I think that by now, just about everyone reading this blog must be familiar with the horrors of industrial farming. The images we are most familiar with are from meat farms: animals kept in cages barely large enough for them, nightmarish sights, sounds, and smells. Sometimes we need a reminder of just how far the industrial farming system spreads. This article, from AltNet describes industrial dairy farming, which is not much better than the slaughterhouse. It’s scary stuff. Cows are bred to produce ten times the amount of milk in a year that they would normally produce for their calves, and they are kept pregnant and lactating constantly, which can leave cows lame from the sheer weight of their udders on their skeletons. Male calves born on these farms are most often sold to veal operations, which are notoriously inhumane, for about $15-20 a calf.
Of course, this was not always the case. There was once a time when cows were only milked for a short time out of the year, when the grass was good. Factory conditions like the ones described here were once unheard of. What happened? We started wanting more milk. Too much milk. The point here, one that I keep coming back to in this blog, is that the destructive systems that bring us our food, and cause so much damage along the way, do so because we ask them to. My favorite soundbite of Michael Pollan’s is that we vote with our forks three times a day. It isn’t enough to recognize the effects of factory farming, nor is it enough to avoid factory farms in our food. We must change our eating habits to reflect food systems that can be supplied by ethical food production. We can drink organic milk, but unless we change the way we eat, the times of year we buy milk and the amount we buy, the demand for milk will remain at a level that can only be met by factory farming.
