By George Moffatt • Education Chair, Jersey Shore Group
A recent ad in a very national magazine stated that milk cows eat a variety of healthy foods. It listed citrus and beet pulp, brewer’s grains, but also candy and unsold bakery goods (cows reportedly love chocolate).
Good PR, certainly. But just try to sell this food utopia fantasy to the cows.
Surprisingly, the magazine ad avoided the industry’s usually bucolic illustrations of cows grazing peacefully on lush, grassy fields, with the sun shining down benevolently upon them. Instead, the ad revealed one of the milk industry’s little embarrassing secrets. It had a photo of cows lined up inside a long dark wooden shed, their heads stretched out of very narrow windows, apparently trying to dine on the weeds outside. Or, just as probable, seeking sunshine and fresh air.
The tragic fact is that milk cows are “forced” into an industrial, non-stop, brutally imposed breeding process to increase their output of milk. A cow’s yearly output is about 7,000 pounds by traditional farming, but today’s industrially imposed output is about 19,000 pounds,
This corporately induced “efficiency” comes at a gut-wrenching cost to today’s female “breeders”—the industry’s term for milk cows. They usually start calving at around 2 and produce milk industrially for just 3 to 4 years. A cow’s normal lifespan is 15-20 years. At the end of their abbreviated life span, cows are depleted of calcium, and their bodies and their legs are so weakened that they can no longer give birth. At this point, the industry labels the milk cows, euphemistically, as “culled” or “spent,” and they are typically sent to slaughter.
By then, they can be suffering from a variety of disorders, such as emaciation, lameness, sole ulceration, laminitis, and hoof rot. They also suffer from painful internal disorders, such as twisted stomachs, torn udder ligaments, and acute or painful bacterial infections.
The dairy companies remove these cows to make room for the next unfortunate group of females.
Not surprisingly, the magazine ad skipped over another problem—what could be labeled the cows’ retribution—the air pollution that cows, both healthy and sick, waft up daily into our already polluted skies. Giggly children call them “farts”; demure adults prefer “wind”; and scientists, “carbon dioxide”or “CO2.”
Most livestock, especially ruminants such as cattle, produce methane (CH4) as part of their normal digestive processes. This process, called enteric fermentation, represents over a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
Another issue is cow waste, also called “manure” or “poop” (your choice). Hopefully, the manure is spread responsibly as fertilizer on farmland. Unfortunately, it sometimes is untreated and just piled high, where it may pollute underground and above-ground water supplies.
In fairness, we can’t blame the cows’ evacuations as deliberate “revenge,” although given their treatment by the factory farms, they certainly would be justified. After all, the nation’s calves’ and bulls’ journeys to Nirvana are quick and presumably painless. Only the female milk cows must pass through Hades first.
In their heyday, most Jersey dairies sold their milk locally under their brand names and even delivered door-to-door. But today, most of their milk is sold to processors for resale.
The Garden State has about 40 dairies remaining, down from about 200 in 2000. In the early 1900s, dairy farms were an important business in the state. In 1935 there were 6,000 dairy farms with 130,000 cows. Today, because New Jersey’s dairies are competing with the factory farms, they, generate roughly 84 million pounds of milk per year. Although that sounds like a lot, New Jersey ranks about 44th in US milk production.
Resources
Milk ad: https://shorturl.at/8jGF5
NJ Dairy Farms: https://shorturl.at/0DWxZ
Milk stats: https://shorturl.at/sD2c5