A Year on a Dairy Farm

2. Chapter 02 The Cow Herself

You cannot eat grass.

Try it. Pull a stem out of the lawn this summer and chew on it for a while and notice what happens. You will get a faintly green taste, a slightly bitter edge, a stringy feeling in your teeth, and at the end of it, exactly zero calories that your body knows what to do with. The energy is in there. You can see it — the grass is alive, growing, photosynthesizing, doing chemistry that human cells cannot do. But the calories are locked behind walls of cellulose, which is a molecule your digestive system cannot break apart. You could eat grass for a month and starve.

A cow eats grass. So does a sheep, a goat, a deer, a moose, a giraffe, a bison. They are called ruminants — about two hundred species in all — and they have figured out a thing the rest of the mammal world has not. Their solution is one of the strangest tricks in biology, and it is the reason humans built civilizations on top of cattle. A cow can take what is growing on land we cannot farm — hillsides, scrub, prairie, marshland, the back forty acres of a steep New York farm where you’d never get a tractor — and turn it into protein and fat that we can eat.

She does this with bacteria.

A cow has four stomach chambers, but only the last of them — the abomasum — is anything like the stomach inside you. The other three are something else. The largest of them, called the rumen, is a fifty-gallon vat of warm fluid that takes up most of the left side of her body. If you put your hand on a cow’s flank just behind her ribs you can feel it: a slow continuous churn, like a very large slow-motion washing machine. The rumen is packed with microbes — bacteria, protozoa, fungi — billions of them in every drop of fluid. They do something a cow cannot do on her own: they break cellulose down. They eat the grass that the cow swallowed. They reproduce inside her. And then, eventually, the cow digests them.

The cow is not digesting grass. The cow is digesting the bacteria that digested the grass. She is a farmer of microbes inside her own body, and the entire arrangement is a partnership a hundred million years older than we are.

The four chambers do four jobs. The rumen is the fermentation tank. The reticulum, smaller and sitting next to it, catches the bigger pieces and sends them back up the cow’s throat to be chewed again. This is the cud. When you watch a cow lying down in the afternoon with her eyes half-closed, jaw moving sideways in that slow circular motion that looks almost meditative, what she is doing is regurgitating a wad of partly-fermented grass and re-chewing it to break it down further. If the barn is quiet, you can sometimes hear it: a soft wet click, every minute or so, as the next wad comes up. A cow chews her cud about eight hours a day. A healthy cow. A cow who isn’t chewing is a cow who is sick. The third chamber, the omasum, is a folded sieve that squeezes water out of the mass before it passes to the abomasum, the true stomach, where it finally meets enzymes and acids the way food meets your stomach when you eat dinner.

All of this — the four chambers, the microbes, the eight hours of chewing — is in the service of one outcome. Grass goes in. Milk and meat come out.

We did not invent this animal. We modified one.

The cow’s wild ancestor was a creature called the aurochs. The aurochs lived across Europe and Asia and North Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. She was bigger than a modern cow — six feet at the shoulder, sometimes more — and she was dangerous. She had long forward-curving horns and a temperament that did not invite handling. The aurochs was the wild ox of the cave paintings at Lascaux. She was hunted by lions and by saber-toothed cats and, later, by us.

About ten and a half thousand years ago, in two places — somewhere in what is now Turkey or Iran, and separately in the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan — small groups of humans began doing something different. Instead of hunting aurochs, they captured them. They kept them alive. They kept the calmer ones and ate the wilder ones, and let the calm ones breed. Over generations, the descendants of those animals got smaller, gentler, more pliant. They got coats in colors no aurochs would have worn. They got useful: they pulled plows, they carried loads, they gave milk. The wild aurochs stayed wild, alongside, for thousands of years more, getting rarer and rarer as forests were cleared and herds were squeezed. The last aurochs on earth was a female who died in a forest in Poland in 1627, alone.

What was left of her, by then, was already living on every continent humans had reached. We had remade her into the cow.

There is no such thing as “the cow.” There are breeds. Hundreds of them. Most readers of this book will know two or three by sight without knowing they know.

The big black-and-white cow — the one on the milk carton, the one in the picture book, the one a six-year-old draws when you say draw a cow — is a Holstein. She is the volume producer, the workhorse of American dairy. About 90 percent of the milk in your refrigerator came from a Holstein. She is very large by cow standards, fifteen hundred pounds or more, and she gives an astonishing amount of milk: about eight gallons a day on a commercial farm, sometimes twelve. She came originally from the lowlands of the Netherlands and northern Germany.

The smaller brown cow with the deer-like face, the long eyelashes, the dark muzzle — that’s a Jersey. She comes, originally and exactly as her name suggests, from the island of Jersey, off the coast of France. She is half the size of a Holstein, gives less milk, but the milk she gives is much richer in butterfat and protein, which is why if you buy fancy butter or fancy cheese or fancy ice cream and read the label you will often find the word Jersey somewhere on it.

Then there are the others, fewer in number, more particular. The Brown Swiss, gray-brown and gentle, originally from the Alps, known for living a long time. The Guernsey, golden-yellow, also from the Channel Islands, whose milk has a slightly creamy color from extra beta-carotene. The Ayrshire, red-and-white, from Scotland, hardy on hills. The Milking Shorthorn, an English breed that used to be everywhere in America before Holsteins took over. The Dutch Belted, black with a wide white stripe around her middle, of which only a few thousand remain in the world.

A grass-based organic farm in the Finger Lakes is unlikely to have a herd of pure Holsteins. The Holstein was bred for industrial milk production indoors on rich grain rations. On grass, she struggles. She is too big, eats too much, breaks down too quickly. So farms like Tom’s tend toward smaller cows — Jerseys, or crosses. Hazel is a Jersey-Holstein cross: half the genetic legacy of the lowland Dutch volume cow, half the legacy of the small rich-milk island cow. She gives less than a Holstein and more than a pure Jersey. She is hardier than either. She holds up on grass.

The other thing to know about modern cows is how recently they became modern.

In 1950, the average American Holstein produced about five thousand pounds of milk in a year. Today the average American Holstein produces about twenty-five thousand pounds. She gives, in other words, five times as much milk as her great-great-grandmother. This did not happen because cows changed their minds about how much milk to make. It happened because for seventy-five years we selected, every generation, the daughters of the highest producers and bred them to the sons of the highest producers, and over time we produced an animal whose body has been pushed in one direction further than any farm animal in history.

The cost of this is real and worth knowing. The high-production modern Holstein has more difficulty getting pregnant than her ancestors. Her feet are more likely to give out under her weight. Her udder is more prone to infection. Her metabolism, in the months after calving, runs at a rate that pushes her body into a kind of controlled depletion: she gives so much milk that her body cannot eat fast enough to keep up, and she draws down her own reserves to do it. She is an animal we have engineered to operate at the edge of what her biology can sustain.

This is one reason farms like Tom’s choose smaller, mixed-breed cows. A Jersey-Holstein cross gives less milk than a champion Holstein. She also lasts longer.

Which brings us to the question of how long a cow lives.

A cow’s natural lifespan — the number of years she would live if she were left to be a cow, without being bred for production, without being sent anywhere at the end of it — is about eighteen to twenty-two years. There are records of cows reaching their late twenties. They are the exceptions. Eighteen to twenty-two is the working number.

The average dairy cow on a conventional American farm is culled — taken out of the milking herd and sent to slaughter — at about five years old. She has had three lactations. She is, in human terms, the equivalent of someone in their early twenties.

On a grass-based organic farm, the average is older. Maybe seven, eight, nine. Hazel is six. She has had five calves. If she stays healthy and keeps breeding back and keeps producing well, she might be on the farm for another three or four years. If something goes wrong — if she doesn’t breed back, if her feet give out, if her production drops — she will not.

This is part of what a dairy cow is. It is not the whole of what she is. It is also not nothing.

Now: what is her day like?

Most of what we know about how a cow experiences the world we owe to a small number of researchers, but more than any other to a woman named Temple Grandin. Grandin is autistic, which she has said gave her a kind of access to cattle thinking that most people don’t have. She thinks in pictures, specifically and concretely, the way she has argued cows do. She has spent fifty years in feedlots and stockyards and slaughterhouses watching what makes cattle calm and what makes them panic, and she has redesigned much of the American cattle handling system around what she found.

What she found is that cows perceive the world in ways that are not like ours, and that almost everything that frightens or stresses a cow can be predicted if you know what to look for.

A cow’s eyes are set on the sides of her head, not the front. This gives her more than three hundred degrees of vision around her body — almost everything except a narrow blind spot directly behind her tail. This is what an animal who has been hunted for millions of years needs in order to survive. The price of the wide field of view is poor depth perception. A cow cannot easily tell whether a dark patch on the floor is a shadow or a hole. She will hesitate. If you push her, she will refuse, and you will think she is being stubborn. She is not being stubborn. She is being a cow.

A cow’s hearing is more sensitive than ours, especially at high frequencies. The clang of a metal gate, the squeal of a hydraulic pump, the high whine of a truck engine — all of this is louder to her than to you. A cow startled by a sudden sound will remember that sound, and that place, for years. A cow who got jabbed in a particular alley three years ago will balk at that alley today.

Her sense of smell is far better than ours. She knows the smell of her own herd, of her own calf, of the people who handle her. She can smell stress on other cows.

She sees in color, but not the same range we see; there is some debate. She is sensitive to contrast — a yellow rain coat hanging on a fence will spook a herd that has walked past that fence a thousand times. She thinks in specifics. She does not generalize. The yellow coat is a problem. The green coat that hung there yesterday was not.

She has friends. This is not sentimental language. Cows form preferred social bonds with specific other cows. They graze together, they lie down next to each other, they get distressed when separated. There is a hierarchy in any herd — a top cow, a bottom cow, a working order in between — and the hierarchy is stable over years and remembered by every member. When a new cow joins the herd, she will be challenged, sometimes hard, until her place is sorted out. Once sorted, the herd settles.

She has a memory longer than people once thought. She remembers individual humans. She remembers which ones moved her gently and which ones did not. She remembers the shape of her own barn and the route to her own stanchion in the milking parlor. If you change the layout of the milking parlor on a Monday morning, you will pay for it for a week.

What this adds up to is a creature whose inner life is real and specific and largely closed to us. She is not like a dog; she does not love you. She is not like a wild animal either; she has been remade by us. She is something else. A cow.

If you stand at the gate of the dry pen at six in the evening and watch Hazel pulling at a rope of baleage, all of this is in front of you. A fifty-gallon fermentation tank turning grass into milk. Ten thousand years of selection from an animal whose last wild ancestor died alone in Poland. A breed shaped by an island off the French coast, crossed with a breed shaped by a Dutch coast. A body engineered, over the last three generations, to do something no cow before 1950 ever did. A nervous system that sees almost all the way around itself, that hears the milking pump from the next room, that has memorized the route from her stall to the parlor and would walk it in the dark. A six-year-old animal who has had five calves and is about to have a sixth, and who might live another four years on this farm. Or longer. Or not.

She does not know any of this. She is busy. She is eating.

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