POV; Notes on Milk

It's just unbelievable. I mean, it sounds like they were just completely soft all the time. The supply, the heavy drinking practices of urban New Yorkers, rich and poor alike, with the liquor and the beer, it required a great deal of brewery grains and these brewery grains had to be disposed of. The dairy in the country were primarily seasonal. I think you would have your whole herd basically not giving milk in the winter.

Only in the swill milk dairy I did the milkmen create a system where they bred the cows all year long so that they could get milk all year long. He receives an apparition from, you know, is wandering through the woods. He receives an apparition from an angel.

The apparition changes his life. In this essay on milk, he not only shows how the consumers can get milk to the city, pure milk to the city, but he also raises milk into a kind of holy realm and he attaches it to early sort of biblical stories about how God loved able more than came because able was the cow herd. He could proclaim milk to be this almost heavenly food that can come from the country into the city

and save the city children from the swill milk associated with the distilleries. It's one of those situations where the consumers are basically hailing the farmers to bring them the kind of milk that they need and for actually quite a while the farmers are not necessarily willing to provide this kind of milk until they realize that if they do create the system, this sort of year-long kind of dairy system, that they can profit greatly from it because the price of what they can get for their milk is so much higher than the price they can get for the milk they make into butter. Members of the Senate, members of the House, all of the distinguished guests in the platform.

With 40,000 in this hall, I just wonder who's home milking the cows. I recall as I returned after spending 14 months in the Pacific, what I really wanted most in terms of the food on the table when I returned. Out there, it wasn't bad, but of course everybody gripes about the food when he's in the service. And you know what it was? Not a steak or none of the other things that you usually think of. Just a glass of good fresh milk, something we never had abroad. We in America should be thankful that we can get good, fresh, healthy milk any time we modded on our tables in the United States.

We want to be watergate of each of our categories. It is, of course, the milk fund. And the milk fund, of course, was investigated by the Senate Select Committee on Presidential campaign activities in 1972. The Watergate Special Prosecution Force, and also the House Impeachment Committee. There were three main milk producing co-operatives that the mixed administration accorded, and they had 70,000 members between them. Mostly in the Midwest and in the South, and these were the very constituents that the administration was targeting for their re-election campaign. And they were very grateful when in April 1970, the administration, the Secretary of Agriculture, announced the largest price support increase in the history of the program. The milk producers were promising an exchange for this increased price of milk, two million dollars, to the Nixon camp re-election campaign.

And some of the money that was used, that was given to the Nixon campaign, was ultimately used by Charles Colson to finance the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist office in September of 1971. So there's kind of a even tie-in for the milk fund into that illegal break-in. I don't identify it. All right, John Erlich, better go get a glass of milk. There's a laughter. Drink it while it's cheap. That's my favorite one there. They're looking to kind of joking about the price of milk. The associate milk producers themselves, they were indicted as an organization, and they actually didn't put guilty to conspiracy for making corporate campaign contributions. I think the future of America is in good hands, and I wish you well in everything that you do.

The watergate investigation can cover the break-in, the cover-up, it included the misuse of federal agencies for political gain, and it also included the milk fund. I don't know if you're going to be able to do that. I don't know if you're going to be able to do that.

I don't know if you're going to be able to do that. I don't know. I don't know if you're going to be able to do that. I don't know if you're going to be able to do that. When people think of the agrarian dream, they think of milk, they think of cows in the countryside.

These sort of farms that are these pastoral farms, they tend to become this kind of veil over what real agriculture looks like, and what real agriculture production is. It's really hard to make a living according to an ideal, and lots of people go under in the process of trying to do that. In some ways it was like being in church, but there's a vacuum pump that's really the loudest thing that's going on, and it's almost like a heartbeat.

And all these cows are breathing. Yeah, it's almost like a religious experience. But it's a really special feeling, and I know it is for Rob too. I just couldn't believe that cows are okay outside, and the way they're more than okay, they never get sick.

They're just very healthy. It's their natural surroundings, it only makes sense I guess, but when you're brought up a certain way, you forget about what makes sense and just do the way you're taught. There's my tree stall barn right there. They grow lots of hair, and they're no cold within the deer or any other animal that's meant to be outside. One big thing I tell people is you've got to not care what your neighbors think if you're going to farm this way, because they're not going to approve. I guarantee you that. I am definitely the most laughed at dairymen in this part of the country. You just can't care what they think if you know what you're doing is right. In the very beginning, when I went all seasonal with no grain, it was just everybody was saying it can't be done. I was scared, but it also added determination to it, I guess, prove people wrong. There's always a strong pusher.

I even asked a panel of nutritionists at a grazing conference if I could do what I am doing now, and they said no, it's not possible. The cows would starve without they wouldn't breed back. Now, eight years later, we're still not doing it, I guess. Part of dairying or farming this way has to do with just not buying anything, too. You just have to be extremely frugal and you can't sell to every salesman coming down the road. And the funny thing of it is most of those salesmen are ex-dairy farmers. If they were farming this way, they'd probably still be farming. We're seasonal dairy. That means we just have in the spring what natural time of the year for cows to be canning. The milk industry doesn't care for it, but milk processors don't like the seasonality needed in a natural system like this. We're also all grass.

We don't do any plowing or killing or planting corn or we don't have all the heavy metal in the equipment. So we don't have to feed any grain. We also use a lot of different breeds of cows by using cross breeds and not these hype, hybrid, high production cows. They don't give 100 pounds of milk, but they'll give enough on grass and still be able to do it again next year. It just seems to make sense now where it was before it was a battle to get me to see it. Because I was always just raised, this is how it's done. This is how dairy farming is done. The cows is born and take the cow away from the cow. It's treated to the bottle, so natural with a calf. The mother can't raise, don't baby. But boy, you go to talk to most dairy farmers. I think I'm just a loonyist guy around for letting my calves run with their own mothers. This is how it's done.

This is how it's done. This is how it's done. This is how it's done. This is how it's done.

This is how it's done. This is how it's done. This is how it's done.