Feminist Vegans and Dairy

From a letter to the editor of Book World (which I initially couldn't find through navigating the Times website, so retyped, and then found the link by a Google search.

Andrew Delbanco [in a review of The Victims' Revolution] classifies as "cant" the statement that "dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother."  I wonder which of these facts about dairy production he disputes: (1) mammals produce milk only after giving birth (2) female cows produce milk only if they have recently calved (3) people cannot take the milk if the calf drinks it; (4) dairy farmers therefore remove calves from their mothers within days of birth; (5) both mother and child resist and protest this separation; (6) mothers often bellow and moan for days thereafter; (7) mothers sometimes go to extreme lengths to locate and reunite with their calves; (8) dairy farmers utilize restraints to prevent them from doing so.

Dairy is the product of the exploitation for profit of the reproductive capacities of female bodies.  To consider this a feminist issue is a defensible political position.  Cows share with us the basic brain architecture responsible for emotion.  The idea that mother cows do not grieve when their children are removed from them, and are not grieving still as machines suck the milk from their bodies -- that is cant. 

signed: Patrice Jones
Springfield, VT

The writer is a co-founder of VINE, a feminist animal sanctuary that shelters, among others, survivors of the dairy industry.

The context of the quote referred to is: "A couple of years ago, Bawer [the author of The Victims' Revolution] made a trip home to see what’s happened to the academic world he left behind. He attended a few conferences for women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and Chicano studies, where he heard plenty of cant, as when a participant at a “Fat Studies” conference explained her veganism by declaring: “Dairy is a feminist issue. Milk comes from a grieving mother.”"

Based on my childhood on a small dairy, I would dispute the following:

(2) Cows produce milk for roughly 300 days after calving, not just "recently calved".
(3) Cows produce more milk than any calf could drink. 80 pounds daily in the first month after calving if memory serves, and that figure is probably twice as high now.  We fed our calves about 14 pounds of milk a day, gradually weaning them to hay and grain.  The calf was probably 3 months old, or so. Now if left together, would the calf have continued to suckle? Perhaps, though cows get tired of suckling and are willing and able to use their hooves on their offspring, so I wouldn't expect a prolonged babyhood.
(6) I'd say some cows bellow (never heard a moan) for a couple days, but the majority don't.
(7) We never had any cows go to "extreme lengths" to reunite that I remember.
(8) So we never used any restraints on "grieving cows" which weren't a part of the normal routine--i.e., stanchions to hold them from milking.

The Volt and Farming

The Post runs a Reuters piece on the GM Volt today, in which I think they distorted the picture.  (The gist of the article seems to be here, though it's not quite what appeared in the print edition.) The headline was that GM is losing $50,000 on each Volt they sell. The reality seems to be that GM and farmers share something.

In the article, there's this sentence: "Each Volt then costs around $20,000 to $32,000 to build, including materials, labor and factory operations"  And the Volt is supposed to sell for $39,145.

What that says to me is while GM is taking a loss on each Volt because of the accounting for the development costs and the overhead of the company, they've actually got positive cash flow on each one (assuming they don't discount the price much).  That's like a farmer.  As long as she can sell her crop for more than the out-of-pocket cost of growing and harvesting it, she can keep going, hoping next year the prices will be better and the yield will be higher.  That's rational, at least assuming the farmer is emotionally invested in farming.  So too is it rational for GM to continue to produce and sell Volts, assuming next year the prices will be better, the yield higher, and the company and its customers will be higher on the learning curve.

Farming Apprenticeships

Farmdocdaily has a post discussing the problems of establishing farming apprenticeships.  Sounds a lot more difficult than I would have supposed.  I guess one problem is minimum wage requirements.  Seems as if you could have a contractual relationship farmer A pays B $x an hour for work; apprentice B pays A $x for lessons.  Probably too simple.

Polling

Last night for the second day in a row I took a phone call from a polling service, using an automated system.  They asked roughly similar questions, though last night's was a bit more detailed, particularly on the demographics (i.e., religion). 

If I recall, and my memory is fading, this is the first time I've been polled solely on politics, excluding the calls where the Dems reassure themselves I'm still a rock-bound Democratic voter who will vote/has voted.

FSA and CCC: the Magic Numbers

Are 8.2 and 7.6.

What does that mean? Based on a very fast skim of the OMB report on sequestration, FSA would take an 8.2 percent hit to its administrative funds, and CCC would take a 7.6 percent hit to part of its funds. I don't understand the CCC calculation but the cut amounts to $469 million, with a good portion of the $19,175 billion either exempt or offset.

[Update: Appendix B has a breakdown of sequestrable versus exempt.  Unfortunately I can't copy the text, but something called the "Discrimination Claim Settlement" is sequestrable.  Is that Pigford, or the women and Hispanic?]

In Which I Trash the Sammies

The "Sammies" are awards ( 2012 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals ) to federal employees for service to America.  This year's awardees are described in this Post piece. 

Of course they all appear to be big shots, which sort of makes sense because bureaucratically speaking, the higher you rise in an organization the greater your impact and thus potentially the greater the contribution you can make to the U.S. 

Somehow today this logic falls flat to me.  If I've got a rich uncle who dies and leaves me money, lots of money, I might just set up a series of awards for employees at the lower end of the pay scale, people who went far beyond the bounds of their job description. Seems to me performance by lower-paid employees could be much more extraordinary, all things considered, than the jobs done by GS-14's.   Maybe set the cutoff at GS-7, or at GS-12, but no higher.

Beyond the challenge of identifying a rich uncle, the next step is figuring out an impartial way to make the awards.

Best Sentence Today (Nun)

"What a difference a nun makes."

That's from a Project on Government Oversight post about oversight of nuclear weapon facilities. (The "nun" in question was one of a group of protesters who roamed through a supposedly secure facility, causing a big shot at Energy to change his mind.

Call an Ambulance for the Right Wing

I worry for their hearts when they hear Jane Fonda is playing Nancy Reagan. (I wonder whether Alan Rickman can change his voice enough to be convincing as Ronald--probably he's a great actor.)

MN Famers on Congress " we’re hopeless"

So says Rep. Collin Peterson--his constituents don't expect action from Congress on the farm bill.

From Farm Policy.

[Updated: Politico piece on the current status.]

[Update 2: Politico report on rally for farm bill]

A Fat Tax

Sarah Kliff has a post at the Post on a possible "fat tax" on milk--boosting the price for the high-octane stuff.  I know the difference, but I remember my father checking the butterfat content of our milk; was it shown on the milk check, or was it a separate process--however it worked it affected the price we got for our milk.  As she writes in the post, butterfat is an expensive part of the milk.

The study on which she writes looked at supermarkets which priced low fat milk lower than full fat milk.