bacteria attack

Cows shit. They shit a lot. And piss. They piss fountains. And the idea that people have come to enjoy consuming a product from a cow which is harvested not 18 inches from the end of her digestive tract makes you think that god may enjoy a good joke (either that or he's a vegan). Keeping bacteria out of milk and off the cow in general is the major battle fought by dairy farmers.

Pasteurization has allowed farmers to circumvent way too much of this battle. If your milk is getting nuked at 160 or 180 or whatever degrees, not too much bacteria - harmful or otherwise - is gonna survive. But if you work on a farm where the milk is sold raw (unpasteurized) or made into raw milk cheese (unpasteurized milk is used to make the cheese), you have to be really really clean.

Our farm makes a few different raw milk cheeses, so we are incredibly careful when we milk. We clean every speck of sawdust or shit or dirt off her teats before milking as well as sanitizing with iodine before and afterwards. We also scrape down their stalls and rebed them with fresh dry bedding 4 times a day in addition to a few spot checks. When the milk is tested the coliform count is usually less than 10 (10 bacteria per milliliter).

But inspite of all our hard work, germs persist and pop up at the most unfortunate moments. Yesterday's make (the unripened cheese) had coliform contamination. In just 18 hours the cheese had blown up with holes and looked like a sponge when you cut it open. 1700 pounds of milk, 2500 dollars worth of cheese, was good only to feed to the pigs. Coliform bacteria is all over the place but the most likely place, the place filled with 50 large animals that shit prodigiously, is the barn. I cleaned it extra well and milked extra carefully yesterday. We will see how todays make goes. If the contamination persists, we will have to start hunting for potential spots of funk - inside milking machines, the milk pipeline or the cheesemaking plant that might be the source of our problem.

Another bad thing that sometimes happens is that bacteria get inside a cow's teat and give her an infection. The two main kinds of bacteria that do this are staph bacteria and strep bacteria - (coliform bacteria can also get inside a cow's teat but that's more rare). Most infections either clear up on their own or are treated with an antibiotic. But there is one kind of bacteria Staph Aureus that can't be killed. Once a cow has it there are basically only two options, to ship the cow (off to be made into hamburger) or to try and kill the quarter (teat). This is one of the most brutal things I have done to an animal that was not meant to kill it. You simply put 1/4 cup of bleach in a big syringe and shoot it in the quarter. And then you do it again the next day and again the next until all the milk producing tissue (and the bacteria hanging out there too) in that quarter are dead. As you might imagine, the cow gets wise to what's gonna happen after the first dose and is capable of putting up one hell of a fight.

Last week we found out that one of the cows had Staph A. Rather than risk infecting other animals or having the painful treatment not be successful, we decided to ship her. It is sad to watch an invisible thing that does not even make the animal visibly sick bring about her demise. But perhaps this is the fate of those at the top of the food chain, to be in constant battle with those at the bottom.