Perverse Logic of Modern Farming - NYT 1/5/04

[Guest guest]

For those not familiar with him (her?) Verlyn Klinkenborg writes a regular

country life column for the New York Times editorial page. It's usually pretty

folksey. This is hot for him.

 

Klinkenborg was also the author of a wonderful 1991 Smithsonian Magazine

article called, "If It Wasn't for the Ox, We Wouldn't Be Where We Are Now."

 

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hkdd

 

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New York Times

January 5, 2004

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

 

Holstein Dairy Cows and the Inefficient Efficiencies of Modern Farming

 

By 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.