Got Milk?: A look at dairy production systems

How do you like your milk? Personally, I like mine ice cold and fat free. Sometimes, I add a little bit of chocolate syrup, because who doesn't love chocolate milk? This nutrient-packed, white liquid is in everything from ice cream to cheese to cakes and cookies and custards (oh my!). You can even use it to make glue. There's no question that milk and dairy products are widely loved by society both for their flavor and for their nutritive value, but recently the public has begun to question whether or not dairy farmers uphold the highest animal welfare standards for their cows, and whether or not milk is safe to drink. Both of these concerns have been fueled largely by animal rights activists, who run protests and demonstrations and publish images like these on social media:

  

 

To the modern dairy farmer or the licensed dietitian, these pictures are laughable, and yet many people believe them. I'll post a separate blog post later about the wild nutritional claims present above, but for now I want to focus on the issue of the cow. What do the actual farmers have to say about dairy products, and where exactly does milk come from? The purpose of today's entry is to answer these questions.

The life cycle of a dairy cow starts in the womb, and the aim of breeding for future dairy cows is much the same as breeding for beef cattle. It involves crossbreeding and often times involves AI. You can read about cattle breeding in my beef cattle post here. Just read the first two sections of Birth to 7 Months: The Cow-Calf Operation, except for the bit about hormone capsules. Dairy cows are NEVER implanted with hormone capsules. Regardless, once the calf is born, the first objective is to get colostrum into its system. According to the University of Minnesota, there is only about a 24 hour window to get colostrum into the calf's stomach. This is because its small intestine wall can only absorb the antibodies it needs to fight illness and infection for this long before the lining is no longer permeable enough to allow whole antibodies to pass through. This is necessary because a calf is not born with a functioning immune system. This takes about two weeks to develop, and as a result, if calves do not get colostrum, the probability of death is high. For this reason, many dairies choose to allow the calf to remain with its mother for the first 24 hours of its life. Other dairies pull the calf immediately and bottle feed it with frozen colostrum, or the freshly milked colostrum from the dam. This is a good use for all the colostrum produced by the mother cow because the milk used for human consumption is not, and does not contain, colostrum.

In any case, dairy calves are usually separated from their dam anywhere between 0-24 hours of life. This is what the third picture is referring to above. However, it is important to remember that animal behavior and cognitive ability is vastly different from our own. According to this paper published in Applied Animal Behavior Science, it is actually more humane to separate cow-calf pairs as early in the calf's life as possible. Early separation resulted in fewer indicators of stress, such as sticking the head outside the pen and calling out. In fact, calling only peaked in cows and calves immediately at separation and 18 hours later. At all other times, a steady decrease was seen in stress indicators. The researchers concluded that the peak at 18 hours was due to tight, uncomfortable udders in the cows because the 18 hour peak coincided with the morning milking. In calves, this was the point at which the calves would have gone 12 hours without being fed. In essence, the cows' udders hurt and the calves were hungry. It had nothing to do with "missing their mother." In fact, the data seems to show that the cow and calf forgot the other even existed. This is in stark contrast to what happens to humans when they lose a child. Cows are not humans, and human emotions should not be allocated to them (1).

As the heifer calves grow, they are bottle-fed milk replacer. During the first few weeks of life, calves are kept in individual pens or hutches by themselves to prevent the spread of disease. After this period, they are moved to group housing and fed a balanced diet to ensure that they are healthy and growing well. The bull calves go one of two ways: either into veal production or into "dairy beef" production, where they are marketed as beef animals, exactly like beef breeds. To learn more about beef production, see here. Veal is meat from younger calves, around six months of age. Contrary to the image spread by animal rights activists, veal isn't usually from very young calves. In the interest of full disclosure, however, I will admit that about 15% of veal does come from very young calves of less than three weeks old. Regardless of age, however, veal calves are still subject to the regulations of the Humane Slaughter Act in America, and bob veal is not widely consumed because as this butcher says, "Is it tender? Yes, very tender. So why not use it? It is so young it hasn't developed any real flavor and it is almost too tender where the meat is almost jello-like." It's more likely to end up in dog food than on your plate, which is why it's only a small percentage of veal sold. All other veal is much older. In fact, veal is one of the older meats on the market. Chickens are often harvested at five weeks old, and hogs at around five months. Only beef cattle live longer, often being harvested around fifteen months of age.

Around five months old, the heifers are weaned off of milk replacer and continue to be fed a balanced diet, rich in protein, plenty of vitamins and minerals, and high-calorie roughage such as silage and alfalfa. When heifers reach puberty, they are ready to be bred for the first time. Unlike in humans, puberty in cattle is based solely on size. Most heifers will reach puberty at approximately 600 pounds in weight and about 49 inches tall, according to the Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council . At this point, they will go through their first estrous cycle and may now be bred in order to begin milk production. Milk production peaks around eight weeks into lactation for mature cows, and around 14 weeks into lactation for first calf heifers, according to the University of Kentucky. The average age of a dairy cow is five years old, although it's also quite common for cows to stay in the herd for as long as twelve years.

A typical day in the life of a dairy cow begins early, at the morning milking. Dairies milk 2-3 times per day, but for purposes of this discussion, we'll pretend a hypothetical dairy farm milks twice a day. Depending on how many cows the dairy has, it may have one of several different types of milking parlors. For large dairies with several thousand cattle, rotational milking parlors are common. They allow large amounts of cattle to be milked very quickly. The cows enter a parlor that is circular and moves continuously like a carousel. A worker attaches vacuum tubes to the udder, and when the cow is milked, the milker automatically falls off. The cow backs out of the milking parlor and goes about her business. Here's a video of a rotational milking parlor in action:

Neat, huh? Real talk, sometimes I watch hours of videos on end of these things because they're really, really satisfying to watch. Also, notice how clean the parlor is. Much different from the videos PETA releases, eh? This is real dairy farming, folks. It's very sanitary.

Smaller milking parlors use a system of hydraulic gates to allow cattle to enter and exit specialized chutes. Automatic milking machines which use vacuum suction (exactly like the milking machines in the video above) are attached to the udders and fall off automatically when the cow is done milking. When all the cows are finished, the hydraulic gates open and the cows leave. The gates close, and more cows enter the parlor. Here's how that type of parlor is set up:

Take note of what he says at the end of the video about milk that is dumped. If a cow is sick and is put on antibiotics, her milk is dumped down the drain and not sold. Therefore, all the claims of milk being saturated with antibiotics are false. Milk is extensively tested for residues before it is allowed to be processed. If a tanker truck of milk tests positive for antibiotics in even the smallest amount, the entire tanker is dumped, and the farmer loses thousands of dollars. This is also why activist claims that there is pus in milk are wrong. Tankers are also tested for things called "somatic cells." What's a somatic cell? Any body cell other than a sperm or egg. This can include dead skin cells, blood cells, hair, and white blood cells (which is the type of cell that makes up pus). If the somatic cell count is too high, the milk is dumped. I would also like to add that milk is filtered, so you won't ever find hair in your milk. The amounts of other cells are so small that they're negligible. One or two white blood cells in a glass of milk isn't a problem, especially since pasteurization kills them.

After milking, cows go back into their barn. They spend their time in between milkings eating, sleeping, and socializing. Some barns even have automatic brushes that scratch cows and give them massages.

Poor thing. She's so abused.

Dairies also give their cows pedicures from time to time.

Real talk, I wish I got free pedicures.

Their barns are large and comfortable, and they are often free to roam about. Each cow gets an individual bed of fresh sand, and some dairies even put in water beds for their cows. Cow comfort is very important to farmers because comfortable cows are less stressed, are generally healthier, and produce the most milk. There's a common misconception that farmers don't care about their animals, and they often forgo care just to make a quick buck. Not so. Unhealthy cows cause the farmer to lose money. That is why all good dairy farmers take great care to uphold the highest animal welfare standards possible, and make sure their cows are healthy and happy.

But what about mastitis? After all, as the picture at the beginning of this article suggests, 1/3 of dairy cows have it, right? WRONG! I checked both websites they used to cite their sources. One link took me to the website for LSU's ag program. It had a lot of really good information about how dairy farming actually works, and you should check it out. That being said, I found nothing even remotely close to what I'm now convinced is a made-up statistic. What they did (and this is genius) was make up a bogus statistic and cite a random ag website, hoping you wouldn't fact check them. Joke's on them, because I fact-checked the crap out of that post. After finding nothing about how many dairy cows have mastitis on the LSU website, I turned to scientific journals for more information, and was absolutely blown away. A study of 65 dairy farms in Ontario, Canada, blew Vegan Street's statistic out of the water. Overall, only 19.8% of the cows experienced mastitis during the course of the 2-year study, and these cows certainly did not have it at the same time. This flies in the face of Vegan Street's claims that 33.3% of all dairy cows have mastitis at any given time. They don't. This would not be profitable for a farmer because milk from cows with mastitis is dumped and not sold for human consumption because it contains antibiotics. All milk is tested in accordance with FDA regulations, as shown here. If it tests positive for antibiotics, the entire tanker of milk is dumped, and the farmer loses thousands of dollars. Therefore, if 1/3 of all the cows on a farm have mastitis, profits will be restricted by 1/3. Not only are dairy cattle expensive to feed because of their complex nutrition requirements, but they also use up a lot of capital in terms of land, barns, etc. while not being milked. If 1/3 of them were infected, the farm would go out of business. That's just simple economics and common sense. As for the claims that milking equipment is what causes mastitis, this is only half true. Good dairy farmers sanitize their equipment and the teats of each cow before and after milking. The second video explains that part. Mastitis is caused by other things, such as fly bites and dirt getting in the teat when they lay down. It doesn't always, or even usually, come from the milk machine. And while it's true that mastitis increases the somatic cell count of milk, somatic cell count is tested much the same as antibiotics is. If the count in the tanker is too high, it's dumped, and that milk never enters the food supply. Also, I'd like to point out that somatic cells aren't pus, as the picture claims. Somatic cells are any body cell that isn't a gamete (egg and sperm). Therefore, it includes things like dead skin cells, blood cells that accidentally leak from capillaries, and white blood cells. White blood cells are the most likely to end up in milk because the purpose of milk is to nourish the calf and help keep them healthy. And while large colonies of white blood cells are one component of what makes up pus, as defined in the Oxford Dictionary, pus is, "A thick yellowish or greenish opaque liquid produced in infected tissue, consisting of dead white blood cells and bacteria with tissue debris and serum." For starters, milk isn't infected, nor is it a tissue. The somatic cells in it don't have to be dead, and there most certainly aren't clumps of tissue debris floating around in it. A few live white blood cells aren't pus. They're just white blood cells, and they're microscopic. Pus can be seen by the naked eye because it includes tissue debris and serum. It also stinks because of the bacteria. The only case where an udder might become infected and pus might get into the milk is in the case of an abscess or mastitis, and both conditions force the milk to be dumped and antibiotics to be administered. 

To conclude, dairy isn't scary! It's actually one of the most regulated food products out there. There are many fear mongering tactics out there that are spread by the animal rights activists, but dairy is a safe, wholesome product that is packed full of protein and nutrients to help get you through the day! Got milk?

I'm a full-time college student at Texas A&M University, where I'm in the process of getting my Animal Science degree, with eventual aspirations to go to law school and work as a consulting lawyer for agriculture corporations. I grew up around animals, and currently manage an operation that breeds show-quality boer goats for 4H and FFA exhibitors. My family also raises commercial cattle in south Texas.