This morning I was watching The American Heartland....a farming/rural life program on PBS...sponsored, by the way, by Monsanto and the Farm Bureau. The featured story was about Fair Oaks Farm a large (22,000 acre) dairy farm in Indiana, where they milk 30,000 cows in ten dairy barns. The farm has also become a big tourist attraction promoting dairy products, and 21st century farming practices...
Fair Oaks has a slogan..."From Grass to Glass".....more on that in a minute.
With 30,000 cows Fair Oaks must have a ton of manure....so several times a day the manure is vacuumed up, moved to giant digesters, and turned into methane that is used to generate electricity for the barns and other facilities. Pretty cool! That was the only thing "cool" about Fair Oaks.
What is life like at Fair Oaks for the cows? Well, by the looks of things from the TV program they live in a nice clean environment. The "girls" all looked clean and healthy....but....here's where I have a problem....the cows are fed 40 lbs. of grain, 50 lbs of silage, and 30 gallons of water every day. Grain...and silage? Then, three times a day, they are led from their feeding stalls to a carousel where they are hooked up to a milking machine and have the milk sucked out while they gently go round and round...to the delight of the tourist! Isn't farming fun!
These cows never feel the sun on their backs, they never eat grass growing in a pasture. In fact, from what I saw on the TV program, most of Fair Oaks 22,000 acres was devoted to growing corn.....no doubt Monsanto GM corn....that is, no doubt, fed to the cows as part of their 90 lbs a day diet.
From grass to glass? I wonder where the grass fits into this equation? Perhaps they feed them some alfalfa or maybe some hay?
When I was a boy, where I grew up, dairy cows nearly out numbered people. Cows filled every field, grazing on red clover and grass.....productive, family farms dotted the landscape. Local dairies were common....I was raised on fresh, local milk. Unfortunately, today, that dairy herd is about half what it was 40 years ago. And dairy farms, once numbering over 11,000, have dwindled to less than 2000. Local dairies are gone, the milk is now shipped by tanker trucks to processing plants all over New England....Those pastures of grass and clover, are now planted with mono crops of Monsanto and Pioneer GM corn.
There are some bright spots out there...consumers are turning against genetically modified foods, and some states, are seeing a return to doing things "the old way" , and a return of small scale family farming. The politics is still tough, and making a living under a "farm policy" geared toward the factory farm, is a rough row to hoe....this is an area I'm learnig more about all the time...the one thing I do know is this....
There are "farms"....factory farms....and there are farms.....family farms. Who grows your food, and how they grow your food is important...If you know a local farmer, thank them....help them...support them.
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Agreed! And supporting local farmers is good for us, too - tomatoes that don't taste like cardboard, for one thing.
ReplyDeleteThere are some small organic farms in Indiana, at least around Bloomington. A few of them even agreed to participate in a gleaning program with the local food bank. Volunteers (me included when I could get out of the freaking library) would go out and pick produce for the food bank - things that would have been composted because the farmer had enough to sell, but didn't have the man power to pick to take to the foodbank. We even helped weed, stake tomatoes, etc - whatever it took to help out a farmer who was helping out the hungry in the community. It's a completely win-win program - helps the community, helps the farmers. What could be better?