7000 Pounds of Milk

Post has an article on a Virginia farmer selling Holstein bulls to Russia. Two paragraphs:

Russian farmers are trying to improve dairy herds that produce an average 7,000 pounds of milk per cow each year, said Valery Osipenko, who co-owns Vistar Farms of Mechanicsville, which sold the bulls to Russian farmers for an undisclosed amount. Top-quality American Holsteins produce an average of more than 20,000 pounds of milk per year.

Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, Osipenko said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.

Random thoughts: back in the 50's, we were averaging something over 10,000 lbs, maybe more, so Russia is really backwards.

Of course, back in the 1700's dual purpose cattle were the rule in America.  I wonder about the evolution of the industry.  In the 50's we had "registered" Holsteins, tracking the ancestry of our cows.  Used artificial insemination and choose the bull based on the production records of his progeny.  Now Darwin writes about how humans have changed domestic breeds by their selection, but I don't recall he used cows as an example.  I'm vaguely aware Washington and Jefferson imported animals based on their qualities: is it possible sheep can be "dual-purpose" (wool versus mutton)?

If we assume that US dairymen were, in the 19th century, trying to improve the productivity of their herds, then maybe it's also reasonable to assume the same was true in Russia.  So what might have happened? Perhaps the Russian Revolution and the arrival of collective farms meant the freezing of the drive to improve productivity?  Meaning for 70 years the Russian dairy industry was frozen?

Still surprising to me that they haven't progressed faster in the 20+ years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Organic Versus Locavore

There's a tension between organic food and the locavores, a tension I see in this NYTimes article.  There's a scarcity of organic milk, particularly on the East Coast, partly because prices haven't risen high enough, partly because of the inflexibility of supply (takes 3 years for a dairy to convert to organic production), and partly because there's not enough organic grain grown in the East.  The latter is important because grain is important for milk production; cows produce much less milk if they're simply grazing pasture and eating hay.  So there's an imbalance in the food economy, an imbalance which the free market fills by transporting food/grain from distant places, but that's not something which locavores can be happy about.

These Young Farmers Are Wimps

From the Life of a FArm blog:

The highlight of haying this year was the addition of the New Holland 570 square baler. After putting up 400 square bales we have affectionatley[sic] named them “idiot cubes”.  There is so much work in squares it sure makes you wonder if it’s worth it.

 Of course, that's why farmers have gone to round bales, even though there's a significant loss of hay in the weathering of the outside layer. (I remember the first round bales, back in the early 50's, which were roughly the size of the square bales.  Difficult to handle and because ratio of the surface to the mass was more equal, a lot more loss if you had a rain storm during haying.  You couldn't leave them in the field, so it was a technology which was quickly abandoned, or that at least went back to the labs to be developed later.

Seasonal Dairy?

One of the certainties of my life has been that dairy farmers work harder than other farmers, since they have to milk cows 365 days a year.  Turns out that's not true, you can go with the "seasonal" approach as described by MO extension. (For those not familiar with mammalian milk production, a cow's milk production dwindles slowly as time from when she last gave birth grows. Dairy cows are milked for about 300 days, then "dried off" for the last two months before they give birth again.)  I follow the concept, but it used to be that milk prices were higher in the winter months, when milk supply was lowest, so there was a financial incentive to spread calving times out, not to mention the need to get a monthly milk check.  Things may have changed since I was a boy.

Yellow Margarine

Via Ezra Klein, a history of coloring margarine. New York was one of the states in which Parkay margarine was sold white, with a packet of coloring which you kneaded into the product to turn it yellow. I remember my mother doing this, so it must have been right at the end of WWII.  I'm sure mom, being a true believer in the virtues of dairy, was not using margarine willingly.

Big Dairies Means Better Milk?

That's the conclusion of a study of Wisconsin dairies, as summarized at extension.org.

Fairfax County: The Leading Dairy County

Yes, by some measurements Fairfax county is the country's richest county, but its true measure of fame came 110 years ago when it was the leading dairy county in Virginia, apparently a position it maintained until the 1950's.  Herndon Patch has a post on this, and the famed Sadie, who apparently average 11-12,000 pounds of milk a year as the best known Holstein in the world.  That's compared to the average cow in VA which produced 2,500 pounds.  If I remember, our Holsteins in the 1950's were producing something comparable to Sadie, but they had the advantage of another 30 or so years of breeding and advancement in nutrition.

Alfalfa: I Didn't Know That

"  It take alfalfa about a week in hot drying weather to turn into hay. "  That's from this post from Life on a Colorado Farm.

In Broome County, NY alfalfa was not a big crop, wasn't even a small crop that I remember.  Now I'm assuming that Colorado's "hot drying weather" has lots less humidity than we had.  But the big factor would be rain: our usual pattern would be to get rain pretty regularly over the summer, enough to damage and often to spoil any hay in the field.  But the timothy/orchard grass hay which was common didn't take that long to cure.  Mow one day, rake the afternoon of the next day, and bale on the third day would be the normal pattern.  Leave the hay in the field much longer and the risk of rain would be too great. 

So that, plus the difficulty of getting a good stand of alfalfa established, probably explains why there wasn't much alfalfa grown.

Mom Knew Best

She always said milk and eggs were the perfect food: of course, we lived on a dairy/poultry farm so her opinion might be a bit suspect.  The NYTimes has a discussion of a forthcoming book on body size and health by Robert Fogel et. al. which included this bit:

Recent research by the anthropologist Andrea Wiley challenges some of our assumptions. She has shown that drinking more milk in childhood does make you taller.

Simulators for Everything

University Diaries points to this dairy cow simulator for vet training, and for artificial inseminators.

Butter

John Phipps links to a post on the history of butter, which the Romans disdained, and apparently it's no longer on the bad food list.  My mother would be glad to know that; she thought milk and eggs the perfect foods.

The Sound of Bloggers

That is, chewing the cud, which fits someone who grew up on a dairy farm.

NY Dairies Can't Win

Not only have corn prices gone through the roof, but the roof is falling, at least in Saratoga and Washington counties, NY on several farms.

A couple comments, which sound hard-hearted:

• I suspect many of the roofs which succumbed to the snow load were on buildings erected during the last half of the last century.  I doubt either the old-old-fashioned barn on my childhood farm, or the old-fashioned hip-roofed barn which was the standard when I was born would have suffered so.  Their roofs were steeper in pitch than the more modern barns I've seen.
• I'm not sure why FSA should be involved.  Surely the farmers were carrying insurance on buildings and herd.  If they had insurance and the insurance covered barn collapses because of snow, FSA should not be involved.

The Dirty Little Secrets of Life--Milk

There's all sorts of things we live with by ignoring them; just pass by on the other side of the street.  One is milk.

I'm reminded of that by this extension post on milk quality.

Note the emphasis on "clean" in the writeup.  The dirty little secret is that some amount of manure gets in the milk. It's inevitable. It's something we don't like to dwell on, something I didn't dwell on even when I was growing up on a dairy farm drinking raw milk and fully aware of the fact; just something we live with by ignoring.

Small Dairies Reviving in NY

A reminiscence from Mr. Dubner at Freakonomics tied to a possible resurgence of small dairy plants catering to the food movement in NY.

I can't resist noting that apparently Mr. Dubner's family had a miraculous cow which gave milk 365 days a year.  (No mention of a bull.)  Traveling 10 miles to a dairy farm sounds odd to me, although I'm probably imagining that he's my age and lived in my area of upstate.  And, unless the farm had Jerseys or Ayrshires, I really doubt the 2 inches of cream on a gallon of milk.  No way, no how.

Organic Dairy--How to Judge

A set of bullet points from a study of organic dairy:

• The average cow on organic dairy farms provides milk through twice as many, markedly shorter lactations and lives 1.5 to 2 years longer than cows on high-production conventional dairies;
• Because cows live and produce milk longer on organic farms, milking cow replacement rates are 30% to 46% lower, reducing the feed required and wastes generated by heifers raised as replacement animals;
• Cows on organic farms require 1.8 to 2.3 breeding attempts per calf carried to term, compared to 3.5 attempts on conventional farms;
• The enhanced nutritional quality of milk from cows on forage based diets, and in particular Jersey cows, significantly reduces the volume of wastes generated on organic dairy farms; and
• The manure management systems common on most organic farms reduce manure methane emissions by 60% to 80%, and manure plus enteric methane emissions by 25% to 45%. 

I've some quibbles: how does quality of milk reduce volume of wastes? What's unique about organic manure management? (Presumably the organic dairies are small enough to spread manure on the fields, while the non-organic are too big for that?)  3.5 breeding attempts strikes me as high, particularly if we're talking actual inseminations. 

But my bigger criticism is that these don't seem to me to be the right metrics.  What would be right?  Taking a dairy-wide view over years, standardizing the units for both conventional and organic. For example, take a 10-cow dairy (i.e., 10 milkers, plus appropriate replacements) over 10 years.  What's the total feed input and its cost, what's the total output of milk, and meat over the 10 years, what's the total manure output and their related emissions?  Throw in some metrics for quality of milk (is more fat better--it used to be but maybe not now).  Once you do that comparison you can proceed to the advantages of large versus small, as in the manure issue.

Dairy Management Answers Back

The Post carries a letter today from the chief executive of Dairy Management, defending their position.  One point he affirms, which I thought I got from the AMS website but which wasn't clear, is:

"The Post objects that the program wastes "government authority" by being administered by the Agriculture Department. But even here, dairy farmers actually pay USDA for all its costs of administering the program. It costs taxpayers nothing, which is as it should be."

 Of course, the tobacco program ran into a public buzzsaw, which resulted in a "no net cost" program.  But that never inhibited tobacco's critics from blasting the government for "subsidizing tobacco".  Similarly, I fully expect the food movement to blast the government for subsidizing obesity by promoting cheese.

Dairy, Cheese, and the Post

Saturday the Post's editorial board weighed in on Dairy Management and cheese.  A paragraph:

Constitutional is not the same as wise, however. Even if this national cheese-peddling corporation doesn't waste government money, it wastes government authority. Dairy farmers are perfectly capable of buying their own advertising. And shoppers are perfectly capable of deciding whether they want more cheese or not. The federal government's only role should be to disseminate objective nutritional information free from conflicts of interest, real or apparent. Working to increase the demand for certain commodities is the epitome of big, stupid government. We'll be very interested to see whether the new Republican House has the courage to say so.

I believe they're wrong because they're ignoring the "free-rider problem" here. The only way for farmers to coordinate and to be sure everyone pays their share of the bill for advertising is to have the government enforce the rules. 

Dairy Management, Cheese, and a Lousy USDA Web Effort

The Times has an article pointing out the contradiction between USDA urging a low-fat diet and "Dairy Management's" promotion of cheese usage, particularly in the form of cheese pizzas, working with Dominos. Dairy Management turns out to be the umbrella organization for dairy research and promotion efforts, thus receiving the checkoff fees from dairy producers. Although the article notes the bulk of the money the organization spends ($140 million) comes from fees, it claims it also gets several million from USDA.  It calls it a "creation" of USDA. It doesn't go into the details of how research and promotion efforts are approved (via a referendum of producers) and funded. 

The article was, for a while, the most emailed article on the Times website. According to this Treehugger post Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle are outraged.  Given the article's tone and content, I'm not surprised.  Even knowing more of the background and growing up on a dairy farm I'm bothered by the conflict.  As an ex-bureaucrat, I'm more distressed by USDA's website for failing to provide good information. The Agricultural Marketing Service, which administers the research and promotion efforts for the various commodities, all of which are authorized by Congress, doesn't have a good, short explanation of such things in general, or dairy in particular.  Do a search for "Dairy Management" , using quotes, on the website and the first page gives you no hits for the promotion organization. 

The best response I could find on the site was a generic statement that  the programs are fully funded by the assessment fees, which might mean the federal money the article refers to must be that used for oversight. But trying to troll through the reports to Congress seemed to indicate USDA was reimbursed for its oversight expenses.  So the "several million dollars" the article refers to might be research money funneled through ARS, but who knows.  I'd hope after the people in the ivory tower (USDA Administration Building) get through scrambling around to respond there will be a big improvement in the USDA/AMS site.  I hope, but I'm skeptical.

My Mother Always Said: Drink Your Milk

John Phipps quotes from research showing that milk was the secret weapon of the barbarians who sacked Rome (my distant cousins, I believe).