A Large Dairy, Poor Cows

 Big explosion at a dairy in Texas Monday, with estimates of the number of cows killed at 18,000!

Don't know the cause of the explosion--possibly methana from manure would be a guess.  

Can only feel sorry for the cows which died, which have to be killed because of injuries, and which survived but won't be milked on schedule, not to mention their likely PTSD. 

Me and Chocolate Milk

 This piece about the controversy over including chocolate milk in the school lunch program reminded me of something.

Growing up, dad would bring up some milk from the morning milking which went into the refrigerator.  As it was raw milk, the cream rose to the top.  Mom would skim the cream off for use in tea, coffee, cereal.  We'd drink the milk remaining, the skim milk. So I was accustomed to the taste and texture of skim milk.

When dad drove the truck to Greene, our market town for feed from the Grange-League-Federation (co-op) store and bigger grocery stores than our local one, we'd often go in the morning and get lunch at a diner.  My order was always the same, tuna fish sandwich and chocolate milk.  I disliked the taste and texture of the homogenized milk, so chocolate milk was the only thing I'd drive.

The Role of Robots

 Matt Yglesias has a piece at substack on the need for robots, attacking the thesis that robots will take away workers jobs.

I didn't study it, but it did cause me to think about farming and robots. My impression is that robots and AI are making rapid progress. Robotic milking in dairy, self-driving tractors, flame-throwing weeders, big data and precision agriculture. At least in the world of farming I don't see robots taking jobs.  What seems to be happening is two-fold:

• reduction in immigration, which mostly supply the low-end work. When TFG tries to build a wall reducing immigration, that increases the incentive for robots. When robots are developed that reduces the incentive for immigration.  
• reducing the number of real farms--most obviously in the world of dairy. The investment in robotic milkers means you need a bigger operation to make it economical, which means the big farms drive out the small dairies. 

Watering the Milk and Vegan Milk

Stumbled on a factoid in the footnotes to a book I'm reading: "The Weirdest People in the World"--about which more later.  The footnote ties to a mention of what economists call "credence goods".  Thoreau originated a famous quote, now used by lawyers: "a trout in the milk" which the piece at the link explains. 

The context is that buffalo milk in markets in an Indian city was tested and found to be adulterated by the addition of varying amounts of water, from 3 percent to more than 40 percent. But consumers couldn't distinguish the adulteration by taste (hence a credence good). 

In the US milk, at least cows milk, is tested for quality, such as fat content. Thoreau's observation--that finding a trout in the milk would be sure proof the milk had been watered--shows this wasn't always the case in the U.S.

As far as I can tell, based on an extensive 10 minutes of research, there are no standards for plant-based milk--all the attention seems to be devoted to the issue of whether calling it "milk" is misleading.  

I'd guess that milk testing evolved well before the idea of requiring nutritional labels on food, and as long as plant-based milks have such labels it removes any impetus for a testing regime comparable to that for milk. 

Amish/Mennonite Dominance in Farming?

 

Read this tweet today:

Young Mennonites posh with cash from selling in high priced areas are stopping at random farms around here trying to buy the farmers out. Fastest growing sector of farmers in my area, along with young Amish.

— NYFarmer (@NYFarmer) April 24, 2022

Back in the day it seemed as if the "Pennsylvania Dutch" and Amish were the same, with the majority living in PA.  In the 60+ years since I'm aware that Amish communities have been established in many states in the Northeast and Midwest.  I assume the Mennonite pattern is somewhat similar.  I know not all Amish are dairy farmers, or even farmers of any type.  And I don't know how heavily they're represented among those leaving dairy farmer.

 So my question is--are close are the Amish/Mennonites to establishing a dominance in dairy farming above the Mason-Dixon line?  How about the organic and traditional (i.e. pasture/silage) types of dairy? 

I assume the statistics aren't readily available from the government. 

Eggs and Dairy

Recent pieces on items of interest to me--the number of dairy farms has declined below 30,000 according to this.  And the average herd size in NY is a bit over 1/10 the size of CA. 

And here's a piece on eggs and inflation which covers different aspects of the industry..

Hand Milking

 A while back I ran across a reference to "hand milking", which turned out to what dad would have called "machine milking".  Now the distinction is whether it's a robot putting the teat cups onto the cows or whether it's a human.

I was reminded of this by a Newshour piece on the advance of robots in dairying. 

Buy Yourself a Hair Dryer? No--a Hay Dryer!

 As farmers in the Northeast were reminded this summer, lots of rain means poor or no hay.  It's difficult to make good hay, if you're dodging rain storms to cut the hay and then let it dry in the field (IIRC we'd usually mow one day, rake the next, and bale the third). I remember how dispiriting it was to spend a day cutting a good crop of hay, raking it into nice rows, and then see it rain for days, with dry spells just long enough to get your hopes up and turn the wet rows over to dry out, only to rain again.

Believe or not, and I'm not sure I do, they've invented and are selling a "hay dryer". The post says it's a staple in Europe, but dairymen in the US have only bought a few.  The Europeans argue that high quality hay reduces disease (i.e., listeria) and improves taste of cheese, and also feeds into the EU focus on natural food.  The EU subsidies for farmers may also help in financing. 

The Future of Fake Food

 I follow some dairy-oriented blogs and twitter accounts, many of which are concerned about the rise of fake milk--plant-based milks.  There's also concern about plant-based meat.

The increasing popularity of these "fake foods" (I'm using the term somewhat tongue in cheek) seems result from several things:

• newness, perhaps faddishness.
• health concerns. It's not clear any of the fake foods are better for you than their "real" competition, but they might be.
• environment.  Animal agriculture, whether dairy or beef, takes a hit from concerns about methane production, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
• animal rights/welfare. You have to kill beef cattle and the male calves of dairy cattle, and we don't like that thought.
• pollution.  CAFOs impact the air and water.

The saving grace for real foods is cost--centuries of development ensure that real foods are cheaper calorie for calorie, nutrient for nutrient, in today's markets.

I remember my mother kneading in the coloring package which came with the block of margarine (butter was scarce in WWII), very upset that she had to serve fake food to us when our cows were producing good milk. The last I checked margarine was cheaper than real butter, although the two products seem to be co-existing.  

I see a similar outcome for today's fake foods: innovation will continue until they're able reasonably to compete with their real counterparts on price and taste, just as margarine does with butter.  Whether real foods become just a high-end niche product for gourmets I'm less sure about. 

[Update--part of this is relevant.]

The Lactose-Intolerant Chinese Don't Have Enough Cows for Their Thirst

 I got to this Reuters article on the growing Chinese market for milk and their lack of enough cows to produce it from the Illinois extension website.  It sparked my curiosity, so I found this BBC article by Googling.  It tries to explain the demand--maybe partially yoghurt, partially other products, partially prestige? 

I'm reminded of a book I've blogged about before, Appiah's, The Honor Code.  In it he discusses the end of footbinding in China.  At roughly the time my aunt and uncle were in China working for the Y Chinese elites were dissing their culture and elevating Western culture as "modern".  Foot binding became regarded as old-fashioned, retrograde thinking.  I wonder if milk is benefiting by a similar logic.

Artificial Insemination

 That should be a click bait blog title, shouldn't it?

I think we switched from having a bull to artificial insemination around 1945 or so. I do remember when the basement of the barn, where the bull had been kept, was floored with concrete in preparation for having hens there.  

I remember when I was banned from the barn when the inseminator came, because the process of insemination was not fit for my young eyes. I remember dad discussing the virtues of different sires in choosing the semen to be used.  

It's been a long long time since then.  I was struck by this piece on the dam of the bull of the century, RORA Elevation. 9 million descendants of one bull--amazing.

Big Dairy

Two interesting pieces on big dairy--we've come a long way since dad consulted with the artificial inseminator over which bull to use for the one of our 12 cows which was in heat.

• how a big US dairy is dwarfed by a bigger one--can you believe 6 figures?
• and occasion to ponder how we got from that to this cow in 70 years.

Every Cow Has "Her People"/

Vox has an interview with the director of "First Cow", who comments of the cow: "She had her people."

She also agrees with the interviewer: “Milk is so exciting.”

The Decline? of Dairy

Is dairy farming really going to hell in a handbasket? That's what I often see, with the trend to ever-larger farms and the decline of the dairy farms of the sort I knew in my youth.

But here's another take from a blogger I follow.  She notes the decline of "English" farms of 50 cows or so over the past 20 years, but notes their replacement by Amish farms.  I'm not sure where the Amish are marketing their milk.  Is it being sold as organic?  That would seem likely.  Anyhow the post is a reminder that change is complicated. 

Poor Elsie, Borden in Bankruptcy

Borden has filed for bankruptcy protection--the second big dairy company after Dean Foods to go bust.

Why "Elsie"--see this .

Supply Management in Our Future?

There's a discussion of "supply management" in this twitter thread:

I agree with much of this and am still preparing for SM policies for grains by next year. Would have been this year if not for planting fiasco. https://t.co/cJLXWd2lwO

— John Phipps (@jwphipps) October 1, 2019

1 - SM, by fixing parity prices for commodities, won't help specialty producers. Palouse lentils, hoop-house raised heritage hogs, organic arugula won't get meaningful price parity (using differentials from marker prices? See how well it worked for OPEC in the 70s) 2/n

— Silvia Secchi (@ProfSecchi) October 1, 2019

Canada has had supply management.  

The Farm Bureau didn't like the idea of a government program in the spring.

Here's a more recent article on it.

My own thoughts are:

• I think supply management would slow the exit of farmers (perhaps fewer bankruptcies and more sell-offs when retiring) but aren't a magic bullet. There's value in slowing the exits, both in impact on the farmers and their communities and perhaps in allowing more time to find niche alerantives to the commodity milk market.
• I'm not sure why alternative "milks" have gained so much market share--price or perceived health benefits or animal welfare concerns  If it's price, supply management would shift demand out of milk.. At least it improve the outlook for those alternatives.

Perdue on Small Farms

This Post article reports that Secretary Perdue said" Tuesday during a stop in Wisconsin that he doesn’t know if the family dairy farm can survive as the industry moves toward a factory farm model."

I don't disagree with his point, at least as far as dairy farms producing for the commodity market, as opposed to niche raw milk/cheese production, but it strikes me as similar to Hillary Clinton's  comments about putting coal miners out of work.  Both true, both reflecting the work of free market capitalism, both politically inept.

Particular Causes and General Causes

One of the problems in history and social science is distinguishing between what I'll call "particular causes" and "general causes".

Two examples:

• saw a tweet on the idea that black cowboys (and other minorities) were written out of the cowboy narrative. The inference was that writers were prejudiced.  That would be what I'd label a "particular cause".  But I believe there's a general tendency when people make generalizations about a group of people: outliers are ignored,  
• people leaving their farms.  A general cause is well-known--ever since the Industrial Revolution started, or before, people have left the country for the city. A particular cause is people screwing black farmers out of their land.  

In some cases, the "general" versus "particular" may be simply a case of different levels of analysis. No doubt many people left the farm for many different reasons. Many, including my parents, died while their children had a mix of motives to not try to farm.  Dairy farmers these days are leaving the farm because they're losing too much money.  But then the question becomes why?  It could be a black family who was denied the bank loan to expand from 100 cows to 1,000 cows. Or it could be a management decision back in the day not to expand, or a lack of decisions to expand.

And Canada's Dairy Farmers Are Compensated

Prime Minister Trudeau and President Trump are similar in one way: when their wheeling and dealing on trade issues hurts farmers, they compensate them.  See this article on the Canadian program.

Big Japanese Dairies

A look at the Japanese dairy industry here.

Seems the farms are smaller than US.