© Gary Hubbell, Ranch Real Estate Broker, 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ORGANIC DAIRY FARMING
Modern dairy farming today is on a big collision course with the idyllic dream that people have of what a dairy farm should be. Let me illustrate this with an example. I have been a professional photographer for over 20 years, and contribute to several stock photography agencies. I once attended a stock photography seminar given by the owner of a major photo agency. “How many of you remember that photo of the black-and-white dairy cows on the green pasture with the red barn in the background?” he asked. Most of the photographers in the room raised their hands. “It doesn’t exist,” he said. “You may THINK you’ve seen that photo, but in actuality there isn’t a good photo of this scenario.” Indeed, I just did a google images search of “red barn dairy cattle green pasture”, and there were three images depicting the scene, none of which was very good. One would think there would be thousands of photos with red barns, green pastures, and dairy cattle, but there are not. Why? Because there are very few old-fashioned dairy farms in existence today.
 When I was a kid, I remember going over to Rex Coffman’s farm to help with the milking. He had about 20 dairy cows, and I remember being fascinated with the automatic milkers that he hooked up to the cows. It was winter when I was there, and the milking barn was steamy from the cows’ warmth in the cool room. It was made of cinder block and concrete, and the cows ate hay and grain while we hooked up the cylinders to each teat. Even with only 20 cows, Rex wasn’t going to milk them all by hand.
When I was 10, my dad went to the sale barn and came home with a milk cow. We had three good acres of pasture, and my dad saw the economy of producing all the family’s milk with our own cow. As it turned out, “Dolly” didn’t respond to anybody but me, so there I was, trudging out in the dark with a lantern each morning to milk Dolly before I went to school. I got pretty good at it. Dolly and I had a good relationship. Milking even one cow by hand takes a good 10 minutes, even if you’re fast, and 20 cows twice a day would make you old in a hurry. The problem with running a dairy as a small farmer is that you never get any relief. The cows must be milked twice (or sometimes three times) a day, every day, and unless you’ve hired the best help in the world, you won’t get to take a vacation. If you are at a high school basketball game and a man in coveralls and a ball cap stands up and leaves in the middle of an exciting contest, he’s probably a dairy farmer and it’s close to milking time.
Small farms are also inefficient, and that’s why many small dairies have folded and larger dairies have sprung up. Big dairies hire lots of people and they run it like the business that it is, where one worker clocks in to work 8-10 hours a day and then the next shift comes on and they take over. These dairies are large, complex operations, with silos for automatic delivery of grain to feed bunks; huge hay barns to hold the alfalfa they will feed; trucks coming and going, delivering feed and taking away milk.
Most dairies nowadays contain at least a couple thousand cows, and they’re kept in big feedlots until it’s time to milk, when they’re herded into milking barns and hooked up to milking machines by the hundreds. Let’s not forget that cows lactate (give milk) to raise a calf. The gestation cycle for cattle is about 9 months, and a cow will naturally nurse a calf for 9-10 months. After that, their milk dries up until the new calf is born about three months later. The cows in a dairy herd are often given a hormone that extends the duration of their heat cycle for another year, and the cows will still produce milk for almost two years. Of course, when thousands of cows are kept together in a fairly confined area, the potential for disease is very high, and the cows are given antibiotics whenever they’re sick. Of course, sick cows must be kept out of the milking rotation for a while until the antibiotics wash out of their systems, but this combination of artificial hormones, steroids, antibiotics, and the residues of pesticides and herbicides applied to their feed makes a lot of people nervous about the quality of the milk that they’re drinking and giving to their children.
In some ways, the organic milk movement is based more on sentiment and emotion than reality. People want to drink milk from “happy cows”. In reality, an organic dairy could have 4,000 cows each producing 80 pounds of milk a day. Yes, think about that—320,000 pounds of milk a day. One cow needs about an acre of irrigated pasture for grazing, so you’re talking about 4,000 acres of irrigated pasture to make sure the cows are fed according to “happy cow” standards. Given the quantity of organic milk that is in demand, it’s difficult to produce organic milk entirely from green pastures. Keep in mind that 4,000 acres is over six square miles of tremendously expensive agricultural real estate. A compromise has been struck, allowing dairy farmers to rotate cows onto green pasture for 120 days of the growing season and then bring them back into the feedlots to be fed alfalfa and grain.
Strict USDA rules have been applied to organic dairies. If a cow gets sick and needs to be doctored with antibiotics, the cow is pulled out of the herd. When the cow recovers, she is then sold to a regular dairy, because she can never be used as an organic cow again. Of course, this places restraints on organic dairies, and it’s a major loss to take a producing cow out of the herd because of an ailment that required treatment with antibiotics. Smaller cattle producers should take note—while feeder calves at 7-8 months of age are bringing 89 cents a pound (average weaning weight of 650 pounds), organic heifers ready to go into a dairy herd bring as much as $3,000 each at 22 months of age. However, farms producing these cattle must be certified organic, and accurate records must be kept of the animals’ care prior to sale to an organic dairy.
Again, because of the difficulties in keeping so many animals in organic status, smaller economies of scale might make more sense. If a farmer has 200 acres of pasture, it’s much easier to run a dairy for 200 cows than it is to keep 4,000 cows on organic fields. Prices per hundredweight are as much as 2-3 times higher than conventionally produced milk. Consequently, the higher prices for organic dairy products might justify a return to the economies of a small family farm.
Click here to keep reading—ORGANIC ALFALFA AND HAY FARMS
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