A ewe waits as her lamb at Northland Sheep Dairy is about to nurse.

The average American consumes almost 68 gallons of cow milk in the form of fluid milk and milk products, and milk ranks amongst their top four consumed beverages (not including tap water). These and other statistics show that milk is a ubiquitous part of our cultural diet. How cultural, how-ever, is knowledge about the average dairy cow’s life? Recently, while visiting at a neighbor’s house following evening milking chores, I was amused by their four-year-old son’s response to learning that I had spent the last few hours milking cows. “Milking the….cows!?”, he replied in shocked amazement. I’ll chalk this one up to being a four-year-old, but must also acknowledge a study published in the U.K. in 2012 by LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming). In their study only 6 out of ten participants between the ages of 16-23 were able to successfully link milk to a photo of a dairy cow. Knowing the cow (or goat or sheep) as the origin of milk is an important first step in agricultural literacy. In promoting agri-cultural literacy and consumers that are actively making conscious food decisions, however, we must also be educating about the concepts of animal welfare, behavior and nutrition, as well as the daily routines and management decisions of farmers. It is an easy step to be a part of a culture that embraces a product but it is a vital step to be a part of a culture that knows the story of the product’s origins.
[Read more…] about The Biology of Dairy Animals

Swanton, Vermont, is about as far northwest as you can go in Vermont without ending up on that funny little peninsula that sticks out south of Quebec into Lake Champlain. The soil is straight alluvial deposits from the lake, and flat as a tabletop. Rumor has it that this was not a bad place to live, a stone’s throw from Quebec, during Prohibition.

Earl sports his Stonyfield Yogurt hat

The Fournier family goes back four generations in Swanton and Earl, current owner of the family dairy farm there, jokes about their bootlegging days. His father, Rene, still owns and operates a farm equipment company in town, and Earl runs the farm with the help of his wife and 39 and 22 year-old sons.

He reflects on the path dairying has taken in Swanton during the last 70 years: “The industrialization of agriculture caused a lot of problems,” he says. “A lot of this started after World War II. A lot of men had gone and they weren’t coming back to the farm. So they started all this mechanization and all these other things to be more productive. They wanted to get more milk with less labor. It was driven by the need for cheap food to fuel our consumer society.”
[Read more…] about Fournier Farm: An Organic Success Story