“Oh my poor teats are cold! They’re so cold I might give soft ice cream instead of milk this morning.”
Sam and I are imagining the foregoing conversation taking place in a dairy herder’s milking parlor. For some reason the milk we had for breakfast started us daydreaming afield, so to speak.
“I sure hope the milking machine is warm this morning ol’ Betsy says to Durwila. ‘Course I hear they’re better than the farmer’s hands back in the old days. My grandma told me sometimes in the old days a milker would forget to wash his or her hands in warm water and just grab hold a’ her with icy paws and start yankin’.”
“Oh, I know,” Durwila says. “My momma said farmer’s hands were so cold sometimes her milk was curdled and came out like buttermilk.”
“I can’t even imagine the conditions that result in that brown stuff they call chocolate milk,” Betsy says. “You think they get that from those Brown Swiss cows when they’re cold?”
“I don’t know,” Durwila says, “But it makes me shudder in my udder to even think about it.”
Sam and I want to say thank you to all the dairy people out there, and their cows, that provide us with milk. Do you know that the average cow in the United States produces as much as 20,204 pounds of milk per lactation? A cow may go through 10 lactations (when she’s preggers and calving) during her lifetime, but generally speaking, a cow is “retired” after about 4 lactations (you don’t want to know what happens after that).
Here’s an interesting fact. Even though farmland has shrunk to 922,095,845 acres (a loss of more than 6 million acres since 2002), America is (was) “drowning” in milk according to the 2007 census for agriculture conducted by the National Agriculture Statistic Service. That’s because milk production in 2007 was 185 billion pounds, up from 52.6 billion pounds in 1950 (from only 9 million cows, which was 13 million in 1950), and the poor global economy had produced a drop-off in demand. The drop off in demand combined with higher feed and fuel prices had resulted in less money paid to farmers. Seems like I heard the situation had improved some recently, but I don’t know for sure.
As far as I’m concerned, a big problem dairy herders face is too many people drinking soy milk, almond milk, rice milk and whatnot in their cockeyed attempts to stay healthy and live forever. Hey, if you’re lactose intolerant that’s one thing, but ordering soy milk in your latte is totally ookie.
I have to admit though that Sam is not too keen on drinking milk either. He seems to prefer water. I spike his water with this blue liquid, which is supposed to control plaque and tartar buildup on his teeth and freshen his breath. It seems to work on his breath, but the veterinarian told me the other day she could see signs of tartar buildup and I should brush his teeth - cow cookies too that!
Hey, you can support farmers by sending for a free bumper sticker that says, “No farms no food.” Just go to www.farmland.org .
May you step in a big cow pie barefoot if you don’t.
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