“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” – J.A. Baker, The Peregrine.

I drove around today, looking for an old-style family farm to take a picture of some cows, something that would have been easy to find even ten years ago, but is getting harder now.

I wanted an image that captured the life of cows before the corporations discovered there was big money in food and the farmers and the good lives of the cows began to vanish, not surprisingly, both at the same time.

Because no one, before, after, cared for their cows more than the old farmers, farming in the old ways. I am not one for nostalgia, but the pace of change all around us sometimes can blind us from seeing what we need to see.

There are some old ways we should have kept.

On my road, five or six miles from my house, I found what I was looking for,  some dairy cows in their green grassy field, drinking from the stream, then crossing it to look for some shade and escape from the gnats and flies.

As I watched, I saw they found their spot, in the shade, away from the road, a quarter-mile from the milking barn. I could have watched them for hours, and I found myself sighing at the thought that my grandchild and certainly her child may not ever see them at all, except on YouTube.

The next generation will never see this scene because it won’t be there. There will be no cows sitting out in the field, drinking from their cool, clear stream, chewing their cuds thoughtfully, and doing nothing with great poise and grace.

All life is transactional now, there’s no safe place to hide.

Cows always look to me like they are deep in thought, but I bet their magic comes from having very few thoughts if any. That vacant look often seems deep. I love watching them.

In the 1950s, two things happened in the United States that led to a catastrophic, painfully slow but relentless end to most family farms in America, although few farmers saw it at the time.

Our world has no more time and space for cows like this, any more than it made room and space for the farmers who cared for them so well for thousands of years.

To the old farmers, cows were partners in the enterprise, something to be coddled, studied, known, and fussed over. I know many farmers who cried every time they pulled a calf out of one of their ladies. They never seemed to take the miracle of life for granted, as gruff and remote as they often seemed.

To their corporate owners, today, the cows are just breeding and milking machines, they might as well be cereal boxes or kitchen tables.

If the cows flounder, limp, give less milk, get sick, or try to go outside, they simply kill them and get another cow that will live a few years if she is lucky and produce twice as much milk as her body wears down.

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Two happenings a half-century doomed the family farmer, and also ended the special lives lived by cows and chickens and sheep.

There is no time for grassy fields now, no room for chickens to walk around, the corporate farms continue their merciless march across the agri-sphere, driving out anyone smaller than they are, making farmers and their family farms obsolete.

When I think of the corporate farms, I think of a great tsunami, rushing across the landscape, destroying everything in front of it.

There were plenty of warnings, but nobody outside of the farmers cared much. The supermarkets had more food than ever before and most people had moved so far away from animals they no longer knew anything about what they needed or wanted.

One of these happenings was the discovery by scientists in New York in the 1950’sthat by adding tiny traces of antibiotics to animal feed they could increase the growth rates of animals.

Suddenly, antibiotics were routinely used in animal feed, particularly in the most intensive American agricultural systems – for cattle, chickens, and pigs.

A host of medical products for animals followed wormers used as drenches, squeezed down throats to kill external parasites like lice, hormones to make the animals grow more quickly, organophosphate dips for sheep to kill wool, and skin parasites like lice.

Farmers spent thousands of years breeding cattle to be calm and productive and healthy, the scientists took a few months, and yes, they made a lot of mistakes.

With these new tools, farmers could concentrate animals in confined areas on a scale never before possible.

Farmers were not just buying machines in great numbers, they became machines, spending as much time in their tractor cabins as they did outside of them.

This new way of farming was at first called farming by the numbers, not by intuition or experience.

Farms were suddenly designed by accountants and economists, not by sons and grandsons and granddaughters passing on a way of life one generation after another.

“Our family is like moss,” one farmer told me, “we just rolled over the moss and gathered it one generation after another. Until now.”

This was soon to be called “factory farming” by the few voices raised in alarm. The term has never been complimentary..

At the same time as the geneticists made their discoveries, Earl Butz, Dwight Eisenhower’s Agriculture Secretary, defined the new future.

It isn’t clear if Butz, a crude by visionary agriculture economist, saw the coming future or created it.

Farms, he said,  and farmers had to consolidate, corporatized, embrace economies of scale, just what most family farmers would never do.  The economists picked up this cry, and the family farmers never had a chance.

Butz’s call became policy, even law. The full weight of the federal government went towards making small family farms obsolute. A cherished way of life began to die.

It was an extraordinary army that was assembling to march on the family farm: politics, big business, economists, science.

Butz was serious, perhaps prescient. He meant that in order to survive, farmers must pursue a new corporate model for farms – maximize profits, minimize loss. By maximizing production,  they would reduce input costs per unit (in farming, per acre.)

If you know any farmers, have been privileged to know a few, you know that this is a tall order for them.

Most of them are fierce individualists, hidebound and wedded to tradition. They really trust no one but other farmers, and sometimes, their wives, and they don’t easily work in tandem with others. They make their own decisions about their farms, they mix tradition with experience, and their ideas and feelings are forged and passed along for many years, one to another.

Farming isn’t a profit center for them, it’s a sacred calling. They rarely make much money, but they very much loved their lives, and for the most part, did their work honorably.

I’m always shocked when the dairy farmers tell me the government hasn’t raised milk prices since 1980. In great measure, this is because the corporate farms can make enough milk to make it profitable, the small farmers can’t. They are bitter about that.

The arrival of the geneticists into the lives of farm animals and the government’s decision that family farms are just not efficient and can’t produce enough food to keep milk cheap and provide enough of it to keep prices down.

The new government policy was to get farms into the hands of the big companies, they would produce much more food and at lower prices, prices that would make voters happy. In Canada, the government passed legislation to protect small farms. That didn’t happen in the United States.

In speeches across the heartland, Butz advised farmers to plant from “fencerow to fencerow” in order to become more profitable.

He told farmers to “get big” or “get out.” He didn’t tell them that within a few years, they would not be able to compete with the rapidly growing corporate farms. He didn’t tell them this was the beginning of the end of the family farm.

The big corporations, drooling over the possibilities, had deep pockets, something almost no farmer had. Almost right away, some farmers started to sell out, those who fought back went broke. They just couldn’t compete with the factory farms.

For the small family farms, this quickly began to minimize rather than maximize the small profits they were used to making. Corporations jumped into farming big-time, buying giant tractors, hiring biologists and geneticists to redesign animals and turn them into unhealthy freaks with short live spans and no resistance to illness, parasites, or viruses, setting up distributions systems that could even sell milk and meat overseas.

When a cow got sick on a family farm, the farmer would tend her or call the large animal vet, almost always a family friend. On the corporate farms, when a cow gets sick, it is instantly put to death, veterinary care cut into profits, the cow just goes to slaughter.

Almost every farm once had a hired hand, usually a man who slept in a barn or a spare bedroom. The hired hands, like the farmers, cherished tradition and knew how to watch out for the animals and keep them healthy. They were valued helpers, often de fact members of the family.

Once the corporate farms got rolling, the farmers couldn’t pay their helpers any longer. And they were falling deeper and deeper into debt buying those big machines that the corporate farms bought like peanuts at a baseball game.

The factory farms didn’t hire old hands, but immigrants and day labors who worked the machinery and drove the tractors. They weren’t farmers and didn’t have much to do with the cows, who don’t go anywhere on a corporate farm.

They stay in small spaces, the lucky ones can move a little, they just give milk until they can’t and then disappear.

The hired farm hand replacements had no farming history to bring to their work. They just worked very hard for very little money. The big farms didn’t follow traditions, they were building something new.

Old farmers often told me about the new breed of farmers who don’t go out into the fields at all or even ever milk a cow. This is incomprehensible to them.

The new farmers work out of offices and often never get near the cows or chickens. “My son went to work for one of those guys,” a retiring dairy farmer told me. “He said it wasn’t anything like a farm, it felt like an accountants company in an office building. The cows were just out back in the barn.”

The average live span of a milk cow, says the Agriculture Department, plunged from 12-15 years to two years by the 1990s. Cows on corporate farms never set foot outside, some never left their stalls, get no exercise, and are bored almost senseless.

There is no stimulation in their lives, no change of scenery no hed for these herd animals, no walk, grazing, or hanging out with other cows, a cow’s favorite activity.

They live as long as they can produce more and more milk, and when they can’t, they die.

The animal rights movement screams and yells when horses work, but how many times have you seen them protesting animals who aren’t allowed to be outside a day in their lives.

In the United States, the movement that calls itself the Animal Rights Movement has been busy raising millions to support their very huge staff and expensive campaigns to kill carriage horses, elephants, and ponies.

When they are not busy getting horses butchered for lack of work or people to care for them, and making sure kids can’t ride on ponies, they are focused on keeping the poor, the elderly, farmers, and people who worked hard or didn’t have big fences from adopting needy dogs and cats.

Farmers tell me they are almost always refused pet adoptions because the animal rights movement says they abuse animals and kill them for food. They go to backyard breeders. I will never quite grasp how this advances the rights of animals.

My wish is that every animal on earth was treated as thoughtfully and conscientiously as these old farmers treated their animals.

In his book “Pastoral Song,” James Rebanks brilliantly and heartbreakingly recounts the animal holocaust he saw developing in England and America.

The family farmers knew that keeping farm animals enclosed in large numbers in one pen, barn, or field for any length of time was inviting disaster.

Every farmer knows that House animals quickly become ill, and “fail to thrive,” as they put it.

The dirty and unhealthy conditions of confinement led to outbreaks of disease and parasites. Animals like cows and pigs didn’t get the vitamins and minerals they needed to be confined in close quarters.

In the wild lots of parasites live on animals like cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens, but the animals are spread out over the countryside and interact with other species. There is wind and rain.

It’s much harder for parasites to jump from animal to animal. Grazing outdoors is a kind of long-time parasite control.

There is also the limited transmission of disease, says Rebanks, through saliva, urine, or muck by spending time outside.

Free-grazing wild animals tend to move away from land covered in their waste, they look for fresh pastures. Animals grazed on family farms with an extensive range of plants that gave them both the diet they needed and also the mineras and vitamins.

But the new and rapidly spreading corporate idea of farming upended all of those hard-learned values. Nobody spent a dime on anything that wasn’t about making more money. The pastures are treated in the same way.

Animals were placed in surroundings that make them dirty, stressed, and diseased, and then given medicines, antibiotics, wormers hormones, and vaccines to cure these problems.

Cows no longer got to graze on pasture, spread out and were being genetically raised to produce more and more milk.

By the 1970s, cattle were expected to give ten gallons of milk a day (twice the milk from just 20 years earlier) but “they were living on a knife-edge,” says Enback and the farmers I talk to, giving far too much of themselves to be robust or fight off infection or parasites.

When a farmer sells his cows, as they all must do at the end, they know they are sending them off on a death march, not peaceful years of grazing and giving all milk they could until they died.

Family farmers generally believed cows were entitled to some peaceful years after all that work. They were put down or shot if they got seriously ill, but were otherwise given peaceful years to graze and be cosseted.

On the farms he saw in England, Reback says one in ten cows had become sicker and weaker. One in ten, he said, was lame at any given moment, with sores on their knees and hocks.

I’ve found agricultural reports that say the same things about chickens and sheep, often kept in even more unbearable conditions than cows.

“They were lean as old crows,” Reback wrote of many of the cows he saw “and hobbled about with huge swollen udders, prone to mastitis.

The proud old cowmen, who once doted on the cows they loved, were all gone. Machines did much of their work, and cheap labor from overseas replaced the need for seasoned hands, always considered essential on a farm. The small farm farmers had twice as much work to do..

Farmhands didn’t make sense to corporations. They wanted to farm in the old way. Most of the poor immigrants were happy to farm in a new way, and they made half of what the hired hands made.

The corporate farms hired animal geneticists who identified “useless” genetic traits, including the instincts they had always needed to develop in their natural settings.

The focus on breeding shifted to developing production – speed of growth and body bulk, improved milk yield, and feed efficiency.

The parts of an animal needed for movement or grazing or being outside could be shrunk with each generation, and the parts that made profits for large corporations were grown.

The physique of the farm animal changed.

They were never outdoors, they never grazed or got to move more than a few feet.

For animals, life became an Orwellian horror show, their very bodies,  and spirits taken from them as they were genetically engineered to be profit centers, not animals with human caretakers and individual personalities and traits.

The first great productivity gains were seen in pigs and chickens, which could be housed in great numbers, confined in tiny spaces, able to re-produce, and selectively bred to convert cheap corn or wheat efficiently into the meat.

Since the 1950’s, before corporations realized the profit possibilities of mass farming, the time it took a chicken from the egg hatching to slaughter has been reduced from sixty-three days to thirty-eight days.

The feed needed per chicken was halved. These new mutant chickens were being kept alive with antibiotics, fed heaps of protein, and house and housed at constant temperatures.

They were more productive, for sure, and food was cheaper.

Essentially, the animals paid for this with their lives and souls, while the animal rights movement sponsored lavish cocktail parties for their biggest donors and clucked about how awful it is for working animals to work.

First, the corporations took over pig farming, then chicken farming, then milk farming.  Large corporations engineered and paid for these genetic changes that gave animals more productivity and shorter lives. They may have done much worse than that, as scientists begin to understand what the chemicals and genetic medicines that humans eat from these animals can do to people.

Corporations in Europe and the United States began switching cattle breeds from decade to decade. The new heavily engineered cattle produced more than twice as much as the cows Reback’s father milked in his childhood: the new cows produce nine or ten gallons of milk in a day.

It took ten thousand years of domestication and gradual selective breeding to create a cow that gave four or five gallons of milk per day. In my lifetime that has more than doubled. It has taken corporate farms just a few years.

Few people are aware of this stunning change, but the cows have paid for it with their very lives. So have the chickens and pigs, many of whom live their lives without ever standing up in factory farms, mostly in the mid-central United  States, where PETA doesn’t hold cocktail parties to raise money and big media is far away. Most Americans will never see what is happening to these animals or even hear about them.

The new cows are high-performing, but they have no lives to live at all beyond producing. The best performing milk cows now often last only two or three lactations (milking cycles after each calf) before they are completely worn out – suffering from lameness, mastitis, or simple exhaustion from being too engineered in pursuit of corporate profits.

In the Corporate Nation, we have learned that high profits are never enough profits.

There must be more and more money all the time, every year, bigger profits no matter what, or heads roll and animals lives get even worse.

No wonder all these family farmers wept as their cows were taken away. I understand it better now.

The old farmers knew their cows would all have a hard year trapped in tiny stalls in concrete buildings and they would be dead in two or three years.

Cows who spent half their lives grazing contently at nothing, in particular, would soon be a thing of the past, like circus elephants and carriage horses and ponies in fairs.

It seems animals will no longer be permitted to live and work with us, that is now considered a form of abuse.

In our warped idea of animal rights, it’s okay to imprison millions, if not billions of animals in horrid, filthy, and cruel conditions so they can earn more money for their owners. Nobody protests that much.

But it is considered outrageous for a horse to be fed, sheltered, and well cared for in a New York City Stable and pull a light carriage in a park in weather that isn’t too cold or too hot.

What surprises me, again and again, is that the people who are labeled abusers – often by the animal rights movement – treat their animals better than any corporate farm anywhere.

I think it’s true that if we saw how the factory animals eat and live and are treated, we would all be vegans.

Sometimes, the so-called “abusers” seem to me to be the people who know animals the best and care for them the most.

The people who increasingly have taken over the care of the animals we eat are sometimes the cruelest and most immoral people who have ever come within a hundred miles of a farm.

It seems we got it backward, and as always, the animals pay our freight as well as theirs.

Before I wrote this piece, I drove back to the cow pasture to see the Guernseys out in the field sitting beneath the big maples as the wind shifted the gnats and flies away from them.

Still, their tails swished back and forth like old women in all those movies waving fans in the heat.  I want to make note of these old ways before they are gone. I imagine one day all of us will miss them in one way or another.

“A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land; it nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace.”  – Wendell Berry, The Unsettling Of America.