(Beth Clifton photos)
by Meg Turville-Heitz
Editor’s note: Even for abolitionist vegans, who believe the only “good” dairy industry involving real animals is a dead one, there is value in understanding that the dairy industry as it now exists is not a monolith, and that modes of activism that tend to strengthen the grip on the industry of the now dominant concentrated animal feeding operations can be counterproductive in reducing net harm to animals and the environment. Here, veteran Wisconsin environmental journalist, water quality planner, and teacher Meg Turville-Heitz offers a brief tour of the multi-tiered dairy industry as it exists in her corner of the “Dairyland” state.
(Beth Clifton photo)
The “dairy industry” isn’t a monolithic beast
Every so often I hear “the dairy industry” thrown up as a target of activists in a multitude of causes, environmental, humane, economic, and involving social justice.
The grievances include manure polluting streams and concern about the location of giant concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that house more than 1,000 cows; objections to the removal of calves from their lactating mothers; and annoyance at subsidies.
But the “dairy industry” isn’t a monolithic beast made up of bad actors of evil intent. Grassroots boycotts and protests are unlikely to phase the big players, serving markets including millions of end customers, but there is an impact.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Three dairy industries
There are actually three dairy industries here in Wisconsin.
There are the organic folks who worry about the water they give their cows and what’s on the grass they feed the cows, who are willing to do the paperwork and deal with the certification lag to be able to sell their milk at three times the going price.
There are also the old-time small-holders who are just struggling to hang on until they can collect Social Security. Their kids have no interest in working so hard or living so poor, and eventually convince them to sell their farms to developers. These may be people who pasture their cows in streams because they think they can’t afford not to, and work off the farm to make ends meet. To be honest, many organic farmers do as well. These are the folks who can’t afford to fix their barns because they spent their surplus on hay during the drought, and the next drop in milk prices will put them in debt even further.
Mega-dairies
Mega-dairiesThen there are the mega-dairies. Concentrated animal feeding operations, called CAFOs for short, house thousands of cows, and are often owned by absentee operators who pollute their neighbors’ wells with E. coli and the air with aerosolized liquid waste, but complain that they have to get permits for processing more sh*t than a city of 5,000 people.
The mega-dairy CAFO folks are not pasturing their cattle. Their cows are not out in the field exposed to pollutants or sunshine, or crapping in streams, though their giant manure digesters and holding ponds might be leaking, or maybe the mess they spread on frozen fields right before a rain is running off. The CAFO operators, like other major agribusinesses, are the ones setting the tone through the ag lobby and that lobby doesn’t like regulation. They’re the ones in Wisconsin who fight the hardest against water quality monitoring and restrictions on manure handling.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Struggling
Yes, I’m generalizing, and yes there is overlap. The idyllic red-barn, Holstein-dappled pasture, the home of fresh-faced 4-H kids pampering their calves that most think of when they think of Wisconsin dairies (and that the entire dairy industry would like them to think of) is struggling.
My neighbors have a help wanted sign out in front of their 300-cow dairy because they “lost” all their milking help and are getting too old to keep up, especially when one of them keeps fighting off rapid-growing brain tumors. They probably make as much money on agri-tourism as they do on their milk itself, with haunted barns and dairy tours. One of their neighbors basically “wastes” a corn field because the corn maze makes more money.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Hay bales
Another neighbor has only been able to afford to re-side and insulate one side of his 100-plus-year-old house. The rest of the house is stacked with hay bales against Wisconsin winters because he can’t work off the farm anymore due to a back injury and his wife is a low-paid clerical worker. Her job provides the health insurance. He briefly benefited from an uptick in dairy prices and managed to fix his collapsing barn, but he also lost the help when his son graduated from high school and he’s back to square one, which seems to happen with regularity whenever the shift in dairy pricing comes to rest on the people producing milk. He still owes me land rent from a decade ago, but I “forgave” it.
(Meg Turville-Heitz photo)
Another local farmer can’t do anything after noon, when she takes all the painkillers she needs to manage her dairy ewes through lambing and move 120-pound-plus sheep from pasture to pasture. She can’t drive or be counted on to remember anything after she’s taken the drugs.
River of cats
Yet another neighbor has had heart attacks and is moving slower every day, followed by a river of cats in search of the milk slurry he gives them to keep them around. He pitches hay and feeds the calves still, but his grandsons come over every day to help handle the steers who are frisky and rude and push the old man around.
Then there’s the grain farmer who rents a lot of acreage in the area after he gave up raising hogs because he kept getting asthma attacks from the aerosolized pig crap. He wants to use more conservation practices, and has managed to add conservation tillage, but his dad, who can’t do much but drive the sprayer any more, refuses and Dad still owns the land.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Feeling their pain
The “dairy industry” and larger “agriculture” isn’t what it used to be. It can’t be generalized. They’re my neighbors and I’m feeling their pain. They are all struggling as the industry becomes more and more competitive, and the only people who can do it are doing it at an industrial scale: chickens, cows, goats, turkeys and square miles of mono-cropped fields; or are scaling back to small direct market farms, like the one I operated until I couldn’t any more, or organic, where they are more and more at the mercy of industrial scale organics. I couldn’t sell my vegetables at a Dole Organic price point. No one can
Driving through the central part of the state the other day I saw signs draped on semis in many vegetable fields begging for seasonal help as the Del Monte cannery gears up for the harvest, tipping semi loads of green stuff into processors faster than the diminished number of field hands can pick.
Veal calf.
(Humane Farming Association photo)
My neighbors know their dirt
With all the “dust over the road” signs warning of top soil that often turns the snowdrifts brownish red in the winter, it’s a sign of a different kind of farming. My neighbors know their dirt too well and would never let it blow away like that. These are the people who are pumping water out of the ground faster than it is replenished, sucking up lakes, and in a rain storm as I passed, all the irrigation was still running at full bore, one sending a huge stream out toward the highway.
As in any other business, there are the operators doing their best and trying to apply a land ethic and humane treatment, and there are those who are looking to make the fastest buck, sometimes at the expense of the environment and the animals. These latter, unfortunately, are usually the ones most effectively insulated from market turns and boycotts.
Meg Turville-Heitz
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Meg Turville-Heitz earned a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s joint program in Life Sciences Communication and Journalism & Mass Communication in 2015, with minors in folklore and anthropology, with an emphasis on environment, Native American issues, social movements, social media m and political communications. “My non-academic professional experience ranges from water quality planning to reporting and editing,” she writes, with “extensive volunteer work in 4-H and other community and professional service.”
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We subsidize this. The change in the way farms were subsidized to favor Big Ag has pushed out all but the die hard old-timers and the dreamer organic farmers. It has also drained rural and middle America of jobs, leaving wasted communities and angry voters. Big Ag doesn’t care about long term environmental issues, their employees or their neighbors, so why the heck would they care about the health and comfort of their farm animals.
Down here in rural Western WA, small farms look much like the author described in WI. Tattered affairs owned by struggling seniors or idealistic urban escapees. I recently was up in rural BC and was stunned by the difference in farming there, where small to mid-sized farms appear to be doing well. Guessing there’s a different kind of farming policy there.
I understand the difference between a small dairy and industrial dairy. There are many. What they have in common is forcibly impregnating cows, separating newborn calves from their mothers and being the reason that there is a veal industry. And all of their animals end up being slaughtered. I am glad the industry is failing. It’s about time. And I think it’s helpful that many people are learning the truth about the industry instead of the myths they have been taught.
The sad thing is, the industry as a whole isn’t failing. The small farmers are, but the big mega-dairies seem to be doing just fine. It’s why dairy products are so cheap, cheese is piled onto absolutely everything and milk byproducts like whey end up in a mind-numbing array of packaged products.
We’ll know the dairy industry is in real trouble when you can no longer buy a $5 pizza or a $1 quesadilla.
Thanks in large part to government subsidies. We are all paying for the cruelty and environmental destruction caused by people consuming dairy products, plus the immense health care costs to which the consumption of it contributes.
To me, the dairy industry is a variant of human arrogance and slavery caste system structure that began thousands of years ago when the human animal first took up the behaviors of domesticating non-humans. Into our servitude, subjugation and oppressive hands, did wild beings fall, when we took them hostage, into bondage, setting the stage for every variant of racism, sexism, dominant might makes right social DIS-order, plaguing and traumatizing humans ever since.
The dairy industry is a shocking reminder that human society made its empires off the suffering of animals and the industrial complexes that rose from the ugly seeds that took the deformed shape of animal agriculture, what is now the single most threatening source of environmental and public health threats, as well as causing unmitigated violence to non-human beings.
The sheer insanity of humans taking another mothers babies from her bellowing side, to then steal HER milk, THEIR nursing formula, a formula proven to cause a myriad of medical abnormalities in humans, confirms that our species is much dumber and cruel than we can fathom, considering we spend our lives patting ourselves on the back, lauding our intelligence as the top of the food chain.
When every single nutrient including protein, originates in plant foods, and NO OTHER species consumes ANY other beverage other than water, and is weaned after teeth appear, it is confounding that, given the diseases and suffering inherent in dairy production and consumption, it’s still such an icon. But then we are a contrived, coerced, manufactured society that was made of commercials and a government that runs on who funds politicians, the powerful industry’s that sell us absurdity, like needing bovine growth fluid for calcium, when the cows get theirs from greens!!!
All I ever had to see of the “dairy” industry to hate it were videos and photographs of the calves ripped away from their mothers to be isolated, tremblingly, in solitary crates and hutches. All I had to hear and read about were the mothers crying for their stolen newborns. This is not just the meg-operations; it is dairy farming. I still remember back in the late 1970s being taken by an old friend to a small dairy cow farm in Pennsylvania and seeing the cows and the mud and the cement milking “parlor” and the milking machinery to know that this is a bizarre and sickening business, a cruel business, a mean business, regardless of how “normal.”
I have taken increasingly, when time permits, to posting comments to food section articles in The Washington Post and elsewhere pushing back against all suggestions that the mammary-gland milk stolen from mother cows and goats is “necessary” for calcium, as meanwhile interspecies mammary milk is not even digestible by the majority of the world’s population. But even if it were, the ugliness of this business would be what it is. I remind readers that despite all the machinery and other things between themselves and the mother cow when they are drinking mammary milk and eating cheese and yogurt from cows and goats – what they are doing is sucking the nipples of a nursing mammal.
I’m one of those people to whom it never fully sunk in that in order to produce milk, a cow, like any other mammal, has to be pregnant. It was reading “The Cookbook for People Who Love Animals” in 1983 that turned on that light bulb in my brain. That cookbook also described how dairy cows (so-called) have been genetically manipulated to produce such an unnatural amount of milk for human consumption that their udders drag on the milking parlor floor and that workers tramp on these heavy, dragging udders without a thought. The cows, meanwhile, are being drained of the calcium and other minerals needed for their bones in order to produce all this milk, they develop osteoporosis and mastitis and painful lameness, their bodies are disproportioned by the weight and drag of the udders, and they are MISERABLE. And then, of course, there’s the horrific treatment of the cows, to get rid of them when their bodies are no longer financially productive, the dragging of them with machinery, the hellish transport, the slaughter.
How many articles I have read in dairy and other agribusiness publications about cows, chickens, turkeys and other farmed animal victims being locked in a building in which a fire broke out and the farmer is quoted by the reporter: “At least no one got hurt.” Articles about how the small dairy farmer’s cows who did not die in the fire, but are suffering horribly from smoke inhalation, are held awaiting the slaughter truck to take them away.
Farmers are not sentimental about “their” animals, and this is a source of pride with them. Yet they have no problem creating smarmy, cloyingly sentimental and dishonest ads on TV and elsewhere about their “wholesome” enterprise and their “humane” animal care – anything to anesthetize the public. Every time I see one of these “dairy pure” types of ads with a farmer holding an inert newborn calf (just taken away from his or her mother), I want to puke and weep with sadness and disgust.
I want all forms of animal agribusiness to be extinguished so bad I can taste it. I will never stop working for an animal-free food supply and for animals themselves until I die.
Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns http://www.upc-online.org
Ms. Turville-Heitz points out something that many of us realize after our purism gives way to consideration of the complexities that make up any and all of our lives: that most of us are struggling in one way or another, that many of us are doing the best we can and would prefer to do better, but for whatever reasons, are not able to do so at this time; and that those who are looking for completely guilt-free ways of living might do well to cast their eyes upwards, because they’re not going to find them here.
Moral relativism is a difficult disease to get over—Homo sapiens is the only one practicing it, too. “Purism”? That’s a term designed to let the nasty facts get slid over to the side.
Nasty facts usually turn up on both sides of moral and philosophical issues, as leading animal rights philosophers Peter Singer and our late friend Tom Regan always acknowledged and took into account in framing their arguments.
I say vegans are right in their focus on the big picture and not on some rare, precious exception to the rule in which some oxymoronic “compassionate” exploitation is championed. The non vegan world doesn’t need our enabling to find excuses and exceptions for consuming or supporting animal exploitation. They have become quite adept at it all on their own.
Robert Grillo
Executive Director
Free from Harm
tel. 773-329-7977
robert@freefromharm.org
web: http://freefromharm.org
PO BOX 607604
Chicago, IL 60660
I’m a vegan activist who absolutely supports publication of this article. I think it is imperative that we know as much as possible about the industries we’re trying to dismantle. It’s also helpful to remember that some of those who oppose us are fighting for their economic, and perhaps actual, lives. Along with the stories poignantly told here by Ms. Turville-Heitz, the New York Times recently had an article about record high suicide rates among French farmers. The victims are mostly, “men ages 45 to 54, working in animal husbandry,” and depressed dairy prices is listed as a contributing factor in at least one of the suicides. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/europe/france-farm-suicide.html
Of course we do vegan/AR activism, and commit to it wholeheartedly, to defeat a much worse and more systemic evil–one of the most profound evils on the planet. But let’s not trivialize those who are collaterally harmed by our work simply because they happened to be ordinary people who found themselves in the wrong industry at the wrong period of time.
Beyond all of this, I want to commend Meg Turville-Heitz for a fantastic article that taught me a lot and also moved me. And thanks to Merritt and Beth for running it.
It’s tragic that anyone is so speciesist and clueless that they truly believe that there are only some “operators” in the stolen animal milk industry who “sometimes” make their blood money “at the expense of…the animals.” And it’s unthinkable that anyone advocating for animal rights would feel compelled to give any credence to such speciesist drivel.
No one advocating for human rights would publish an article about how hard it is for small, local sex traffickers to turn a buck. Nor would they provide a platform for anyone who empathizes with the pain felt by those who enslave humans because it’s the only way they’re able to turn a meager profit on their small cacao farms.
This comment was cut by more than half. The essence of racism, sexism, speciesism, classism, etc. is the argument that “There is us, and there is them, and they are all alike and no good.” The author of the above comment, having already expressed her position, went on at considerable length with further analogies which might variously have been considered to be racist, sexist, and classist in their failure to distinguish among shades of grey in human behavior toward animals, instead painting the whole of the animal-welfare-to-animal-rights spectrum in black-and-white terms.