The offspring of a cow is either a female heifer or a male bull calf. Their gender seals their fate. Females will be raised to live out their life on the farm, producing milk. Males will most likely be castrated—at which point they will be known as steers and raised to be slaughtered for meat. On a large dairy farm, the heifers will often be sent to heifer replacement farms, only to return to a dairy farm after they are bred. Bull calves are sent immediately off the farm to be raised for veal or “baby beef.” On the small homestead farm, the animals would most likely stay on the farm regardless of their gender, the heifers to raise for milking, the bull calves to raise for eventual slaughter.
Although cows generally have one offspring at a time, occasionally they produce twins. If both of the young calves are of the same gender, all is well. But if one of the calves is a female and one a male, a unique situation is likely. Before birth, the young calves exchange hormones through their blood. The female gains male hormones and is born infertile. She can therefore never be bred and will never produce milk for the dairy. She is termed a freemartin and is raised for meat.
Although I consider the cows, their calves and the pastures to be the dairy, in reality “the dairy” refers to the physical structure on the farm. The dairy is actually three buildings: the milk room, the milking parlor and the milk processing plant—the creamery. I wish that I could say I named them, but no, these are their official names, shared in dairies all across the nation. Tradition abounds in an industry as slow to change as dairying.
My milking parlor is a simple building: a concrete floor, a galvanized tin roof, the same metal sheets on the walls and a large sliding metal door on the south side. It is the room where the cows come in one at a time and are hooked up to the milking machine. In the simple loft above is the vacuum pump that runs the milking machine; down through the ceiling run the vacuum lines. An old metal stanchion hangs from the ceiling. As a cow puts her head through the steel doughnut in an effort to get at the grain kept in a box on the floor, the stanchion is locked around her neck, giving the cow plenty of room to move around, but not so much that she can back out and exit her confinement.
The building’s design is intentionally simple, to meet its function: it must be hosed out twice a day after the cows come through. The concrete slab is often wet during the day, but always clean. It is the first step toward keeping the milk healthy and clean. As soon as the milking of the cows is completed, the milk is removed from this room and taken to the milk room a few feet away. In the milk room, the milk is stored, well away from animals and their manure.
The milk room is in a larger building, more complete and finished than the milking parlor. The milk room’s functions are to cool the milk, store the milk and house the milking equipment. Constructed of insulated concrete, it is a big box, smooth on the interior walls and floors, more rustic on the exterior. The ceiling is tongue-and-groove pine, whitewashed, which always reminds me of milk, like milk paint.
When I am in this room I think that a dairy is a simple place: simple, straightforward and wholesome. Then if I turn from the three walls of sinks and counters and the bulk refrigeration tank and look at the fourth wall I see the large shelf standing there. On it are stacks of paperwork, inspection reports from the state Department of Agriculture, large binders of federal milk protocol, bound reports of a farm plan written by the county soil conservation corps, state dairy nutrient management plans, veterinarian results and bills, artificial insemination receipts, private milk-testing lab results, state milk-testing lab results and an assortment of gallon jugs of cleaners, disinfectants, acid cleaners, iodine and bleaches. I find it more comforting to look in a different direction and keep that wall to my back.
Sharing a common wall with the milk room is the creamery. Here the milk is transformed from the cool liquid stored in the bulk refrigeration tank to the finished cheeses aging in the coolers lining the walls. In the center of this room stands the squat, heavy steel cheese vat, its sturdy thick, short legs supporting the round, shiny vat. The vat is connected to the walls of the creamery by hoses bringing cold water to the heating elements and the robust electric cord to power the machine. Slinky cords connect temperature controls from the milk to the recording device attached to the back wall. It all looks very high-tech, albeit with a 1950s conception of technology. There are no digital readouts, no bells, no whistles. Atop the vat is a bulky, oversized motor to stir the milk, with the same midcentury design.
Within sight of the dairy buildings are the cow paddocks, the small courtyards where the cows wait to be milked each morning and afternoon. Cows are miraculous creatures. Quiet yet stubborn, strong yet gentle, they have personalities far richer than their initial appearance suggests.
I love cows. Large, solid, beautifully color-toned, gentle, the symbol of a dairy, a farm. I think it is their size, their bulk, that gives them their cultural value, their heft. Pigs, certainly lovely; chickens certainly tasty; but cows, they command your attention. They are larger than we are, yet we control them, rule over them. I feel important and valid standing next to my cows. I am strong; I am powerful.
And then they knock into me, refusing to go where I want them to go, and I swing back to reality: they are in charge.
Cows are a mystery. Are they bright and in control or acting instinctually with little thought? When I got my first dog, very soon after I moved to the farm, a friend of mine who’d had dogs for years explained that same mystery with canines. He said that from the day you get your dog to the day he dies, you will never know if he is dumber than a stick or if he is brilliant, spending his life pretending to be simple in order to convince you to feed him well and take care of his every need. Cows, to me, exhibit that same perpetual mystery.
Cows are not the brightes
t animals on the pasture but they possess a certain sort of intelligence. They carry a calf for nine months, give birth, spend a small amount of time with their calf before it is separated from them and then they continue producing milk as if they still had their calf. So far it appears as though the farmer is in charge. But then the cow slowly begins to produce less milk. A little less each day, not really noticeably, but still less. Ideally the cow would be quickly bred again to keep her carrying a calf nearly all year long.
The cows here have managed to get me to order in the finest alfalfa hay from Eastern Washington, store it in a beautiful French barn to keep it from getting wet and then carry it out to the field for them. They do need to go through the whole milk production lifestyle, but it still seems likely they got the better end of this deal. But then again, they might have no idea what is going on. I may never know.
Throughout the winter, and parts of the early spring and late fall, I feed the cows hay, specifically alfalfa. In those cooler months, the pasture grasses cease to grow and I must supplement the cows’ diet with hay brought onto the farm.
On the eastern side of the state of Washington are vast hayfields. The land is cheap, flat and fertile. Thousands of acres are devoted to hay production, for feeding horses, dairy cows and curiously for export to Japan for racehorses. Hay is one of the largest crops of this state, and yet nearly all of it is grown in Eastern Washington. Western Washington is simply too wet, with inadequate heat in the summer to dry the cut grasses before they can be baled for storage.
Every few weeks a large hay truck pulls up to the farm to unload five or six or seven tons of premium alfalfa hay. It is not certified organic hay. The haulers that I hire do not grow the hay, they simply broker the transaction and transport it over the mountains and stack it in my barn. Therefore, it is difficult to know exactly how it is grown. I must assume that growing this much needed hay consumes great quantities of water, fertilizers and diesel fuel to run the tractors that cut, gather and bale the alfalfa. After it is baled, then it is driven across the state, over the mountain pass and into my county and eventually onto the ferryboat, across the water and down the long driveway to the farm. There are few haulers willing to come out to the island. It is costly, annoying and time-consuming. I have never found one that can source organic hay and so I must settle for the hay that I can get.
Situations like mine with hay make the discussion on raising food “green” interesting. Sitting at my kitchen table, reading the current books on farms and food and health, I sincerely desire to supply the best-quality feed for my animals. When the reality of actually trucking that feed onto the island comes into the equation, it becomes more difficult. Quickly my ideals fall and I end up contributing to the chemical fertilizing of Eastern Washington farmland. Few choices in farming practice are black-and-white.
The daily life of a cow is very predictable. I love to watch my cows as they go about their prescribed pattern. They are awake far earlier than I, but not necessarily active till sunrise. On those rare days when I am awake as the sun rises, I find the gals in the pasture, sitting, looking content and very much awake. They have yet to stand up, might be relaxing, chewing their cud a bit. They take their time getting going in the morning. I think of the cows at this time of day as my paperweights, precious trinkets I remember seeing at fancy homes. Made of glass or brass or ceramic, those paperweights were heavy, squat on the base and always had a bit of faded green felt on the bottom to protect the smooth polished end tables where they resided. My paperweights are more substantial, yet I imagine that I have positioned them just so, to hold down the tapis vert of the pasture.
Once the day has begun, they stand up and begin grazing. The grazing is haphazard at this point, a light search for food, knowing that the bulk of their feeding will happen in the next hours. Once I finally show up on the scene, they focus on me and getting to the milking parlor for grain.
The cows appear to have no interest in getting milked, but the grain appeals to them. They love the sweetness of the corn and oats and barley. It is easy to eat and there is no competition from neighboring cows to keep them from their allotment of grain. There is pressure on their udders from the milk that has been produced and if they were not milked for a number of hours or days they would feel that increasing pressure. On a twice-daily milking schedule I don’t sense that they have any desire to rid their bodies of their milk, but rather simply the desire to get a bucket of grain while the milking machine whirls above them in the attic.
After the cows are milked and returned to pasture, either they are left there to graze for the day or fed hay if the grass is low and there is not enough for them to eat. For the following three or four hours they will work their way through the pasture, munching on this clump or that clump, generally keeping in a herd, with the odd cow going out on her own for some time, but always returning. Seemingly on cue, the cows will be satiated, their many stomachs full, and they will one by one drop their bulky bodies to the ground, all within a few feet of each other, and begin to chew their collective cuds.
The basic idea of a ruminant is thus: all ruminants, whether cows, sheep or goats, have four stomachs. The first two, the rumen and the reticulum, perform the function of predigesting the feed that the cows eat. The grass goes from one stomach to the other and then is brought back to the mouth of the cow to be chewed and returned to the stomachs and so on. The cows spend a few hours filling the rumen with grass and water and then sit down, relax in the grass and pass the digesta back and forth. It is a picture of contentment; they have found their own bovine enlightenment. Another hour or two later and they are up again, the morning’s grazing having passed on to the later stomachs: the abomasum and the omasum. It is a well-designed system and generally functions smoothly.
The most common hiccup in the cow digestive track is bloat. Occasionally, and usually in the springtime when the young grass is plentiful, the digesta in the rumen will create bubbles that it cannot break. The bubbles of fermenting grass become too tight to break and expand. The cow cannot break the bubbles and the rumen will start to expand. It is a remarkable sight. On the left side of the cow near the spine, the hide will be taut and huge, the entire upper side sticking out from the normal silhouette of the cow. To a light tap, it feels like a finely tuned drum, full of pressure and stretched to the limits of the skin. Although amazing to watch, bloat also has the ability to kill the cow. The pressure can increase and press against the cow’s lungs, making it difficult to breathe. The cow will also stop chewing its cud and stop eating, a sure sign of bloat.
I first encountered bloat on the morning of a party here at the farm. Guests were sure to arrive a few hours later and I had a cow that I was certain, in my nervous state, would die.
The death of an animal, especially a favored dairy cow, would have been sad to say the least, but the sight of a large dead cow carcass in the front paddock in clear sight of everyone arriving that afternoon was not one that I could live with.
Eliminating dead animals is an issue. Jersey cows, the breed that I have, are the smallest bovines and yet still weigh eight hundred pounds minimum, an average Holstein cow twice that. A half ton of dead weight, with legs extended, is not an easy load to move. My small tractor could never pick up such a weight and the sheer bulk of the animal could not fit in the tractor’s bucket attachment. In addition to the inability to move such a carcass, digging a hole to accommodate a large animal is an equal or greater challenge. Digging a pit six, seven, eight feet deep and eight to ten feet across would take hours if it could be done. The only option is to hire a small excavator or backhoe operator to dig a pit and lift the dead cow into it. An easy and quick task for a hydraulic-equipped tool, but getting the operator and equipment to the farm on a Sunday afternoon with hours to spare before a party was not how I wanted to spend the afternoon.
I called the woman who sold me my first cow for advice. She was shocked that I didn’t have a supply of anti-bloat medicine at the ready, but gave an a
lternative therapy: butter. I took a pound or two of butter and balled it up in my hand, lump by lump, and forced it into the mouth of the unappreciative cow. With one arm around her head to steady her and the other as deep into her mouth as possible, I attempted, rather unsuccessfully, to get her to swallow the butter. Most ended up on the ground or spit at me, but I was successful at getting some down her gullet.
The logic is that the fat of the butter will break the surface tension of the bubbles in the rumen, relieving the stomach of its air. After a few stressful minutes of walking the cow around the paddock, the pressure on the side of the beast had subsided. I really wanted a loud, eventful belch to signal the success of my butter-stuffing, but had to be content with a slow relaxing of the stomach and the health of my much-beloved cow.
Since then I have come to rely on vegetable oil instead of butter as a bloat reliever. A liquid is much more likely to be swallowed by a cow than lumps of yellow butter. Even if the vegetable oil didn’t work as well, it’s hard for me to give up great butter. The cows deserve it, but a less precious alternative is welcome.
The curing of bloat early in the history of my dairy was a small success that I was most thankful for. I wish I could say that all illnesses associated with cows could be so smoothly remedied. Immediately after the farm became a licensed grade “A” producer of raw milk, the state Department of Agriculture came to the farm and took a milk sample to send off to the state laboratory for its monthly testing. I had never tested the milk and had no idea what to expect, but needed a positive result to maintain my licensing status.
A day later the inspector called me to let me know that there was a problem. The somatic cell count of the milk was extremely high and well over the legal limit. The somatic cell count—SCC—is an indication of the number of leukocytes or white blood cells present in the milk and therefore in the udder. A low number indicates that there is a low level of infection; a high number indicates a high degree of infection. My count was so high that there was an obvious and serious problem.
Growing a Farmer Page 10