A Year on a Dairy Farm

4. Chapter 04 April Out To Pasture

It is the third week of April, and the grass is six inches tall, and the ground is firm, and the forecast is for sun, and Tom Hartley has decided that today is the day.

He has been deciding for a week. The grass had been ready, more or less, since the previous Wednesday. The ground had been the question. After a winter of forty inches of snow and a spring of cold mud, you cannot put ninety-four cows on a pasture that has not finished firming up, or they will punch their hooves a foot deep into it and turn the field into something you cannot fix in one summer. So Tom has been walking the lower pasture every morning at six-thirty with a stick, pressing it into the ground and pulling it back out and looking at how much soil came up with it. By Tuesday the stick came back clean. By Wednesday he was sure. He waited two more days, because there is no benefit to being early and there is real cost to being early, and now it is Friday, and the grass is six inches tall and the ground is firm and the forecast is for sun.

The cows have been inside since November.

The barn doors are wide open. Marcelino is at the back of the milking string moving cows forward; Tom is at the gate. The cows know something is up — they always do, on this morning, every year, even though some of them have done this only twice in their lives and some of them have never done it at all — and they are walking with their heads up and their ears forward and a kind of low murmur is moving through the herd that you do not hear in the barn in February.

The first cow out of the gate is an old Brown Swiss named Bertha who has done this seven springs in a row, and what she does, having stepped onto the path, is walk twenty feet and put her head down and start eating, immediately, without ceremony, like a person who has been waiting for the line at the buffet to clear. The next three cows do the same. The fifth cow, younger, hesitates at the edge of the pasture, sniffs the air, takes one step, sniffs again, takes another step, and then, for reasons that are not entirely her own to explain, leaps straight up into the air with all four feet off the ground at once.

Then all of them go.

Ninety-four cows, fourteen hundred pounds each, running. They run in loose loops around the pasture, kicking out their back legs, tossing their heads, banging into each other, doing things with their bodies that you would not have guessed cows could do. Hazel comes out of the gate at a trot and accelerates. Her udder, full from the morning milking, swings under her. She runs the way Mabel ran across the floor of the calving pen on the morning she was born — with the same unsteady joy, only at fourteen hundred pounds.

It takes about three minutes. Then it is over. Then ninety-four cows have their heads down and are eating, scattered across two acres of grass that until five minutes ago had not been touched by a cow in five months.

Tom and Marcelino lean on the gate.

“Cada año,” Marcelino says, smiling.

“Cada año.”

What you are looking at, when you are looking at a pasture, is not what you think you are looking at. You are looking at the top of something.

The grass — the green, the part the cow eats — is maybe a third of the total living mass of a healthy pasture. The other two-thirds is underneath. Roots, going down four or six or eight feet. Microbes — bacteria, protozoa, fungi — a billion or more of them in every gram of soil. Mycorrhizal fungi making thread-thin networks through the dirt and connecting the root of one plant to the root of another in a kind of slow underground internet, through which the plants trade water and nutrients and sometimes warnings. Earthworms turning the soil over. Beetles and springtails and nematodes. Roots dying and being decomposed and adding their carbon back to the soil. The pasture is an ecosystem, and the grass on top is what it produces.

A pasture builds soil. A cornfield depletes it. This is the difference, ecologically, between a pasture-based dairy and the kind of farm that grows corn and soy to feed cows kept indoors in confinement. The cornfield is plowed, fertilized, planted, sprayed, harvested. The soil is disturbed every year. Organic matter is mined out. After several decades of corn-soy rotation the soil is thinner and biologically simpler than it was. After several decades of well-managed pasture the soil is deeper and biologically richer than it was. Pasture is one of the few forms of agriculture that adds back to the land it uses.

When you stand in a pasture in April and the cows are eating, what is happening underneath you is that the grass, sensing that some of it has just been bitten off, is signaling its roots to push more sugars down into the soil. Some of those sugars feed the mycorrhizal fungi the grass is partnered with. Some of them feed the bacteria around the roots. Some of them are exuded directly into the soil to feed whatever is hungry. The grass is gardening. It is doing this because over millions of years grasses evolved with grazers, and grass that is grazed and then allowed to recover comes back stronger than grass that is left alone. The cow biting off the top of the grass is part of how the grass intends to live.

This is the deepest fact about a grass-based dairy, and it is the one that no marketing copy can communicate. The cow and the grass are not in a transaction. They are in a partnership a hundred million years old.

What grows in a Finger Lakes pasture in April is not one plant. It is many.

If you walked Tom’s lower pasture on a sunny day in May with a notebook, you could probably identify between fifteen and twenty-five different plants in the space of a single acre. Some of them are grasses — orchardgrass, timothy, tall fescue, Kentucky bluegrass, a little perennial ryegrass. Some of them are legumes, which is the family of plants that includes peas and beans and which has the special biological trick of pulling nitrogen out of the air through bacteria living in nodules on their roots — white clover, red clover, birdsfoot trefoil. Some of them are what most people would call weeds, and which are nutritious forage that cows like — dandelion, plantain, chicory. A good pasture has all of this growing together. The cows, given the choice, will eat some of each, and the milk they produce on a diverse pasture is more flavorful and more nutritionally complex than the milk produced on a single-species lawn.

Tom knows the names of probably forty plants growing on his farm, by sight, in the field. He learned most of them from his father, and his father from his father, and a few of them from the county Cooperative Extension agent who came out in the 1970s and taught Tom’s father how to read pasture composition by walking a transect with a clipboard and counting hits. Tom can tell you that the upper pasture has too much fescue and not enough clover. He can tell you that the field by the road, the one with the seep at the lower edge, grows reed canarygrass that the cows do not love but will eat if it is what is there. He can tell you that two Aprils ago there was a hard frost on the eighteenth that knocked the alfalfa back by three weeks. He can tell you which paddock the deer come through, where the woodchucks live, where the soil is shallowest over the bedrock and where it goes deep enough that you could push a fence post in by hand.

This is a kind of knowledge that nothing replaces and nothing transfers easily. It cannot be looked up. It is built one walk at a time, over decades, by a person who is paying attention to one piece of land. Most of what makes a real farmer a real farmer is contained in this kind of knowledge, and almost none of it is visible from the outside.

The cows will not stay in this paddock.

By tomorrow morning they will have grazed it down to three or four inches, and Tom will move them to the next one. The pasture is divided into about thirty-two paddocks of varying sizes, separated by a single strand of polywire that runs from a battery-powered fence charger and which Tom and Marcelino move every day. Each paddock gets a day or two of grazing and then a rest period of twenty-five to forty-five days, depending on how fast the grass is growing. In May, when the grass is exploding, the rest period is shorter. In August, when the heat slows growth, it is longer.

This is called rotational grazing, or sometimes managed intensive grazing, and the principle behind it is the partnership the grass and the grazer worked out long before us. Grass species — the wild ones, on the great prairies of North America before the cattle came — evolved alongside bison, who would graze a patch hard and then move on and not return for months. Grass that is grazed and then rested grows back vigorously. Grass that is continuously grazed, day after day in the same field, never gets a chance to rebuild its roots and eventually weakens. The old-fashioned American practice — turning cows out into one big field for the whole summer — degrades pasture over time. Rotational grazing improves it.

This is not new science. The Zimbabwean ecologist Allan Savory has been writing and teaching about it since the 1960s. Some of his larger claims about using grazing to reverse desertification have not held up under careful study, and his work is contested in the academic literature. But the core idea — that mimicking the natural pattern of intense grazing followed by long rest builds healthy grassland — is well-supported. It is now standard practice on grass-based farms across the country, including Tom’s. He moves a fence every morning. The whole system runs on a battery the size of a car battery and a few miles of wire and the knowledge, in his head, of how each paddock is doing this week and what it will look like in ten days.

So now: when you go to Whole Foods or the co-op or the grocery store, and you pick up a carton of milk, and the label says grass-fed — what does that mean?

It depends.

The USDA had an official Grass Fed label until 2016, when they withdrew it, because it was being applied so loosely that it had stopped meaning anything specific. After 2016, grass-fed became a marketing claim with no federal standard. Anyone who wants to can put the words on a label.

There are still real grass-fed certifications, run by private organizations. The strictest is the American Grassfed Association, which requires that animals eat only grass and forage their entire lives — no grain, ever, not even at the end — that they live on pasture year-round when conditions allow, and that they never receive antibiotics or hormones. A carton with the AGA seal means something specific.

A carton that says grass-fed without that seal, or without some equivalent third-party certification, could mean almost anything. It could mean the cows were on grass for a few months in the summer and on a grain ration the rest of the year. It could mean the herd ate pasture grass during the day and a substantial scoop of grain at every milking. It could mean the cows were inside on a total mixed ration for most of their lives and the words went on the label anyway. The shopper has no way to know.

USDA Organic is a different certification, with its own rules. Organic does not require all-grass feeding, but it does require that organic dairy cows receive at least thirty percent of their feed from pasture during the grazing season, which has to be at least 120 days long. Organic also prohibits antibiotics, synthetic pesticides, GMO feed, and growth hormones. The seal means something. It does not mean grass-fed.

Tom’s farm is both. The cows eat grass and forage and nothing else — fresh in the summer, baleage in the winter, never any grain — and the farm is certified organic and certified by the American Grassfed Association. The milk that leaves the farm carries both seals. It is, by the strictest definition the country has, the real thing.

It is also more expensive to produce than the milk on the shelf next to it. The cows produce less. The pastures cost more to maintain. The labor required is higher. We will come back to all of this.

For now: the cows are out.

By dusk the herd is still on the pasture. They have eaten about half of the available grass. Most of them have lain down. Some are still grazing. Some are chewing cud. The light is dropping toward the lake, and the grass is changing color in it, going from green to gold to a kind of amber gray. Hazel is at the lower end of the pasture, near the line of trees, lying with her front legs folded under her, her udder cool against the grass, her eyes half-closed. She has not had a day like this in five months.

Tom watches from the gate for a while. Then he goes back to the barn for evening milking. The cows will come up on their own when the time comes; they know.

Behind him, a hundred yards down the slope, in the row of hutches along the south wall of the heifer barn, Mabel is asleep on the straw. She is six weeks old. Her body has rounded out from the long-legged thing it was at birth. Her coat is shedding the slick of newborn for the heavier brown-and-white of a calf. She has never seen a pasture. She will, in late August, when she is weaned and grouped with the other heifer calves and walked out for the first time. Until then, the pasture is something she does not yet know is hers.

The cows graze in the falling light. Bertha is somewhere in the middle of the herd, where she has been for seven Aprils. Hazel is at the edge. Above them, the first stars are coming out over the lake.

It is a good day.

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