Milk

by Mark Kurlansky

  In America there is no similar subsidy for milk, but farmers are simply spurred on to produce more by the economic principle that says the more milk produced, the more profit to cover expenses.

  In the United States, as in all countries with a dairy tradition, people once regarded dairy farms fondly. Milk industry advertising captured perfectly the beloved image of a dairy farm that most Americans had—a red barn with white trim, hilly green grass country, and sweet-faced brown Jersey cows. But this scene hardly exists any more. Today dairies are muddy, sprawling affairs with long feed lots, milking parlors, and other prefabricated structures.

  For those who can afford it, the milking parlor of choice is a rotary milker—based on the same idea as the Rotolactor shown at the 1939 World’s Fair, only larger and computer-regulated, with cows eagerly waiting to step on. It is still the same comical bovine merry-go-round with the cows lining up for their ride. In most milking parlors, cows grow restless, stamp their feet, and defecate, but this is not so on their rotating trip, which they thoroughly enjoy. When they get back to the starting point and have to step off, they clearly show their disappointment at leaving.

  People do not want to live near a dairy anymore. Cows defecate and they are also extremely flatulent. This was never an issue with the charming forty-cow farm with the little red barn. But when a few thousand cows live next door, farting and producing mountains of manure that the farm endeavors to dry out and convert to fertilizer, they are very strong-smelling neighbors.

  Farmers with large herds usually have more manure than their pastureland can absorb. The total animal waste in the United States is one hundred times more than what is taken in by human sewage treatment plants, and 4.5 million people are exposed to dangerous nitrate levels in drinking water, mostly from poorly handled animal waste.

  The odors of large dairy farms contain chemicals and gases that can cause respiratory and digestive ailments. They also contribute to climate change. A United Nations study concluded that cattle flatulence produced more greenhouse gases than do automobiles. The big culprit is methane gas, which, although it does not get as much attention as carbon dioxide, is more than twenty times as destructive in terms of climate change. A dairy cow burps and farts between 300 and 400 pounds of methane gas every day. And that figure does not include the roughly equal amount that emanates from her manure. Standards and procedures have been established to deal with these issues, but farmers say that the procedures are very costly—one more expense digging into their already very narrow profit margin. For example, farmers in some areas are no longer permitted to hose down their barns and stables. Instead, they have to cover piles of manure with straw to absorb the animal waste and then use that straw as compost. This is a very sound and careful way to deal with waste, but it involves increased manpower and costs considerably more than does simply hosing.

  The public that no longer loves dairy farms is also questioning dairy practices, with some arguing that cows today are producing unnatural quantities of milk. It certainly is unnatural in that they are producing ten to twenty times more milk than they would need to suckle their young. Of course, dairy farming has always been based on the premise that cows need to overproduce if a farm is to survive, but the amount of that overproduction has never been as high as it is now. Cows aren’t living as long as they once did, either, and they have more health problems. The huge udders needed to hold all that extra milk create back and leg problems.

  Animal rights activists also claim that dairies often abuse their animals by leaving them tethered to the same spot all their lives without a roof over their heads. But this happens only rarely. Dairy farmers want to get the most out of their cows and understand that if they treat them well, they will produce more milk. It has even been shown that cows that eat in covered feedlots produce more milk than cows that eat in lots that don’t have roofs.

  Many activists and consumers today are also pushing for dairy cattle to be grass-fed. The irony is that grass-feeding—simply letting cows eat the grass that grows in pastures—is the absolute cheapest way to raise cattle.

  England has a good climate for pastureland, and Chad Cryer of Wiltshire’s Brinkworth Farm said that the grass there is good for grazing ten months of the year. But, he added, “We are not impressed with grass-feeding. Cows need more.” At Brinkworth, the Cryers give their cows more by spending money on high-protein grains such as barley and alfalfa because they believe the cows need the extra nutrition.

  Many farmers feel this way about the “grass-fed” idea. No one denies that cows fed in feed lots produce more milk than cows that are grass-fed. That is why they take on the extra expense of purchasing feed.

  Eric Ooms of New York State said that grass-feeding would not work for his four-hundred-head dairy herd. “As you get bigger you have to keep track of nutrients,” he explained. “If you let cows graze you are not sure how much they are eating. If you stall-feed them you know exactly.”

  In South Australia the weather is mild enough for grazing, but during the summers, December to April, there is little water and the land becomes parched. The dairy farmers grass-feed their cows as long as they can and then turn to store-bought feed. At Nangkita Hills, the Connor family, four-generation dairy farmers, said that they would grass-feed their cows year round if they could, because they would like the savings of not buying feed. The Connor farm spreads over hilltops with strong sea breezes—the southern coast of Australia, only twenty miles away, faces Antarctica—and experience has taught them to be cautious of investment. They do not disapprove of feed-lot dairies, but say, “If you invest in feed lot and don’t get high production you lose a lot. Grazing is less risky.”

  In South Australia, whether they feed their cows or graze them, farmers have one unique problem: Dozens of strange creatures as large as human beings with powerful hind legs and wimpy little forearms hop onto their land and eat all their cows’ food. Some farmers will shoot one or two kangaroos to scare off the rest, which scatter in a mad and bouncy retreat.

  Kym and Kate Bartlett live on a dairy farm that Kym’s family has owned since 1927. They have a year-round garden and elegant palms and other decorative plants around their farmhouse. Their land is irrigated by the wide Murray, Australia’s longest river, and they are careful not to let the water from their farm run back and pollute the river. They grass-feed their two hundred Holsteins year round. “You have to move the cows every day,” said Kate, “but the cheapest way to produce milk is to get them to eat grass.”

  Australian Illawara

  Karen and David Altmann’s Dakara Farms is also on the Murray, but they had difficulty preventing their farm water from running back into the river, and so they decided to operate a feedlot dairy. Those who are against feedlot dairies often describe them in dark and denouncing tones, but Dakara Farms seems clean and well managed and the cows well cared for. The Altmanns have four hundred Holsteins and one hundred Illawarra, an Australian red cow produced by crossing shorthorn and Ayrshires with local breeds. The Illawarra are high producers, and their milk, rich in butterfat, is valued for butter- and cheesemaking.

  David, a fifth-generation dairy farmer, bought this farm in 1999 and built an open-air feed shed with a roof and long row of metal bars with spaces for cows to stick their heads through and eat the food piled up on other side. It is a cool place in the heat of summer, with mist sprinklers that are turned on in extra-hot weather. The feed smells fragrant—a mixture of hay, wheat, canola, apple pulp from a nearby juice producer, crushed oranges from an orange juice plant, potatoes, and leftover grain from brewers.

  1920s ad for cow feed “guaranteed” to increase cow’s milk production.

  The cows are free to wander the hills and drift over to the feedlot when they are hungry. They produce well over the average cow’s yield in Australia, and their lives must not be too stressful, because they lactate for at least seven years, often nine, and sometimes even twelve or fourteen. But eventually, like all cows, they get shipped o
ff to the slaughterhouse.

  20

  RISKY INITIALIZATIONS

  With every scandal, like the nineteenth century one about swill milk, the one involving Nestlé formula, or the more recent one in China, the consumer grows more distrustful of dairies, corporations, and government. There are always more scandals, and so public distrust of milk only increases.

  The nuclear age began in 1945 with the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead of horrifying the world, these bombings set off a nuclear arms race. While the Japanese were struggling with the aftereffects of radiation and fallout, the U.S. government denied that such things existed and pursued nuclear tests aboveground, sending poison into the atmosphere. In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. Britain followed in 1952, by which time the United States was exploding even more powerful hydrogen bombs in the South Pacific. In 1953 the Soviet Union was testing hydrogen bombs in Siberia. Scientists estimate that between 1945 and 1958, the power of the nuclear weapons exploded in the world was equal to eight hundred times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

  With each explosion, tiny particles that could not be seen, not even with a high-powered microscope, entered the atmosphere and traveled the world. Some of this so-called radioactive fallout dissipated, but some didn’t, including strontium-90, which accumulates in bones, especially the unformed bones of children, and can cause cancer, leukemia, or premature aging; and iodine-131, which accumulates in thyroid glands and can also cause cancer. This fallout landed on the plants that cows ate, and it passed on into their milk and into anyone who drank that milk. In 1958 a test of milk in forty-eight U.S. and Canadian cities showed that its strontium-90 content had at least doubled between 1957 and mid-1958. The U.S. government tried to assure everyone that those levels weren’t dangerous, but few people, including many scientists, believed them. In 1962, health officials found so much iodine-131 in Salt Lake City milk that they advised people to avoid it.

  In 1963, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain agreed to stop aboveground nuclear testings in the atmosphere, but nuclear latecomers France and China did not sign on; France continued until 1974 and China until 1980. Since then testing has been underground. But in 1963, the Federal Radiation Council warned that even without further explosions in the atmosphere, health issues such as an increased incidence of leukemia and birth defects could continue for the next seventy-five years. Contaminated children could pass on those conditions to their children as well.

  In the 1950s there was a widespread movement to avoid milk because cows were eating nuclear-contaminated grass and their milk contained the contaminants. As this risk appeared to abate, other problems arose, and milk suffered from a series of scandals. Each came with initials: PBB, rBGH, BST, BSE, and GMO.

  In 1973 in Michigan, cows were becoming lethargic. They had stopped eating and were producing less milk. Eventually, some became too weak to stand. But veterinarians could not identify a disease. Perhaps pesticides were the cause? Farmers suspected a new protein-enriched feed that contained Nutrimaster, a brand name for magnesium oxide, which increased milk production by improving digestion. After considerable testing, it was discovered that the feed contained not magnesium oxide but polybrominated byphenyl, or PBB, a flame retardant for fabrics and plastic. When consumed by cows, the PBB was stored in their livers and fatty tissue. From the fatty tissue, it went into milk, and from the milk, into the fatty tissue and livers of people who drank the milk, causing severe health problems. Selling milk from cows so sick they could barely stand? It seemed as if not much had changed since the days of swill milk.

  It turned out that the Michigan Chemical Corporation, which made both Nutrimaster and PBB, had mixed the two products up because they looked similar and were packaged similarly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture assured the public that there was nothing more to worry about, and going forward, that was true. But a few years later, the children who had consumed the contaminated milk started to show alarming symptoms such as weight loss, hair loss, lack of coordination, and lethargy. Those children who had breastfed from women who had consumed the contaminated milk didn’t escape, either; the mothers had had PBB in their breast milk. A third of all Michigan farm children were sick by the mid-1970s, along with some children in Detroit and other cities. After the PBB scandal, the public grew increasingly wary of high-intensity feeds, which increase milk production but often cause indigestion in the cows.

  Starting in 1993, cows began being injected with something called recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH, also sometimes known as bovine somatotropin, or bST, which producers promised would increase a cow’s milk production by as much as 25 percent. To facilitate that increased production, the cows’ udders grew to an unnatural size. That was troubling to some dairy farmers, but others reasoned that if a farm could increase production that much without buying and maintaining additional cows or even buying additional feed, it was worthwhile.

  The rBGH compound had been developed by the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which was also exploring other ideas for large-scale, high-production dairy farming. Although the college was located in upstate New York, most of its ideas were not suitable for the small New York or New England dairy farms, but rather for the large dairy farms in the West. Many there, including California farms with as many as thirty thousand cows, began following the Cornell model and using rBGH.

  There has since been a significant consumer outcry against rBGH, in large part because it was created using highly controversial genetic modification methods, with the help of an old consumer-target favorite, the Monsanto Agrochemical Company. In 1993, it was approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration, but Canada, the European Union, and other countries banned the use of rBGH in cows, fearing that consuming milk from cows injected with the hormone heightened the risk of certain types of cancer. There is no conclusive evidence that such a risk exists, however, and in the United States, the National Institutes of Health concluded that milk from rBGH-injected cows and milk from noninjected cows were exactly the same. The American Cancer Society refuses to take a position on the issue but says that so far there is no evidence of risk.

  Nonetheless, rBGH has not been a huge success in the United States. Some farmers who started using it in the 1990s have discontinued the injections, and today, less than a third of American farmers use the hormone. Farmers have found that rBGH has not lived up to expectations as far as milk production is concerned, and that it causes cows to suffer indigestion and teat infections.

  This in turn has caused farmers using the hormone to use more antibiotics, which is another concern for milk drinkers. It has been found that excessive use of antibiotics in farm animals leads to resistance to these drugs in humans who consume these animals’ meat or milk. Most research does not indicate that milk from antibiotic-injected cows poses a risk to humans, but a growing number of Americans no longer respond to antibiotics, and about 23,000 Americans die from antibiotic-resistant infections every year. There is also a risk that the antibiotics given to the animals could get into the soil and into plants and vegetables, resulting in even more humans becoming antibiotic-resistant. In 2013, in an action unrelated to the use of rBGH, the FDA decided to clamp down on what they regarded as the excessive use of antibiotics in cows, chickens, and pigs.

  Despite the government’s and scientists’ assurances that rBGH is not harmful, many American consumers have been demanding that labels say whether the milk, butter, cheese, or yogurt they buy has been made with milk from hormone-injected cows. Some dairy companies have already started to do this, selling milk in containers labeled “rBGH-free” or “hormone-free.”

  At the heart of the controversy is the fact that these large-production giant dairies that can fill all the milk shelves of America at a low price are putting small farms out of business, and developments such as rBGH encourage that process. In fact, the Cornell economists studying the impact of rBGH predicted that it would drive sma
ll farms out of business because of the type of herd management it requires. It is central to the Cornell philosophy that “larger herds are indicative of better managers.” They even encouraged economic policies to help ease small-scale farmers out of dairying, which would completely undo the rural culture, even the landscape, of a number of states such as New York and Vermont. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders wrote in 2012, “There is something very wrong when large processors reap large profits, and family farmers … can barely survive, or must sell their farms.”

  Between 1970 and 2006, about 573,000 dairy farms in the United States closed, but there was not a corresponding drop in U.S. milk production. Why? In the twenty-first century, the number of dairy farms with more than two thousand cows doubled.

  Consumers’ distrust of the dairy industry can be blamed not only on PBB and rBGH, but also on BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, more commonly referred to as mad cow disease. This, too, was caused by an attempt to give cows a concentrated feed that would cause them to produce more milk. The more protein cows eat, at least in theory, the more milk they will produce. And so the idea was hatched that cheap meat and bone meal could be put in their feed, despite the fact that cows are herbivores by nature and not designed to eat meat.

  BSE is thought to have first shown up in English cattle in 1985, although the disease was not diagnosed until 1986. It seems to have been caused by the presence of infected nerve tissue—brains and spinal cords—in the feed. The disease, which kills cows, is also fatal and incurable in humans. The human variant of the disease is known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).