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.
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Fournier Farm: An Organic Success Story
by Jack Kittredge
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.
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.”
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The Economics of Organic Dairying
by Ed Maltby
In the early days of the organic label, there was the enthusiasm of creating a new type of farming, which some saw as an alternative to the mainstream corporate chemical agriculture, and there was an ability for these pioneers to make a reasonable living from organic dairy as the buyers they were working with understood the economics of organic dairy and were eager participants in its growth. Now the two national brands that effectively set the pay price view organic dairy through the lens of a corporation or a traditional cooperative where the interest of the company/cooperative precede those of the farmer, rather than working together. Organic dairy has matured and there is the need to think about how to attract the next generation of organic dairy farmers who may not want to work seven days a week; who see good health insurance as an entitlement; vacations and the ability to send their children to college a necessity; and to have enough profit to establish a retirement fund that is not based on selling their land and livestock.
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Quality Goat Cheeses Fulfill an Agricultural Dream The Does Leap Dairy Story
by Jack Kittredge
Northern Vermont has always had a special appeal to the rugged among us. Winters there are not casual; one has to be prepared for isolation, cold, self-reliance. Good jobs are not plentiful. Besides the school and town, employers tend to be small and frugal. Yet the benefits of settling there are many. Land is relatively less expensive than it is farther south, and the less attractive marks of civilization – power lines, billboards, railyards, strip malls, pipelines – are fewer and farther between.
It was to Bakersfield, about an hour northeast of Burlington, that George and Kristin Van Vlaanderen turned in 1997. They had just finished grad school in the University of Maine Sustainable Agriculture program in Orono, Kristin’s family was from Fletcher, the town next door, and 130 acres of mostly hillside, wooded land was available for a price that wouldn’t break the bank. They had a dream.
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