This is what is wrong with agricutlure today.

Government subsidies of the family farm don’t help small farms - they overwhelmingly go to big corporate businesses that are bad for farmers, the consumers, the animals, the low wage workers, and the environment.

My cousin owns a remarkably similar facility in Wisconsin - 1400 cows and a dozen imported workers.

“Teabow Farms, about five miles north of Frederick, has a herd of 1,820 animals, of which 950 must be milked daily. There are 18 hired hands.”

The article doesn’t explain what the land base is. But if this is typical of a milk factory, then the base is disproportionately small. An acre of grass can absorb the nutrients deposited by a cow over the course of a year without runoff and leaching into water systems. My cousin has 1400 milk cows and 1400 heifers on 200 acres. Mmmm. Manure lagoons! Smells like… victory… for the banks! And e coli in the drinking water.

Note the number of non-milking heifers. Half the herd. It takes two years for a heifer to grow large enough to calve and produce. So this means that a half the heifers are calving each year - so the cull rate of the milking cows is 50% - most cows last only two lactations, long enough, on average to produce her replacement (half the calves are relatively worthless bulls). Cows aren’t culled willy-nilly. Living conditions are so atrocious that the cows are breaking down at this rate - ruptured udders, blind teats, blown-out knees, disease, etc. In fact, at this rate of turnover, it doesn’t make sense to control diseases like Johnes that don’t affect milk production until a cow is four or five years old - but on these mega farms, they’ll be dead before Johnes stops the flow of liquid. The fact that Johnes is incredibly painful way before the milk dries up is irrelevent.

We need to get government out of agricultural subsidies (admittedly almost impossible given the way the Electoral College and Senate magnify the power of farm states). If we didn’t subsidies the giant industrial factories, economics would tilt towards sanely-sized FAMILY farms.

The government that governs least governs best.

Somebody (Sadie?) give Fabienne some smelling salts.