Birth and youth
The calf is separated from its mother shortly after birth, for a number of reasons.
One is to make sure the calf receives adequate nutrition. Nothing is more important than making sure the calf receives quality colostrums in its first few days. If you don’t know, colostrum is the special form of milk mammals create in their first few days of nursing. It contains antibodies as an immediate defense against disease. Farmers separate the calf from the mother because not all mothers produce high quality colostrums, and farmers want to make sure high quality is what each calf receives.
After the calf is separated the colostrums is milked from the mother (this milk never enters the food supply, by the way), and the colostrums is then tested for antibodies. If the mother’s colostrums is indeed of high quality, some of it will be fed to her calf but some will be frozen and reserved for calves whose mother’s colostrums leaves much to be desired.
The calves remain separated from their mothers because the milk is reserved for human consumption. Since the pair have to be separated, it’s less stressful the early the separation takes place. You can tell this calf is confused about where milk comes from!
video of calf sucking on bailey’s hand
But don’t worry, the calf will receive plenty of nourishment from a milk made from formula, much like the formula milk my mother fed me with (as breastfeeding was not popular in 1974). The formula milk fed to the calf will be made from a variety of ingredients like a number of different grains, minerals, vitamins, and molasses. And the formula will be altered as the calf grows, with the goal of providing their every nutrient need at each stage of their life and to gradually wean them onto dry food.
Trust me, if you give just half the thought to what you feed your child as dairy farmers do for their calves, your son or daughter will be healthy and strong!
You’ll notice the calf has its own little housing unit, for several reasons. First, calves are vulnerable to disease at this age, and keeping them separated from other calves reduces the spread of sickness. Second, by keeping them separated you can monitor exactly how much each calf is eating, to make sure they are feeling well, and it prevents dominant calves from taking the food of weaker calves.
Third, you have already seen how confused the calf is about where milk comes from. Well, if you place the calf in a group with others the calves will try to nurse from one another. Of course, they won’t find any milk, and this frustrates them, causing them to butt the udders of their peers, causing injury and perhaps even knocking others down. In general, whenever you see livestock producers separate animals into individual pens, it is usually to prevent them from hurting one another.
If you look closely on the heads of the calves, and especially if you feel around for it, you’ll find the beginning of horns. Yet, in all the Chick-fil-A commercials you’ve seen the black and white calves (Holsteins, they are called) don’t have horns. What gives? Well, to keep the cows from hurting farmers and each other their horns are removed at an early age. The brown Jersey calves also have horns, by the way.
I once worked on a university beef farm where we didn’t dehorn the calves until they were about six months old, and that involved using an implement that cut into the calves’ heads, scooping out the horns. While we would give the animals an antibiotic shot it wasn’t an ideal way to dehorn. A better way is to burn the tip of the horn of the calf with an electric iron, which will cause the horn tip to fall off after a few weeks. These calves have the fortune of being part of university research involving animal scientists and veterinarians in how to minimize the pain from dehorning, so not only will they feel less pain than other calves, but are helping us learn how to improve welfare throughout all dairy and beef cattle production.
The males here are sold to others when they are only a few days old, which fairly typical for dairies. Dairy farmers wish to specialize in milk production, and there are other farmers who specialize in raising dairy cattle for meat. About an hour west of this farm is a feedlot whose manager specializes in raising male dairy cattle for beef. According to my sources, about 70% of male dairy calves will be raised for beef and 30% raised for veal (and by the way, veal is produced much differently than you probably think, but we’ll talk about that later).
The females, called heifers, will stay here on the farm for milk production. Now let’s see the heifers in what for humans are the early teenage years.
When the heifers are a little older they will be placed into small groups of similar-aged calves and given all the food they wish to eat.
You’ll notice that every cow we will see, from the calf to her milking mother, is provided shelter with dry bedding for their comfort.
7 Weeks of Age
At about seven weeks of age the calves will be transferred to group pens, lots, or pastures, where they will be cared for until they are ready for breeding.
15 Weeks of Age
Now the heifer is ready to be bred, but you won’t find a bull on this farm. Instead, she will be bred using artificial insemination. Let me show a video created by the ag college here at OK state demonstrating how cows are impregnated.
DR. STEIN DEMONSTRATES ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION FOR CATTLE
AI allows bulls with superior genetics to have far more offspring than would be possible using natural breeding. And superior genetics for the most part has to do with the rate at which feed it turned into milk.
While the number of dairy cows in the U.S. has fallen from around 17 million to 9 million since 1960, total milk production has rise 40%. How? Because each cow is producing more milk. A lot more! 1960 the average cow produced about 755 gallons of milk per year, while today she will produce over 2,000 gallons.(G1,N1)
This is a picture of what it takes to produce one gallon of milk today: 2 gallons of water and roughly 10 lbs of feed (that feed consists of Alfalfa hay, bermudagrass hay cotton seeds, corn, soybean meal, and various vitamins and minerals).
FIGURE —WHAT THE COW NEEDS TO MAKE ONE GALLON OF MILK TODAY
In 1945 it would have taken five times the amount of feed and water to produce that same gallon of milk—a remarkable improvement in productivity, which both reduces the prices of milk and uses less inputs, and less inputs means a lower carbon footprint (per gallon of milk). In fact, the carbon footprint of milk in 1945 was almost three times greater than the footprint today!(C1)
Cows are producers of methane, a greenhouse gas, and they expel methane as they burp, which can be as often as once a minute. So being able to get more milk out of a single cow is like getting more milk for each lb of methane emitted, allowing us to consume foods we enjoy while benefiting the environment at the same time.
Of that surge in productivity in the last fifty years, 2/3 is due to better genetics, and 1/3 is due to better management and feed.(D1)
FIGURE —WHAT THE COW NEEDED TO MAKE ONE GALLON OF MILK IN 1945
This attention paid to genetics is a rather recent part of running a dairy farm, when viewed from the long timeline of agriculture.
Selective breeding in dairy cattle
Up until the time of Henry the 8th in England little care was given to what cows would be bred with another. In another lecture I talk about how King Henry enclosed the commons and converted it to private property, giving big landowners the monetary incentive to increase productivity. But still, there wasn’t so much breeds of cattle as there were different races in each region. Each region had its own particular genetics, and people were not eager to import the genetics of other regions.(F1)
The black and white cows you see here—and in every Chick-fil-A commercial—is referred to as Holsteins in the U.S. and Friesians elsewhere. Every now and then a recessive gene will cause them to be red and white. They are called Holsteins or Friesians because this line of cattle was developed in both the Friesland of the Netherlands and the Holstein region of Germany. These cattle were imported to the U.S. at different periods, but most of today’s U.S. Holstein cattle can trace their ancestors back to the imports arriving between 1877 and 1905,(D1) and are the most popular dairy breed because of their superior milk production.
The smaller brown cows are Jersey’s, which originated from the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel. Although a single Jersey produces less milk than a Holstein, the Jersey produces more milk for each lb of feed they consume (Holsteins therefore produce more because they eat more). This farm had only a few Jerseys until the price of corn skyrocketed, at which point they integrated more Jerseys for their more efficient conversion of feed to corn. If someone wants milk to produce butter they would be willing to pay higher prices for milk from Jersey cows because they contain more butterfat. So Jerseys can be more or less profitable than Holsteins based on consumer demand for milk, cheese, and butter. (G1)
Interestingly, while the Jersey cows are gentle and have an gregarious personality, the meanest animal I have ever seen in my life was a Jersey bull.
Surprisingly, until 1750 very little attention was given to the bull that would be used, when today that is the most important choice a farmer can make. This might be because they had no system for collecting data and so no good system for designating who the best bulls were. And the signals they did rely on were flawed. When a farmer in the Elizabethan Age set about trying to determine whether a cow would produce a lot of milk they might look at the direction of its hairs on the rear part of an udder, which had about as much validity as the many superstitions that existed at the time.(F1)
Today, milk production is a highly advanced science, and an enormous data collection has been established, allowing dairy producers to use statistics, not myths or tradition, to identify the best genetics.
So if the carbon footprint of your milk is a major concern for you, then nothing is more important that the semen the farmer buys to impregnate this heifer.
But the good news is you don’t need to worry about this. The farmer has even more incentive than you to get more milk with fewer inputs, and so this increase in productivity over the last century did not need motivation from concern for the environment, but the farmer applying modern technology to reduce her costs.
The same thing goes for better nutrition, the second most important reason for higher dairy productivity. Before the 16th century a lot of farmers would slaughter much of their livestock in the fall because they couldn’t produce enough feed to feed them through the winter. This first changed once they learned to grow turnips for a winter feed. Over the next few centuries small advancements in nutrition was made, but still, even in 1900, the science of nutrition was hardly a science at all.(A1,M1)
Now, more thought is given into what these cows eat than what we feed our pets or even ourselves. Today, computer programs are used to determine exactly what cows will eat, and this program is used to deliver exactly what the cow needs at each stage in its life at the least cost. Farmers can purchase some of these programs themselves to determine their feed formulations, use free programs provided by university scientists (like the Spartan 3 program by Dr. Hutjens at the University of Illinois), or hire consultants to design feed formulations for them. Whatever strategy is taken, the feed will be determined based on the cow it will be fed to, an enormous amount of data on nutrition requirements and milk prices, and a computer optimization routines to make sense of it all. Since roughly half of the dairy farm’s cost is feed, and since small deficiencies in nutrition can cause considerable shortfalls in milk production, a farmer can thrive or go bankrupt based on her feeding strategy.
FIGURE —COMPUTER PROGRAM TO FORMULATE DAIRY CATTLE FEED
(Accessed January 6, 2013 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37bHvCG92zc)
Two years of age
From her first conception to two years of age, this is where the gestating heifers will be cared for until they are ready to give birth. Like other parts of the farm, youˆll see the cow has plenty of room to move, access to pasture during the growing season, a nice shelter, and comfortable bedding.
At two years of age the heifer is ready to give birth for the first time. Her calf will be removed immediately and for the first three (?) days after birth her milk will be kept from the milk supply because it is high in colostrums, a blend of fats and antibodies intended to help her calf get a healthy start in life. This milk will be given to the calf instead of humans.
Then there will come the day, a few days after giving birth, where she performs this leisurely walk for the first time. We are heading towards the milking parlor, where she will be milked and used for human consumption for the first time. Milking is performed twice a day—thrice on some farms—and is probably a pleasant experience. The walk gives her exercise, her udder would hurt if she is not milked, and the animals are handled gently.
You may have seen some YouTube videos depicting cruelty towards dairy cows, but I have worked on two private dairies before and saw nothing but humane care. But some people believe taking a calf from a mother is inhumane. Some people believe using an animal to produce things for humans is inhumane. At the same time, these animals wouldn’t even exist if humans didn’t drink milk. If we did convert to veganism some of the land that was devoted to livestock would be the homes of wild animals instead, and, I ask, are insects, mice, and deer happier than these cows? Those are the questions you have to ask yourself to sort out your feelings on livestock.
Observe what the milkers do for each cow. First they clean the udder, and then they dip it in iodine, to help sanitize it. They will check the udder to make sure the milk looks healthy, after which they will attach the automatic milkers and move to the next cow.
One of the main problems the milkers are looking for is mastitis, where the mammary glands are inflamed and can cause the cow pain. Notice how they squeeze the nipples to observe the milk. It clumpy, semi-solid milk results the cow probably mastitis. Usually this is caused by a bacterial infection, and this has long been the bane of dairy producers.
When I milked cows about 20 years ago we didn’t check cows daily for mastitis like they do today. We would wait until a cow looked sick before we checked. This is because U.S. producers realized European dairy farmers were producing higher quality milk, with lower somatic counts in the milk. Somatic counts are the number of cells per milliliter of milk. These cells are usually white blood cells produced by the cows’ immune system. Cows with mastitis will thus produce milk with more white blood cells. Milk processors today really want low somatic cell counts in the milk, as it indicates higher quality milk and allows them to produce more cheese from every gallon of milk. Most dairies, including this one, receives a higher price for its milk the lower its somatic cell count.
Farmers will usually prescribe antibiotics for the cow, and we should pause her to say something about antibiotic residues in milk. Milk is heavily regulated and there is zero tolerance for antibiotic residues in milk, meaning milk must have absolutely zero antibiotic residues for it to be sold. When scientists inspect milk sold they find that only rarely is this zero threshold violated.
While she is in the milking herd this will be her home. The concrete pad is here because it is easier to clean and keep dry and provide a stable walking surface. I once worked on a dairy that didn’t have one, and during the rainy season the cows would have to walk up to their udders in mud to get to the dairy barn. It was both hard on the cows and made the udders dirty, so most farms today use concrete like this.
Though there is lots of concrete, you see here that each cow is given its own dry and comfortable place to rest. The sand is changed frequently, and these bars keep cows from getting too close to each other, where one cow might accidentally step on the udder of another cow.
Remember that the cow is about 2 years old the first time she is milked, and 2 months after that she will be bred for a second time.
Then when the cow is 2 years and 7 months old she will be removed from the milking heard and sent to a “dry lot” where she will have access to pasture (during the growing season), other food, shelter, and the like. After two months in the dry lot she will be ready to give birth again, and then return to the milking herd.
Once the cow has given birth about three times, and has been through the milking cycle three times, she will be culled from the herd and slaughtered for beef.
References
(A1) Albala, Ken. Food: A Cultural Culinary History [lectures]. The Great Courses. The Teaching Company.
(C1) Capper, J. L., R. A. Cady, and D. E. Bauman. 2009. “The environmental impact of dairy production: 1944 compared with 2007.” Journal of Animal Science. 87:2160-2167. DOI: 10.2527/jas.2009-1781.
(D1) Damron W. Stephen. 2006. Introduction to Animal Science. Third Edition. Pearson Prentice Hall: NY, NY.
(E1) United States Environmental Protection Agency. Ag 101: Dairy Production [web article]. Accessed February 13, 2014 at http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/printdairy.html
(F1) Fussell, G. E. 1966. The English Dairy Farmer 1500-1900. Frank Cass & CO.
(G1) Gillepsie, James R. 2004. Modern Livestock & Poultry Production. Seventh Edition. Thompson Delmar L
(M1) Mazoyer, Marcel and Laurence Roudart. 2006. A History of Agriculture: from the Neolithic age to the current crisis. Monthly Review Press: NY, NY.
(N1) Norwood, F. Bailey and Jayson L. Lusk. 2011. Compassion, by the Pound. Oxford Publishing: NY, NY.
