About a week after I got there, I applied for and obtained a milking job in Richmond. It was about a 30-40 minute drive from my apartment. It was a pretty long trip. I was hoping for something closer to home than that. I was taking an introductory dairy science class, when the teacher (and farm manager), Ron Bowman, mentioned that he had a position open at the school dairy farm. I quickly applied for whatever position it might be. It just so happened that I would be feeding the calves at the school dairy farm, as well as moving pens of cows to and from the milking parlor. I was hired, and I was back to where I started with Rawl, feeding calves. Instead of 10-15 calves to care for, I would have 40-50 calves to care for, as well as keeping the milking parlor stocked with cows to milk.
At the dairy farm, I saw a learned many things, some good, and some not so good in my estimation. The USU dairy has long been a top school in the country for dairy science. The farm supplied milk to the Food Science department, which had a small dairy processing plant. The most notable output of that plant was the famed "Aggie Ice Cream." Fantastic stuff that is.
On the farm, I saw experiments with feeding, rumination, embryo flushing and others. One of the things I saw, which helped me develop my own ideals and philosophy surrounding feeding related to fact that feeding cows, which are ruminants, large amounts of grain created an overly acid rumen (first stomach) environment. This acid environment led to many health problems and low butterfat production. The long-term experiment included mixing in various levels of sodium bicarbinate (a pH buffer) into the feed to determine the impact on production and some other parameters that I was not privy to. These high grain, high energy diets were part of the path to high production dairying with the Holy Grail being a herd of Holstein cattle that had an average annual per cow production of 20,000 pounds or more of milk. Let's put that in perspective. That much milk is about 2,326 gallons of milk. A cow lactates about 305 days out of a 365 day year, so that is 7.6 gallons a day.
One of the implications of this high production environment was that the cows burned out very quickly. Cows often only lasted two to three lactations, then became ill or infertile. At Rawl's more holistic farm, he saw average annual production of about 14,000 to 15,000 pounds of milk per cow. When I was working for Rawl, he had one cow that was 20 years old and had had 18 calves in her life. He had another cow that was the butterfat yield champion of the county and was 18 years old, having 16 calves in her life. The average age of Rawl's cows was just over ten years old. What I saw at USU compared to Rawl's farm led me to question the efficiency of the high yield model. Just as important, it caused me to question the ethics of the high yield model. Later in life, as I studied both human and cattle nutrition, it became clear to me that cows eating diets intended for ruminants (hay and other forage, not grain) produce milk that is of higher quality for human consumption and human health as well. That will be a future topic to discuss.
I was grateful for the opportunity to continue to work with cows and for employment. I continued to work at the USU dairy farm for about two years or so. For the first year, I was largely in charge of the calves. After the first year, I started milking as well. With the employment, I was able provide for myself and pay for college. I was able to get married and support my family in a very meager, but acceptable way. I was also able to learn things that have helped to form my views of proper farming and how to grow excellent food, excellently.
