[Letters to FarmGirl]


"When I managed our 300-cow family dairy farm, cows ate a healthy mixed ration of leafy green and other vegetables -- the best relative feed value alfalfa we could find, soybeans, corn, and some vitamin and mineral supplements, depending on the quality of the other ingredients.

The percentage of each ingredient was figured by weight, with different pens of cows getting different rations, depending on their needs, usually based on their lactation stage.

We did NOT give our cows hormone shots.

I walked the pens 5 or 6 days a week, knew all the cows as individuals and could tell if they needed extra attention.

Antibiotics were given only to sick cows when indicated. Sick cows were not milked with the rest of the cows and their milk was discarded until a milk sample was "clean" of the medicine.

After over 70 years of raising healthy cows and selling milk, (starting with grandma and grandpa delivering milk in town and ending with a large co-op) the family finally went out of the milking business, along with most of the other small farm families that used to have a few milk cows.

A lot closer to retirement age than I like to advertise, I had to go to town and get a job working indoors with people. I preferred outdoors with cows. There is nothing like having to go outdoors to care for animals in all kinds of weather to develop some character and to put a person in a position to think about things in concrete terms rather than as hypotheticals. And when work was extra hard because of bad weather, or other adverse situations that arise in life, we still could tell ourselves that we were doing a good thing because we were working to feed people.

When I read all of the anti-cow, anti-milk rhetoric, it makes me sad. It discounts all of the tremendous hard work that our family did with pride since 1932.

When you educate yourself about what is in your milk, remember that all milk is not the same drink - it depends on where it comes from, and it doesn't have to be "organic" to be okay. And try to do your own thinking.

If vegetarians eat soybeans and leafy green vegetables, and so do cows, why is it okay for the vegetarian, but not for the cow?

Please advocate for healthy herds and family farms, instead of no milk and no cows."

Thanks for listening.
Arnica Montana
Rural Womyn Zone
www.ruralwomyn.net