Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/opinion/05MON3.html?th

 

January 5, 2004EDITORIAL OBSERVER Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient

Efficiencies of Modern FarmingBy VERLYN KLINKENBORG

 

Sixteen years ago, I met a Holstein cow named Juniper-Mist Bell Paula. She lived

in splendid solitude in a stone-walled paddock on a venerable Massachusetts

farm. Bell Paula was, in fact, more chicken than cow. Her job was to produce

eggs, not milk. Several times a year, she was given hormones that caused her to

super-ovulate — to release many eggs instead of one. These were flushed from

her, fertilized and implanted in receptor cows as near as the next stone paddock

or as far away as China and Japan. The reason was Bell Paula's milking record.

At the time, an average Holstein in America — the ubiquitous black-and-white

dairy cow — gave some 16,000 pounds of milk a year. Bell Paula could give 31,000

pounds a year when she was still being milked.

 

If Bell Paula represents one end of the Holstein spectrum — the long-lived queen

of the hive, so to speak — the Holstein in Washington State that was found last

month to be infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease,

represents something much closer to the middle. She was unusual only in the

disease she carried. When it became clear that she was unhealthy, she was

slaughtered. And, under a testing regime that was changed only last week, her

carcass, once tested, was presumed to be safe and fed into the system, instead

of being held until the test results were in.

 

There was nothing anomalous in that Holstein's slaughter. Beef cattle and dairy

cattle represent two different types of animal, but their fates are identical.

What most Americans do not realize is that nearly every dairy cow eventually

becomes either hamburger or the cheaper variety of steak when her profitability

drops. Holsteins are frequently culled for slaughter when they are between 5 and

6 years old. When you figure that a Holstein first gives milk when about 2 years

old, that means a productive life on the dairy farm of about three years. In

that brief life span, everything is done to maximize yield, including the

regular use of antibiotics and the feeding of high-protein concentrates of the

kind that used to contain meat and blood meal from other Holsteins, a practice

that has since been banned.

 

After poultry and pigs, the dairy industry has become one of the most

concentrated forms of agriculture in America. The old mental picture of a herd

of Holsteins standing hock-deep in pasture bears no relation to the way milk is

produced in much of America. Some herds, especially in the West and Southwest,

number in the thousands, which means the animals spend their lives in barns on

cement where they are milked automatically, in some cases on huge rotating

platforms that look like something out of science fiction.

 

For all their adaptability, even Holsteins can put up with only a certain amount

of this. By the time they mature, at around 5 years old, many begin to break

down from leg and foot problems. Dairy organizations distribute locomotion

charts to help workers assess lameness, which can lead to reproductive failures

— another reason for culling animals. Other cows begin to fail from the stress

of carrying an udder that can weigh as much as a full-grown man. To prepare them

for slaughter, the cows must be given time to get any residue — the word means

traces of drugs — out of their systems.

 

As always, the goals of industrial agriculture create a perverse logic. Instead

of adapting the agricultural system to suit the animal, we try to adapt the

animal to suit the system in order to eke out every last efficiency. We may take

it for granted that dairy cows will eventually be slaughtered. But strange as it

sounds, it makes greater financial, ethical and social sense if we to

the cows' notions of efficiency, which do not include living on concrete or

eating anything but grass and grain, rather than to ours. The animals would be

healthier, their milk would be better, and we would not have to worry quite so

much about what was in our food.

 

At some point Americans will begin to judge agriculture not by its intentions

but by its unintended consequences. The intention in the dairy industry has

always been to streamline, modernize, automate, all in the interest of greater

profits. But the consequence has been to concentrate power and money in the

hands of a few, to drive down prices and to create a national surplus of milk

that forces small dairy producers out of business. That, in turn, frees former

dairy land for development, for suburban sprawl. The consequence has also been

to breed an animal that can barely sustain the way she is forced to live.

 

The river of milk in America brings with it a river of ground beef made from

dairy cows, a river that is almost impossible to inspect adequately in a

deregulated industry. The problem isn't just a concentration of meat. It's a

concentration of political power that hamstrings any calls for closer

inspection. The industry has been quick to point out that far more people die

from salmonella and E. coli than from mad cow disease. That's not exactly a

reason to stand up and cheer.

 

It's possible that the Washington State Holstein may have had the only case of

mad cow disease we come across. But if so, it will have been luck rather than

good planning. According to the philosophers at Cow-Calf Weekly, an online

journal for the beef industry, " Perception is reality. " That's the sort of thing

one says when the reality is too unbearable to look at.

 

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