Whole Life Magazine

October/November 2014

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conventional dairies, and he's proud to pay the extra associated costs. Among these costs—although his dry lots are designed for 140 cows, he said he limits them to 75. Lesser quality milk is sent elsewhere, LaBrucherie assured me, and farmers can miss the mark only once before being barred from Alta Dena. e cleanliness and humane practices of its producers are evaluated monthly. is farmer emphatically opposes pesticides and GMO feed. e teenage calves on dry lots lounged in the shade and ate green alfalfa. And his milking cows' diet of spent grain (fermented barley and hops from cra breweries), a practice dating to Neolithic times, put an unexpected spin on the happy cow tale. CLARAVALE FARMS D own miles of dirt road, through desert too parched for cactus, lies Claravale Farm. Owners Ron Garthwaite and his wife, Collette Cassidy, are more private than the McAfees, but greeted me politely. Garthwaite confi rmed that McAfee learned dairy farming the hard way. Claravale and Organic Pastures are the only certifi ed raw dairies in California, and the two companies work together advocating with state authorities on behalf of unpasteurized milk. EVAPORATED MYTHS W hile there are undoubtedly unscrupulous farmers in the industry, all of the animals I visited roamed large paddocks or pastures, and don't spend their days in tiny stalls or hooked up to milking machines. For example, at Basque American Dairy, LaBrucherie's cows spend about 15 minutes twice a day in the "milking parlor." Claravale's goat milking parlor has four stalls, and at a signal from farm hand Spencer Tregilgas, the goats, four at a time, jump into the milking stalls, where they spend about two minutes. In one YouTube video, a farmer "tears" a newborn calf from her mother to fulfi ll human demand for cow's milk. Farmer McAfee, who has made a sustained eff ort to keep mothers and newborns together, explained it diff erently. "We kept them together for about two years," he said, and, "we had incredibly high calf losses, about 30 percent." Dairy cows in a herd, he learned, are not nurturing mothers. "About 70 percent of the time they would walk away, neglect, step on them... coyotes would come into the pens at night out in the pastures and eat the calves. It was not economically sustainable. It was certainly inhumane, and not something we wanted to support." Now Organic Pastures' cows and calves are separated when the calves are three-days old. For the two months it takes their immune systems to develop, newborns live in small, half-shaded wooden hutches where they're fed colostrum, milk and hay. en they move to a paddock to live with other calves, and at six months they join the herd. Animal lifespans vary among the dairies. Factory farm cows typically live about four years, but McAfee and LaBrucherie's cows live more than twice as long. Both dairymen would like to believe their animals' deaths are quick and painless, but neither is permitted to witness the process and they cannot be certain. However they take some comfort that due to past exposés of abuse, there are now cameras in the slaughterhouses. CHANGES IN THE INDUSTRY "T he future cow is an almond tree," says McAfee, because "a lot of dairies here in California are going bankrupt." Ironically, his own profi table almond orchard fi nanced Organic Pastures. One employee maintains his entire almond orchard, while the dairy requires 64 employees. Similarly, Basque American was going broke in 2009 before stumbling upon spent grain from regional breweries as a rich source of free feed. Perhaps the most promising trend is at the Sanctuary at Soledad Goats in Mojave, where a delirious circus of nuzzling nannies and kids jumped up to greet me. Charitable donations and the gourmet goat cheeses Soledad sells at farmers markets and to restaurants from Lancaster to Laguna Beach support rescued cows, horses, dogs, a donkey, ducks, turkeys, chickens, pigs, sheep and a fl ock of pigeons. At Soledad, all residents are allowed to live out their natural lives; here the animals are never sent to slaughter, and nannies as old as 17 lounge about contentedly. Owner Julian Pearce described a carload of vegan women who visited Soledad a er seeing it featured on a local TV broadcast. Upon sampling a bit of goat cheese, one 25 year-vegan, convinced the animals receive humane treatment, exclaimed, " is is terrible. You've just converted four vegans." her mother to fulfi ll human demand for cow's milk. Farmer McAfee, who has made a sustained eff ort to keep mothers and newborns together, explained it diff erently. "We kept them together for about two years," he said, and, "we had incredibly high calf losses, about 30 percent." Dairy cows in a herd, he learned, are not nurturing mothers. "About 70 percent of the time they would walk away, neglect, step on them... coyotes would come into the pens at night out in the pastures and eat the calves. It was not economically sustainable. It was certainly Now Organic Pastures' cows and calves are separated when the calves are three-days old. For the two months it takes their immune systems to develop, newborns live in small, half-shaded wooden hutches where they're fed colostrum, milk and hay. en they move to a paddock to live with other Animal lifespans vary among the dairies. Factory farm treatment, exclaimed, " is is terrible. You've just converted four vegans." october/november 2014 23

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