Got Milk?

Yes we do!  Jasper County is home to a very large dairy operation - Fair Oaks Farms.  Five farms in Jasper and Newton Counties milk 30,000 cows and send their products both north and south on I-65.  They are about 20 minutes from my house on the back roads.  The whole time I drive through fields of corn being grown just for them.



Cow-Go-Round by 'Old Man T'

It is quite an operation.  72 cows at a time are milked on a carousel in each of 5 milk houses - around the clock!  Hundreds of cows wait in the corridor to step up into place as those that are milked step off.  They are housed in quarter mile long open-sided  barns where they sleep on beds of sand.  Their manure is processed to generate the electricity to run the place.  Ingenious. 

All of this can be visited at Fair Oaks Farms Dairy Adventure (see link above).  It is a Disney-like farm theme park complete with movies, visitor center, restaurant, and a birthing barn.  A bus tour takes you to the working farm and to a milk house.  Agri-business at its most amazing.

I have visited there twice and the milk I buy comes from there.  (If you live near Chicago or Indianapolis, your milk may come from Fair Oaks, too.  They sell under some well known brands).  But, I have to admit that after the initial awe, I felt saddened.  On the tour, they keep up a steady patter of 'how happy the cows are' and that 'big is beautiful' and 'small is inefficient'.

Well, I've seen the smaller way of doing things and the different way of life associated with it.  I've watched the cows as they were turned out to pasture in the spring and the ensuing 'frolic' - even the old gals could 'kick up their heels' a bit.  I' ve seen them find seclusion in a hollow or the woods to give birth and how proud they were when they returned to the barn with a little calf.

I loved to watch the little society they created among themselves and how they could silently 'organize' things.  One day I was walking with my clueless suburban dog towards the barnyard.  He ran on ahead, and in the few minutes I was behind him, the herd had encircled him and were moving in to literally stamp out him out.  Once they saw me scrambling over the fence, they silently dissolved their circle and pesky dog lived to see another day. Another time they 'organized' a blockade against the horses.  My Dad had to eventually provide a separate feeding area for the horses or they would have starved.

I wonder if there are any families living on small dairy farms now. Milk for them was always plentiful and so was homemade butter and cheese.  Extras were sold to the non-dairy neighbors for some 'mad' money.  Recipes, tips and discussions of the 'best' way of making these were a source of endless interest - and fun debates.  Is that way of life gone now?

My Dad and many of his neighbors didn't have an agri-business philosophy. He told me that although he had purchased the farm, he didn't really own it.  He said that it belonged to God and he was a fortunate man  to be able to use it in his lifetime.  I could see he  loved the land and respected his stock. A lot of the old - timers who survived a little longer than he did have willed their land into the Nature Conservancy to protect it.

I keep a slim volume of Robert Frost's poems on my bedside table.  In a few lines he can bring me to a moment in time that seems as alive as when I first experienced it.  I feel I am back at Running Fox Farm as I read:

 I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sh'nt be gone long. --You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother.  It's so young

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan't be gone long. --You come too.