A dairy experience

40.

Once, I visited a dairy in Queensland, to see for myself how the dairy cow lived. I had to be up early. It was pitch black – 5 am. Two all-terrain-vehicles were already roaring around the hillsides rounding up the herd. At 5.15 things were coming to life. The main approach to the dairy sheds was getting crowded. Two hundred and fifty cows queuing to be milked. Every day at this time and again in the afternoon, they queue for up to two hours in mud and excrement, eventually entering the yards and then the milking shed. Inside the shed it’s all bright lights, hard concrete and iron piping. Twenty cows on one side of the milking pit are plugged in to have their milk drawn from their udders whilst being fed cotton seed to supplement their poor diet in drought-affected pastures. After being milked they are released, but by 6 am only sixty cows have gone through. One hundred and seventy were still outside, waiting.

In one corner, in a pen, there was a newborn male calf, who had good reason to feel frightened. On the dairy farm he’s regarded as trash because he’s male (and useless to the dairy) and he’ll shortly be disposed of. If the calf was female, she’d be taken away from her mother 6 hours after birth, which is thought to be adequate time for her to receive all the essential antibodies from her mother’s colostrum. She’d be taken to the calf rearing section of the farm, quite a distance from the grazing herd, and some months later she would join the heifers in another paddock. At 2 ½ years she is mated with the bull or fertilised by artificial insemination - and she bears a calf. From here she starts a career as a milker, bearing a calf every year. She’ll be milked daily until she is no longer economically productive, at which time she will be sent to the abattoir to have her throat cut and her body used for canned dog food

Meanwhile, at the calf sheds, it’s 7.30 am and 30 young animals drink milk from buckets and are put out in enclosures which are ringed with electrified wire and infested with flies. High above swarm a huge flock of cockatoos attracted to these paddocks, mainly by the undigested cotton seed from the excrement of the cows. Their constant screeching adds something of an eerie atmosphere to the place. There’s a feeling of doom here. The river is drying up, not only from drought, but because its water is being used to irrigate the winter rye grass being grown for fodder. Chemical fertiliser is being spread over the paddocks and these same chemicals, mixed with the wastes from the dairy herd, leech into the river causing a bloom of blue-green algae. This particular river has always been clean enough for platypus, but now there is a danger that they might disappear. And all this destruction and interference is just for milk. Milk to pour on our bowl of corn flakes or into our cup of tea.

So, who will benefit? The big dairies down south will and the intensive dairy farms that push their cows to three milkings per day - they will! It’ll be cheap milk for all, but for the animals it will be just more misery and slavery.