The Accidental Agrarian

There was a time when having a family milk cow was quite common place.�� A house cow such as Bridget1, here, would have provided milk, dairy products and beef for a family. At times the excess would have been enough to sell to create, if not an income, than an offset–payment for feed, bedding and dairy supplies. It was a very good thing. A secure thing–knowing where the source of your food was. So good, in fact, that keeping a cow in urban or city settings was not that uncommon.2�� I believe this practice was continued in many areas up until the 1960′s.

Now don’t get me wrong. Keeping a dairy cow, either in the city or the country, is a lot of work, and a huge responsibility.�� The feeding and upkeep of the beast alone is enough to put most people off, let alone the twice daily milking, the supply of milk and the manure. Not to mention getting the old girl bred every so often, so as to produce a calf, so as to get back into peak milk production. Nevertheless, the humble house cow is at the heart of agrarianism and must needs be at the center of any discussion of local foods, food security, self-sufficiency or sustainability.

You of the goaty crowd, or the even rarer sheep milking set3�� are perfectly justified in raising your eyebrows at this point. Surely goats and sheep are smaller and can be kept on less. Of course! They make their own valuable contribution. But in sheer terms of economy, a cow which gives milk rich enough to turn into milk, cream, butter and cheese, plus a saleable (or edible) calf, plus manure for the garden, trumps these smaller dairy animals. Now to some the volume of milk–over four gallons a day in some dairy cattle breeds–can be quite daunting. Especially if you don’t have a large family, know how to make cheese or have pigs. But what are neighbors and bartering for anyway?

But what if you already live near a small, local, organic dairy? Very cool. So do I. But I cannot afford to buy enough of their milk to make my own cheeses, to have cream aplenty to churn into butter or make ice cream at will. I don’t have the luxury of using their whey all the time to feed my pigs, nor do I get the manure to help grow my gardens. So the dairy up the road has to forgo sales to me and instead become pestered by me when I ask them all sorts of questions and borrow equipment. The flip side is they have an emergency milker if they need and we can share vet farm call expenses to our remote area.

All of these thoughts have flooded into my head as I have leaned up against the warm flank of Bridget, my hands on the controls of my very own dairy manufacturing unit, twice daily. There are the kicks, buffets, disgruntled cow attitude and tail in the face at times, but there is also the sweet smell of hay, warm cow, fresh milk and the sound of owls in the pre-dawn light, or the larger than life full moon which saw me home last night. Things like this help balance out the 5 hours a day or so I spend tending to feeding, milking or processing milk. I quite enjoy it and look for no other reward than knowing where and how my family gets its dairy products.

But several examples come to mind–from personal friends of ours, our families, and another here–where it was quite common to earn enough extra money from a family cow or two to pay some or all of ones college expense, or to afford cars or other expensive items. Generally in this scenario the milk was the least valuable commodity–it has always been expensive and difficult to ship milk–and the cream was what was being sought after. A Jersey cow like Bridget, with her high butterfat content was especially valued.�� The cream, once separated from the milk, was easier to store, lasted longer and was less bulky to ship. For a true dairy enterprise the cream could be turned into butter or cheeses with the by-products of buttermilk, whey and wash water being fed to pigs as a sort of holon.

The point of these ruminations, I guess, being that by trading enslavement to corporations, an industrial food system gone wrong, and the fast-pace of the rat-race, for the demanding moo of a bovine task-mistress one can easily break the cycle of work-hard-to-earn-money-to-buy-food and tap the keg of life by working just as hard but to produce food for yourself and others at your own pace.4 This isn’t to say that keeping a cow doesn’t tie one down. It certainly helps to have other livestock one is responsible for as well. However, if I only could keep one type of livestock it would be a milch cow.

Technorati Tags: milk, dairy, cows, Jersey, milking, cream, butter, holons, raw milk, self-sufficiency, sustainability, agrarianism, farming, agriculture, local foods

1. Bridgey’s looking a little thin and worn. She hasn’t had the best of life before moving here to us. In fact I am sure should would prefer her previous owners rot in hell than ever hear mention of them again. I am sure she will begin to bloom here this spring now that she has plenty of food and sunshine–essential for a healthy cow to produce healthy, naturally vitamin D rich milk
2. The dispute over what started the Great Chicago Fire aside, there was a Mrs. O’Leary and she did have a cow. There are also the Welsh Dairies of London.
3. of which I have a daughter
4. One of the chief comments from those mentioned above, who worked so hard at dairying in their youth, was they are glad that all they have to do these days is drive down to the store and pick up a gallon of milk from the shelf. Yet they don’t see that to do that they must 1) own a car, 2) work to pay for the car, its fuel, and the milk and 3) that the milk they’re buying today is a far inferior product to the one they were part of creating once upon a time.

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This entry was posted by Podchef on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Dairy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.