Got Milk? A Disturbing Look at the Dairy Industry

The bucolic scene of Holsteins grazing on a grassy hill that adorns milk cartons and cheese wrappers is nothing more than fantasy these days. While the meat industry has come under intensive scrutiny (and with good reason) for the massive factory farm system of raising cattle in confinement, animals in the dairy industry are arguably worse off.

Eating milk, cheese, sour cream, ice cream, and other dairy yumminess is impossible to do with a clear conscience -- and I'm not referring to the fat or cholesterol. Calves born into the industrial grip of today's dairy industry have a road ahead of them that is short, but not merciful. Dairy cows are subject to brutal conditions before being sent to slaughter for beef and male calves are worth next to nothing in the dairy business. Some are simply left to die after birth. Many are slaughtered for low-grade "bob veal" a few days after they are born and will end up as cheap hot dogs or dog food.

While a small number of dairies are bucking the industrial trend, the vast majority of dairy products we eat come from factories that are nothing short of horrific in many cases.

Where Milk Comes From

We've become so far removed from the source of our food that many Americans are oblivious to where most of what they eat is actually coming from, dairy included. Yes, milk comes from cows. And how do cows get milk? Like other female mammals, they produce milk to feed their offspring. In the business of raising cows to produce as much milk as possible, which is the goal of most of the U.S. dairy industry, cows are kept in perpetual states of lactation and impregnation.

"One of the things people don't think about is the effort it takes a cow to produce milk," said Marlene Halverson who has worked on farm animal welfare issues for years. "The amount of energy and the physiological capacity to produce the kinds of yields that industrial dairy farming is demanding of cows today is huge." The average dairy cow on industrial farms produces roughly 20,000 pounds of milk a year -- 10 times more than she'd normally produce to feed a calf.

Professor John Webster, author of The Welfare of Dairy Cattle, wrote, "The amount of work done by the cow in peak lactation is immense ...To achieve a comparably high work rate a human would have to jog for about six hours a day, every day."

Sounds exhausting. And that's just the beginning. In between milkings, Halverson says, a high-producing dairy cow's udder will fill up with 6.5 gallons of milk. That makes walking with a cow's normal gait next to impossible because of the swollen size of the udder, greatly increasing the chances of lameness.

Of course, cows haven't always produced so much milk. As Nicolette Hahn Niman accounts in her book, Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms, early in our country's history, cows weren't even milked year round, but only in the months where there was good enough grass. "Like cured meats, butter and cheese were methods of preserving milk during the seasons of plenty for the cold months to come," she accounts.

And cows used to serve multiple purposes -- milk, meat, and labor. But increasingly cows were bred for single traits, such as milk production. After World War II, industrialization of our food system ramped up with the availability of cheap energy, pesticides, fertilizers, and mechanization. By 2005, Niman writes, cows' yields were increased by seven fold in a century's time -- mainly through manipulations of breeding and diet and the additions of antibiotics and hormones.

But the largest surge in so-called productivity came decades after WWII. "It was the 1970s when the dairy industry really started ramping up milk production in Holstein cattle," said Halverson. "Cattle before the 1970s were healthy, normal dairy cows, they didn't have issues with lameness, mastitis (a painful udder infection), and reproductive problems in huge amounts." All that selective breeding and milk demand has made the Holstein a much more fragile animal.