A Year on a Dairy Farm

10. Chapter 10 November The Decision

It is the second week of November. The trees along the road are bare. There has not been a hard freeze yet, but it is coming. The grass in the lower pasture is yellowing at the tips. The cows have been brought in from the night pasture for breakfast and the morning milking is done. Tom is in the parlor, in a long plastic glove up to his shoulder, with his arm in Hazel.

This is a thirty-day pregnancy check.

For a few seconds his face is the face of a person doing two things at once. He is feeling, through the wall of her rectum, for a particular shape and size in her uterus — the small firm fluctuation of a six-week pregnancy, which feels, to a hand that has felt thousands of them, like nothing else. He is also, although he would not admit this to anyone, hoping. Hazel is six. She has been on the farm her whole life. She is in her sixth lactation. She has had five calves and one of them is named Mabel and is in the heifer barn behind him. She has been open since May, which is too long, and if she has not taken this time he is going to be in a conversation with himself this weekend that he does not want to be in.

He moves his hand. He moves it again.

She is pregnant.

He says nothing — she would not understand him if he did, and there is no one else in the parlor to hear it — but he leans his forehead, briefly, against her flank, and breathes out. Then he straightens up. He withdraws his arm. He removes the glove and drops it in the hamper. He writes Hazel #47, +30 in the herd book in pencil. She will calve, by his calculation, in the second week of August, when the corn across the road is tall and the air is heavy and the second cutting of hay is being put up.

But this morning, before any of that, Tom has a different thing to do.

This morning, Tom has a list. The list has three names on it. The names are Bertha, Pearl, and Daisy. They are in a yellow legal pad in the top drawer of the desk in the milkhouse. They were written down last night, after dinner, by Tom and Sarah at the kitchen table, with the herd records open on the laptop and a glass of bourbon between them, neither of them saying very much, both of them having had this conversation many times before.

Today is the day Tom and Sarah cull.

Culling is the dairy industry’s word for the process by which a cow leaves a milking herd. It can mean a number of different things. In the language of the farm, a culled cow is a cow whose time on this farm is over. She is sold — to a beef operation, to an auction, occasionally to another dairy that wants her — and her stall in the barn is filled by the next heifer who has come due.

About one in three cows in any given American dairy herd is culled each year. The figure has been remarkably stable for decades. On a herd Tom’s size, that means about thirty cows leave every year. Some leave for production reasons (their milk has dropped below what makes them worth keeping). Some leave for reproduction reasons (they have failed to get pregnant after enough services that the math no longer works). Some leave for health reasons (chronic mastitis, lameness, metabolic disease). A few leave because they have, in the language farmers use, gone bad — become aggressive, become kickers, become unmanageable in the parlor — although this is rare on a small farm where people know each cow.

Most of the cows that leave do not leave to retire. American dairy cattle, when culled, almost always go into the beef supply chain. Their meat — leaner and tougher than meat from purpose-raised beef cattle — becomes ground beef. It becomes hamburger. It becomes the patties that anchor most of the meat consumption of the United States. The single largest source of beef in the American food supply is, statistically, dairy cows at the end of their dairy careers.

This is part of dairy. It is part of why dairy and beef are not separate industries; they are two parts of the same industry, with the same animal at different points in her life. The grass-fed organic milk in the carton at Whole Foods, and the ground beef in the same shopping trip, are likely to have come from the same kind of cow, raised on the same kind of farm, processed at the same kind of plant.

Bertha is nine years old. She is the old Brown Swiss who walks out of the barn first on turnout day every spring and goes immediately to the grass without looking up. She has had eight calves. She has been the steadiest milker in the herd for most of those years, and she has never been a problem for anyone. But this fall her production is down. Her milk in May was around fifty-five pounds a day. Her milk in October was thirty. Her udder, when Tom presses it, is softer than it should be at peak lactation; there has been a small ongoing infection that the standard organic treatments have not cleared, and which Tom does not want to put antibiotics into because the farm is organic and antibiotic use complicates everything. Bertha is a cow who has done her work, and the work is done.

Pearl is five. She has been bred eight times in the past sixteen months, and not one of those services has resulted in a confirmed pregnancy. The vet has examined her twice and found no obvious medical cause. Pearl is, in the language of the farm, infertile in a way that doesn’t have a name. She is going dry in two weeks regardless. After that she would be a cow standing in the barn eating feed and producing nothing, indefinitely, while the dollars-per-day arithmetic ran in the wrong direction. There is nothing wrong with Pearl exactly. She is just not a cow the system can afford to keep.

Daisy is four. She is in her second lactation. She has had three episodes of mastitis in the past nine months, two of them in the same quarter — the same teat — which is a sign of a chronic infection that has likely entered the udder tissue and may not respond to anything. The veterinarian’s recommendation last month was to cull. Tom has known this. He has been waiting for the right week, which is now, because the truck for the auction in New Berlin runs on Wednesdays and today is Tuesday.

These are the three. There are probably four other cows in the herd who are heading toward the same decision in the next two months. Tom and Sarah will go through this exercise again before Christmas, and again in February. Thirty cows a year. About one every twelve days.

The arithmetic of the decision is harder than anyone outside the farm thinks it is, and easier than most farmers admit.

It is harder than it looks because it is not just one number. It is a vector of numbers — production, conformation, fertility, health, age, temperament, genetic value, debt the farm is carrying, what the auction is paying that month — and the farmer’s job is to weigh all of them at once. The farm management software helps. So does experience. So does a glass of bourbon at the kitchen table on a Monday night in early November.

It is easier than farmers admit because, by the time a cow is on the list, the answer is almost always already there. The arithmetic has been pointing one way for weeks or months. The conversation at the kitchen table is not about discovery. It is about acceptance. It is about saying out loud, between two people who have been doing this for thirty years, Bertha is going. Pearl is going. Daisy is going. It is about owning it.

Tom does not enjoy this part of the work. He has not enjoyed it in any of the years he has been doing it. He has not, on the other hand, ever stopped doing it.

At nine-thirty Tom walks through the barn. He has not changed his clothes. He has done the morning milking and the pregnancy check on Hazel and made the day’s list with Sarah, and now he is doing what he always does on the morning of a cull day, which is the slow walk through the herd that is, in the structure of the day, no different from the walk he does every morning, but is also, on this morning, different.

He stops at Bertha. She is at the bunk. She lifts her head. She looks at him with the steady patient look of a cow who has been on this farm for nine years, who recognizes him, who has, in some Temple-Grandin sense of memory, the experience of him: this person, this voice, this hand. He puts his hand on her flank. She does not move away.

He stands there for a minute. She goes back to eating.

He says quietly, in the low voice that has been the voice he uses with his cows for thirty years: Vieja. Vieja. The Spanish was learned from Marcelino over time. Every farmer he has worked with has had a name for the old cows. Vieja is one of them. It means old one. It is, when said in this voice in this barn at this time of the morning, also a goodbye.

At ten-fifteen the truck arrives.

The truck is owned by a man named Rusty Pelton, who is sixty-four years old, who has been hauling cull cows in upstate New York for forty years, and who has, in that time, transported approximately every fourth cow Tom has ever owned. Rusty drives a 1998 GMC with a stock trailer behind it. He has a radio in the cab tuned to a country station. He is wearing Carhartt overalls and a Mets cap. He nods at Tom. They have known each other since 1991.

Tom and Marcelino bring Bertha out first. She walks calmly. She has never been a difficult cow. They lead her to the trailer ramp. She walks up the ramp on her own. She steps into the trailer. She looks at Tom over her shoulder in the way cows look at people, which is not in the way humans look at each other but is also not in any other way, exactly. Tom closes the gate behind her.

Pearl comes next. Pearl is more reluctant. She has not been off the farm in five years and the trailer is unfamiliar. Marcelino moves her up with a gentle hand on her flank. She steps in. The gate closes.

Daisy is last. Daisy is, even today, calm.

The trailer holds the three of them. There is room. Rusty signs Tom’s paperwork, which has been printed off the herd management software earlier this morning and which Tom hands him on a clipboard. The paperwork tracks the cows to the auction, which will track them to the buyer, which will track them — eventually — to a processing plant in Pennsylvania or western New York. The chain of custody is, by federal regulation, complete.

Rusty hands the clipboard back. He gets in the cab. He starts the truck. He waves out the window. He drives down the lane, past the heifer barn, past the trailer where Marcelino lives, past the maple at the end of the driveway that has lost most of its leaves, and onto the road, and out of sight.

Tom stands at the gate of the lane for a moment after the truck is gone.

Then he turns and walks back to the barn.

The barn that afternoon is quieter than it was the night before. Or it is the same — there are still ninety-one cows in it, and the sound of cud chewing is the same, and the smell is the same, and the light through the eaves is the same — but it feels quieter, to Tom, because he knows three of the cows who were here yesterday are not here today.

Marcelino is in the parlor washing the floor with a hose. Sarah is in the kitchen paying bills. Anna is at Cornell. The dog is asleep under the table.

Tom stands at the back of the barn and looks at the dry pen, where Hazel is, where she has been since the breeding back, eating, growing the calf she will have in August.

The continuity of the farm is a thing he can see, when he stands at this gate, more clearly than at almost any other moment of the year. There were cows here yesterday who are not here today. There are cows here today who will not be here next year. There is a cow in this dry pen now who is carrying a calf who will be born in August, who may stay on this farm for ten years, or may not. There is a heifer in the barn over the hill — Mabel — who is seven months old, who will give her first milk in eighteen months, who may have eight calves of her own over the next decade, who may also not.

A farm is not a fixed thing. It is a slow river of bodies passing through a place, with the place staying constant and the bodies turning over. The work is what holds the place together while the bodies move. The cows come, the cows go, the calves are born, the heifers freshen, the old cows leave, the milk goes out the door in a tanker, the check comes back on the eighth, and the work continues.

That evening at the kitchen table, Tom is reading the paper and Sarah is on her laptop and the dog is on the rug and the radio is on, low, the way it usually is.

Sarah says: “How was it.”

Tom says: “It was OK.”

He does not say Bertha. He does not need to.

Outside, the November wind is moving across the empty pastures. Inside, the lights are on. In the barn, the herd is settling for the night. In the dry pen, Hazel is lying down, with a calf inside her the size of a small dog, growing on the slow internal clock she has been running on her whole life.

Tomorrow is Wednesday. The milk truck comes Wednesdays.

The work continues.

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