A Year on a Dairy Farm

14. Chapter 14 Sources And Further Reading

The notes below are not academic citations. They are recommendations, organized by chapter, for any reader who wants to keep going. I have stayed mostly with sources that a serious fifteen-year-old can actually read and that are, in most cases, available at a public library or online.

A few books appear under more than one chapter, because the best books on this subject tend to cover ground in several of them at once. The most generally useful three, if you only ever read three, are Verlyn Klinkenborg’s More Scenes from the Rural Life, Anne Mendelson’s Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, and Margaret Gray’s Labor and the Locavore.

Chapter 1 — February: Inside the Barn

Verlyn Klinkenborg, More Scenes from the Rural Life (NYRB, 2013) — short essays on farm life in upstate New York, written with the kind of patient attention this book has tried to imitate.

Wendell Berry, Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food (Counterpoint, 2009) — a small selection of Berry’s farming essays, more accessible than his longer works.

Catherine Friend, Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn (Da Capo, 2006) — a funny memoir about adult-entry small farming. Useful as a counterweight to the romanticism in this genre.

Anne Mendelson, Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages (Knopf, 2008) — the best single book on the cultural and biological history of dairy.

Chapter 2 — The Cow Herself

Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation (Scribner, 2005) — Grandin’s most accessible book, and the one that explains how cows actually perceive the world.

Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures (Doubleday, 1995) — Grandin’s autobiography. Worth reading even if you do not care about cows, but especially if you do.

Laurie Winn Carlson, Cattle: An Informal Social History (Ivan R. Dee, 2001) — a readable history of how humans and cattle have lived together for ten thousand years.

Anne Mendelson, Milk (above).

Chapter 3 — March: A Calf Is Born

Sonja A. Swanson and Kevin J. Anderson, Cow-Calf Separation in Dairy Production — a 2021 review article in the Journal of Dairy Science. Free online. Summarizes the research on what separation costs cow and calf.

Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals (New World Library, 2007) — a careful book on what we know and do not know about how animals experience their lives.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (Little, Brown, 2009) — the most-read recent book on the moral side of animal agriculture. Disagree with it where you want to. Read it.

Chapter 4 — April: Out to Pasture

Allan Savory, Holistic Management (Island Press, 3rd ed. 2016) — the canonical book on managed grazing. Worth reading, with the caveat noted in the chapter.

American Grassfed Association, americangrassfed.org — the certification standards in full, plus directories of certified producers.

USDA Organic Standards, ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic — the federal organic rules, which are public and surprisingly readable.

Sarah Flack, The Art and Science of Grazing (Chelsea Green, 2016) — the best practical guide to rotational grazing for small farmers.

Judith D. Schwartz, Cows Save the Planet (Chelsea Green, 2013) — accessible introduction to soil science and grazing’s role in carbon cycling. Reads its claims with the appropriate critical attention.

Chapter 5 — The Morning

John Smith and Mike Brouk, Milking Systems and Parlors — Penn State Extension publication, free online. The clearest short explanation of how milking machines actually work.

Robert Wolke, What Einstein Told His Cook (Norton, 2002), chapter on dairy — useful background on the chemistry of milk and how it gets from cow to carton.

John Bunting, The Milkweed (newsletter, archives at themilkweed.com) — Bunting was a dairy farmer who wrote pointedly about the industry for decades. Useful for the working farmer’s perspective.

Chapter 6 — June: The Milk Check

USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Federal Milk Marketing Order Statistics (ams.usda.gov) — the data behind the Federal Milk Marketing Order system, updated monthly.

Marin Bozic et al., Risk Management for Dairy Farms — University of Minnesota extension publications. Free online. The clearest explanations of how dairy pricing actually works.

Brenda Cooper, Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers (The New Press, 2024) — a recent book that combines the economics of small dairy with the labor question. Useful for both this chapter and chapter 7.

USDA NASS, Milk Production annual reports — for the long-run data on the consolidation of American dairy.

Chapter 7 — August: Haying and the People Who Do It

Margaret Gray, Labor and the Locavore: The Making of a Comprehensive Food Ethic (University of California Press, 2013) — the indispensable book on this subject. If you read one book about farm labor, read this one.

Brenda Cooper, Milked (above).

Seth Holmes, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States (UC Press, 2013) — about fruit and vegetable workers, but the analysis applies broadly.

Migrant Justice / Justicia Migrante (migrantjustice.net) — a Vermont-based farmworker advocacy organization. Their reports are useful primary sources.

Jonathan Blitzer, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (Penguin Press, 2024) — for context on Central American migration to the United States, including the conditions that have driven many dairy workers north.

Chapter 8 — Goats, Sheep, and the Cheese Across the Ocean

Comté Cheese Association, comte.com — the official organization. Their public materials are detailed and informative.

Pierre Boisard, Camembert: A National Myth (UC Press, 2003) — about a different French cheese, but the best English-language book on how AOC systems actually work.

Jenna Woginrich, Made from Scratch (Storey, 2009) — a memoir of small-scale homesteading that includes goats. Honest about the difficulty.

Gianaclis Caldwell, Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking (Chelsea Green, 2012) — if you actually want to make cheese, start here.

The Cellars at Jasper Hill, jasperhillfarm.com — a Vermont operation that has built something Comté-like in the United States. Their model is worth understanding.

Chapter 9 — October: Breeding Back

Select Sires, selectsires.com — the catalog from one of the major dairy genetics companies. Worth seeing for yourself how bulls are marketed.

Heersche, Hopkins, and Spire, Reproductive Anatomy and Physiology of the Cow — Kansas State Extension publication, free online. Clear and accurate.

Helen Browning and Tim Finney, What’s Wrong with Modern Dairy Cattle Breeding? An Organic Perspective — short paper from the Soil Association (UK), free online. Critical perspective on industrial genetics.

Chapter 10 — November: The Decision

Bernard E. Rollin, Farm Animal Welfare: Social, Bioethical, and Research Issues (Iowa State Press, 2003) — the philosophical literature on farm animals, written by a philosopher who has spent his career thinking about this carefully.

USDA, Dairy Cattle Disposition Reports — the public data on how cull cows enter the beef supply chain.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing (Knopf, 2012) — not about cows. Listed here because the chapter on culling owes its restraint to Klinkenborg’s instructions on how to write quietly about hard things.

Chapter 11 — December: The Year, Counted

USDA Farm Service Agency, fsa.usda.gov — the agency itself, including descriptions of all the programs mentioned in the chapter.

Cornell PRO-DAIRY, prodairy.cals.cornell.edu — the financial benchmarking reports they publish are the closest thing to public data on what actual New York dairy farms earn.

National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, sustainableagriculture.net — for advocacy and policy context on the federal programs that touch small farms.

Chapter 12 — Could You Do This?

Cornell Small Farms Program, smallfarms.cornell.edu — start here if you live in or near New York. Every state has an equivalent through its Cooperative Extension service.

SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education), sare.org — the federal program. Their Building a Sustainable Business is a free workbook that walks a beginning farmer through real planning.

Northeast Organic Farming Association (nofa.org) and equivalent organizations in other regions — for conferences, mentorship, and apprenticeship networks.

Eleanor Agnew, Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back (Ivan R. Dee, 2004) — a book by a participant in the back-to-the-land movement, looking back honestly. The clearest account of why most attempts ended.

Henry M. Paulson Jr., On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (Business Plus, 2010). Most of this memoir is about the 2008 financial crisis. But the early chapters contain something this book has tried to gesture at — the story of a young couple who, in their twenties, chose to start their married life in a loft they built themselves on a piece of his parents’ farm in Illinois, and never left, even as his career took him to Goldman Sachs and the Treasury. The wiring was Wendy Paulson’s. The clumsiness was Hank’s. Read the first few chapters.

Helen and Scott Nearing, Living the Good Life (1954) and Continuing the Good Life (1979) — the original American homesteading books. Worth reading both for inspiration and as a check on what their lifestyle actually required (a partial pension, no children, very particular philosophical commitments).

Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (Sierra Club Books, 1977) — the foundational American argument for small-scale agriculture as a moral and ecological practice. Forty-eight years old and still the book to read.

Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin, 2006), and the young readers’ edition (Dial, 2009) — the most-read recent book on where American food comes from. The young readers’ edition is the model many of the choices in this book have, in their own way, tried to follow.

A Note on What Is Not Here

I have not included most of the academic literature on dairy science, animal welfare, or food systems policy, although these literatures are large and worth knowing about. A reader who wants to go further into any of these can start with the bibliographies of the books listed above, most of which lead into the academic conversation.

I have also not listed every farm memoir, every documentary, or every newspaper article on the subject. These exist in abundance. The recommendations above are the ones I would, if asked by a younger version of myself who wanted to understand what an American dairy farm is, hand over without hesitation.

The list is not closed. Other readers will bring other books to it. That is how it should be.

All 14 chapters of A Year on a Dairy Farm · Library · All courses