Dairies feel brunt of Hurricane Charley - Dairy Herd Management 8

[Guest guest]

Hmmm.... You must be very blessed to be ignorant of the grinding

philosophy of capitalism.

 

Capitalism means basically having a very high concentration of capital

(in this case cows, buildings, and milking machines) and as low a

concentration of workers as possible, so they don't suck up your

profits. You may be making only $10 per day per cow, but multiplied by

900 cows, that's a lot. Mechanized milking means that fewer laborers

can milk more cows. (Let's not ask how well the cows are treated when

workers must zip from one cow to the next as quickly as possible to make

their quota. Love and affection for cows are not supposed to be part of

the formula for a capitalist dairy.) So, the owner of this operation

might hire 20 low-paid immigrant workers to milk the 900 cows with

milking machines.

 

Then comes a storm which disables the milking machines. Also probably

the flimsey shacks of many of the workers were destroyed. So now he has

to milk 900 cows by hand with the 12 workers who can show up. Probably

he has them milk the 30 most productive cows, so that he can save them

from mastitis and the rest he lets go unmilked while the workers spend

their remaining time cleaning up after the hurricane destruction. I

can't imagine how miserable all those high-production cows are, not

being milked for a couple days.

 

I'm sure he's doing the math right now about how many he will simply

send to the slaughterhouse, rather than continued to feed them and lose

their milk for the next two weeks while they go on a program of

anitibiotics for mastitis.

 

You say that you would never have to let your cows go unmilked because

of a major storm? Lucky you -- I can only guess that it's because you

are following Srila Prabhupada's idea of small-scale self-sufficient

farms, where animals can be maintained with love and care.

Unfortunately, these Bradenton country farmers were operating by a

different set of rules -- and now they (and sadly, the cows) are paying.

 

ys

hkdd

 

Hrimati (dd) ACBSP (Mayapur - IN) wrote:

 

>They do not know how to milk by hand...?

>

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