I grew up on a farm with a little red barn and beautiful black and white Holstein cows. I was involved in 4H and FFA. As a senior in High School, I even earned a 1st place finish in Dairy Judging at the 1996 NAILE. Today, looking around at our milking robots and parlor, free stall buildings, and crossbred cows, it might seem like a different world from where I started, but I would disagree.
It’s often said that 1% of the population produces the food for 99%. And without sounding arrogant, it is true that we do the work that allows everyone else to not have to be the hunters and gatherers. Even as a dairy farmer, at the end of the day I don’t have to feed some hogs or cultivate the garden because other farmers have done that for me.
The dependence on farmers to provide our food is really fairly recent. In the last 100 years, we have gone from a large agrarian population to a small minority as people left rural areas and moved to cities. And there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that but 100 years is a tiny drop in the evolutionary bucket. Now we expect people to do things for us. It trickles down to everything. From when people used to do more of their maintenance on their cars, more of their maintenance in their homes, their roofing, siding, shingling, or remodeling. We’re losing that doer in us, and it’s become more of, “Somebody else do that for me,” right or wrong. I do it. We do it. You only have so many hours in a day, so you’re subcontracting out.
I think how quickly we have gone to depending on others to grow our food instead of doing it ourselves has left many of us at odds with our natural desire to be a part of the food we eat. So many people are confused and disconnected about something that they actually care a lot about.
It’s great that there are so many people taking more of an interest in where their food comes from. I like to see more diverse farms out there. There is a place for the small scale farmer in the world, but I also don’t believe that those small scale farms are the only answer for a sustainable food system. The cow has left the barn and we can’t go back to only small farms providing for all of the hungry bellies who depend on us.
Right now we are in a massive transition time. Economies of scale are getting bigger and bigger. Whatever benchmark you want to use, it’s going to be more cows per person, even if it’s going up 10 cows, and what technology can be done to help bridge that gap and that’s nothing new. You went from bucket milking to pipeline, you went from pipeline to parlor. Now we went from parlor to bigger parlors, or to robots.
This last week, college students from all over North America toured our farm. They were here because they were competing in the Dairy Challenge and our farm was the first stop on their tour before the competition took place. These teams then traveled to some very progressive dairy farms around the area and spent time pouring over the details of each farm, they look at all the different areas from feed to cow health to employee management and more. In the end, the teams make recommendations on how the farms could improve for the future. The farms they visit are already doing things very well. But the competition is very much like farming in that the tiny details can be what make a farm survive for the future. (You can read more about it HERE)
When I think about the people in the highrise buildings in the center of New York City who has never stepped foot on a farm, I wonder if they know what this life is like. I of course hope that they know that we actually really do care about our animals. I know there is a disconnect. People don’t see how we actually are caretakers of our planet and caretakers of our cows. They believe that the little red barn and black and white cows that I grew up with are the correct way forward. They don’t see that we can have the big farms and we can have the small farms and in fact, we need both. The future of our farms relies on how we manage what we have, no matter what size our farm is.