Milk & Motherhood

Lessons From The Land

The dairy herd is back in the fields. The gentle chewing of the cud, the lowing and the huffing. This year, the farmers will struggle to find enough fresh grass to feed the cattle given the extremely dry spring we have had here in the UK.

Photo by Hans Ripa on Unsplash

A while back I volunteered as a Cub Scout leader for a year and during that time I arranged for the group to visit the local dairy farm. I feel passionately about knowing where our food comes from and this visit would give us an insight into just that. It was a great tour and taught the kids (and me) so much but the one thing that stayed with me from that trip is the way the cows traits are bred into or out of them, through artificial insemination.

The farmer has a huge catalogue from which they can choose the semen from a bull that will mean the cows udders grow straight making milking with automated machines easier. They purportedly can also breed the mothering instinct out of the cows and I was told that this means that if you leave a dairy calf (particularly a Holstein Friesian) with it’s mother for more than a few weeks, it’s likely to lose interest and may even lie on it, endangering the calf.

This makes taking them away from their mother seem like the right thing to do, after which we can benefit from the milk the mother is still producing. I’m not sure where the evidence for this is though and regardless, many of us have become desensitised to this fact and so it seems has the cow.

So what stories did the dairy cows tell me and what lessons can we learn from them?