The cows.
Good friends of ours have an organic dairy farm. I get to drop by with a couple of gallon glass jugs just about whenever I want to buy raw organic milk straight from the tank–almost straight from the cow. We drink it, and use it in our cereal and coffee, and I make yogurt from it. Delicious!
When I stop in, Tim is always up to his neck in some kind of work, if he’s not milking, which takes 8 hours of every day. That’s 4 hours two times a day. He milks over 120 head.
The mixer.
Today, he was mixing timothy and alfalfa hay together. Organic hay, of course. He uses a Bobcat to lift big round bales into a giant Kitchenaid mixer. Okay, it’s not a Kitchenaid, but that’s sort of what it looks like. The mixer chops the stiff hay stems up and mixes the two together to balance the nutritive content. He says if he didn’t do this, the cows would eat only the alfalfa, and that wouldn’t be good for them. He knows a LOT about nutrition and hay and feed and fertilizer and chemicals, and can spout percentages of nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous, and calcium like I conjugate verbs.
They’ve been transitioning to organic for a few years. I asked him what the toughest part of the transition has been. He said feeding the herd. He had to start buying organic feeds — much more expensive than non-organic — but he had to still sell his milk at non-organic prices. And, you guessed it. Non-organic milk brings much lower prices than organic. Making ends meet for the last couple of years has been hard.
The hay mixer at work.
In retrospect, he said he should have sold his entire herd and bought cows that were already considered organic so that he could start selling at organic prices right away. The easy part was switching the pasture. All he had to do was start using organic fertilizer. He’s looking forward to the grass being high enough that he doesn’t have to mix hay every day. But then there will be other chores.
By the way, here’s a couple of interesting facts: milk is measured and sold by the pound. One cow produces 45-70 pounds of milk every day. Many of Tim’s cows are Jersey. Their milk has a higher cream content.
I can get more details about life on an organic dairy for anyone interested. Next time you pick up a half-gallon container of organic milk at the store, think of Tim and all those hours on his feet, reaching between the hind legs of his cows, disinfecting their bags, and attaching the milking machine to their teats.
Makes it taste even better, doesn’t it?
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