down but not out

Almost a year ago the McAllister barn burnt down in a very horrible fire. All the cows were inside and most perished in the blaze. The site smoked for days afterwards because of all the hay in the hayloft and the place stank when you drove by.

The few times I've gone by this summer there were some heifers hanging out in the green pasture next to the blackened spot where the barn was. Then today I saw that a new concrete foundation had been poured and there was a stack of roof trusses stacked in the barnyard.

Alone in my car, I cheered.

cow pus, it does a body good.

So, there is some discussion in America right now about lowering the somatic cell limit. (Somatic cell count - SCC - is a count of how many white blood cells are in a milliliter of milk. A count of less than 200,000 is thought to indicate a healthy cow, although counts can be quite low - 10-50,000. Counts higher than 250,000 probably indicate that there is probably some sort of infection going on.) The current limit is 750,000 which is, like, really fucking high, in my opinion. If your tank of milk is averaging that you have some serious mastitis going on in multiple animals. 750,000 is the American limit because science has concluded that this is highest amount of cow pus that humans can safely consume with no chance of ill effects.

In Europe the limit is 400,000 and now those socialist bastards have the gall to want to require that any milk products the US exports to Europe meet that standard. Don't they remember we saved them from the Nazis? Now the US dairy industry is considering the idea of lowering the US limit to 400,000 to comply with the European policy. This is causing some farmers and dairy pundits (is there even such a thing?) to flip out and say that farms are going to go out of business because they can't meet the 400,000 limit.

I don't know how people figure this stuff out, but some studies say that at 400,000 12% of the quarters (teats) on a farm are infected with mastitis. 750,000 is more like 25%. The idea that 25% of your cows quarters are infected doesn't speak well for a farm's cleanliness, monitoring or treatment procedures (again, in my opinion). Keep in mind that if a cow has a really bad case of mastitis, the milk will be withheld from the tank. So these numbers don't even count cows that are deemed "sick".

While I don't like to think about farms going out of business because of this (and really, you get lots of help from the department of ag and chances to fix this sort of problem - it's not like you have one high count and the state comes and takes your license away) i have the question the quality of work being done and the quality of life for cows at farms with cell count problems.

Another issue related to cell count is production and profit. A sick animal is not going to make as much milk as a healthy one. The amount is quite a bit - something like between 6-10% of potential production is lost as an cow' s SCC starts to get above 300,000. Treating a sick animals costs money - the sicker they are the more it costs. If your farm ships to a larger processing facility, there is often a premium paid for low SCC milk.

I think the US should definitely drop the limit to 400,000. It encourages better farming practices, makes cows more efficient and allows for US dairy exports to Europe.

This is a good article from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with more specific health and economic information about somatic cell counts.

If this sort of thing really trips your trigger, you can google "milk production scc" or "400000 scc europe" and read all sorts of articles about it.

old and new

my co-worker's wife had a baby a few months ago. i like hearing about her and sometimes, my co-worker or his wife will bring her by for a visit. he told me about being amazed by looking at her hands that were so soft and new. "it's like my hands are made of something completely different than hers" he said. and i know what he means. my fingers are a topographic map of cris-crossed ravines and fissures. there are hard islands of callous that rise up out of my palms. the edges of my fingernails seem to be perpetually stained with black crud. nicks and cuts and tears pepper them everywhere. when she holds my rough stained finger in her tiny perfect ones, it is like they are made out of two opposite substances.

living the dream

If you work in town ... "you'd have an easy life, in some ways. You wouldn't be out in all kinds of weather. Cold winter nights, you could lie snug, in bed and not worry about young stock freezing. Rain or shine, wind or snow, you'd be under shelter. You'd be shut up, inside walls. Likely you'd always have plenty to eat and wear and money in the bank.

"That's the truth and we must be fair about it. But there's the other side too. You'd have to depend on other folks in town. Everything you got, you'd get from other folks.

"A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please and no man can tell you to go or come. You'll be free and independent on a farm"

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote that in her book about her husband's childhood on an upstate New York farm in the 1860's. I like to think it is still a little bit true.

how we almost burt the barn down, but didn't

Two weeks ago I came out from the milk house and found the barn full of smoke. Most of the cows were outside and I quickly freed the ones being kept in that day and chased them out of the barn. By the time I had done this, the smoke was gone. Someone from the cheese plant had seen the smoke and come over to see what was going on. We searched around for a while before we found what had burnt up - a transformer box that controls the pulsation on the milking system. The wires had caught fire inside the box and burnt themselves out once the fuse tripped. The dairy supply place came and replaced the box saying the other one must have had some dirt and dust and moisture (all things present in a barn) that led to the burn out. Sigh of relief from all involved ....
Until last weekend, when I went to milk the cows and the pulsation didn't work. And the dairy supply company came and said the box they put in last time must have been no good and put in a new one which worked fine ...
Until Friday when my co-worker, Nate, went to milk and there was no pulsation. Okay ... something is getting strange now. On Monday we were definitely gonna have to call the electrician and have this stuff looked at - at least because the dairy supply place was running out of transformer boxes.
But then yesterday I was on my way to get the tractor and I thought *sniff* "yuck ... it smells like burning plastic .... oh fuck!" Indeed, the box was on fire, again. And again we dodged the bullet of catching the barn on fire mostly because god looks out for fools and little children and dairy farmers. Well obviously it couldn't wait until Monday and we called to have the electrician and the dairy repair people come out and figure out what was going on.

They searched and they searched and finally, when they were looking for something else, they found a section of the milk pipe that had a little smear of soot on it. Then they realized what was happening. (In a pipeline milking system there is the stainless steel pipe that the milk goes through and then a plastic pipe that the vacuum goes through right next to each other. There are little ports on each pipe to plug the milking machines into.) In this one spot in the barn the wires that control the pulsation went in between the milk pipe and the vacuum pipe. When the wash cycle ran (which makes the pipes jiggle) the wires were getting pinched. Eventually they got pinched enough that they plastic stripped off of them and then they got pinched again, completed the circuit and blew out the transformer - sometimes with fire and sometimes just with a big jolt of electricity. This happened 4 times before we finally figured out what was going on.

The creamery's owners came in the afternoon to get the whole story. I told them that the repair people had been there for 5 hours. (on an emergency weekend call)
That was probably expensive. he said
But less expensive than a new barn i said
yeah ... but still scary. you need a medal for bravery. he said
what i really need is a valium. i said

on not reinventing the wheel or ... i wonder how they did that?

The local library here has an excellent book called "Barn Plans and Outbuidings" by Algrove Publishing. The cover says it was originally printed in 1889. It has a whole stack of plans for barns that existed on farms in the US at that time. It also sometimes tells a little about the farm and how much the structure cost to build (in 1889). The most extravagant barn in the book cost 1500 dollars. There are also all sorts of engravings and plans for building things like ice houses, creameries, temporary cattle shelters (like when you move to Kansas and have to find somewhere to put your cows that first winter) and corn cribs.
I love to look at the pictures and see how people managed things before electricity, even if I do work on a farm with a state of the art cheese aging facility.

back in the saddle

It has been a little bit crazy the last three months. But I have a shrink, so, you don't need to hear too much about that. Suffice to say, I rehomed my ox, moved away from the farm I lived on in the country to a house in town, and got a job at Jasper Hill Farm.

I am the assistant herd manager. This means I milk and take care of the cows as well as work to assure their health and well being. It is the first "for realz" farming job I've had. I have had some internships and produced some of my own food (eggs, veggies, syrup) for sale; but now, when shit breaks, it's up to me to figure out what to do about it. When the cell counts in the milk come back high or low, it's my ass that gets questioned or praised. When a mastitic heifer kicks like a bastard as I try to get the last of the bacteria filled milk out of her swollen and sore udder, I have to grit my teeth and take the hits because ain't no body else gonna do it.

I love it. I took this job because I wanted to see if I had what it took to have my own dairy farm and if I could milk cows in a way that produced milk I would feel confident selling to people as raw (eventhough that's not what we do here). Can I work a 16 hour day and then get up at 4am and do it again? When shit breaks, can I trouble shoot or figure out who to call? Do I like being around cows all day (almost) every day? ... The answer is a tentative "yes".

It is also a good inbetween step from working in an assisting role, to doing it alone. The herd manager here is a great guy with alot to teach me. We each get 2 days off a week, which is quite excellent for one's sanity, I think. We also get paid a fair and livable wage.

This is one of the farms profiled in the book The Town That Food Saved. The book questioned whether or not a town could really benefit from a farm that produces cheese so expensive and unusual that some people who live there would have a hard time affording it or being willing to try it. But I think a place that makes jobs, tries hard to produce a high quality product that is healthy for the people who eat it and the animals who make it and offers good experience for future independent farmers can definitely benefit from such an operation, and I am glad to be part of it.