Wearing the cow socks I’d bought with my field guide to cows, I boarded the little yellow cheese bus in front of the cheese factory, eager for my first farm tour and meeting some cows up close and personal.
“Hi,” said the young blonde woman in denim overalls standing up front, “my name is Mandy, “and I’ll be your guide this afternoon.” Mandy introduced herself as a high-school junior and farm girl active in 4-H. She used to scoop out cones of Tillamook ice cream at the factory but was now working in fudge. Doing tours was a bonus, and she was glad to have a full bus.
Even in overalls, our little Mandy exuded a prom-pink sweetness.
Before leaving the parking lot, the bus paused in front of a replica of the Morning Star, a ship constructed in 1855 to carry the left-over milk and butter of Tillamook’s pioneer farmers up the coast and inland to Portland. As they exchanged these goods for supplies, the Tillamook dairy industry was born. Because milk spoiled easily in transport, the farmers began making cheese. (Click on link under the picture for your own tour.)
On the way to our destination, Mandy pointed out different breeds of cows grazing in the fields:
Holsteins produce the most milk.
The brown and white Guernseys produce the rich milk with cream on top.
The tan Jersey’s milk is highest in butterfat.
The Brown Swiss are the heartiest and also great producers of butterfat.
Dutch Belted cows—known locally as Oreo cows because of the white stripe around the middle of their black bodies—eat more grass than grain so need a lot of pasture.
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| Jersey |
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| Guernsey |
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| Brown Swiss |
While learning about cows, we passed around baggies of feed—corn, various grain pellets and pellets of beet pulp, soybean meal,barley, canola meal, and delinted cottonseed, along with whole fuzzy cottonseed to clean out the cows stomachs. All this food had a high fat content because farmers get paid according to the butterfat content.
Our guide then launched into the specifics of artificial insemination—A I, as Mandy referred to the breeding procedure in which freeze-dried sperm is injected into the cow. “And if the A I doesn’t take,” our prom-pink farm girl added, “we just stick the cow in a pen with a bull.”
She then passed around a catalogue of available bulls whose studly sperm stats were outlined under their pictures. These big boys sported such bullish names as Caleb, Durham, Black Bart, Emerson, and Kenneth.
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| Dutch Belted |
She then passed around a catalogue of available bulls whose studly sperm stats were outlined under their pictures. These big boys sported such bullish names as Caleb, Durham, Black Bart, Emerson, and Kenneth.
Someone in the group asked Mandy about her plans for the future.
“A doctor,” she said, “but I don’t know if I want to work on people or animals.”
Pulling into a large gravel area between a barn and farm house, we were greeted by a young man wearing muddy Levi’s, an undershirt, and work boots. Mandy introduced Riff as a fourth-generation farmer studying embryonic insemination at Oregon State.
Riff led us into the milking parlor next to the barn. The parlor was a huge rectangular cement room with five milking machines running parallel to each of the long walls. Between the machines and the wall was a walkway on which cows passed through the parlor. The machines were separated down the middle of the room by a sunken work area which put the parlor manager face to udder with the cows.
The milker hosed down the cow’s legs, then after wiping clean each of her four teats with iodine fit each one into a metal cylinder. From these cylinders, the milk ran through narrow tubing into a transparent plastic hub and from there through a pipe into huge sterilized holding tank. Here, the hot raw fluid was cooled before being picked up by a big silver tanker truck.
The storage tank cost about the same as a small house. And if even a trace of antibiotics rendered the entire tank of milk worthless. The most common use of antibiotics was used to treat mastitis, an inflammation of the cow’s mammary glands.
When the cow had no more milk to give, sensors shut off the milking machine. This milking operation had to be done twice a day, 365 days of the year.
The process was efficient, as in the way each cow’s tail was wrapped around a little hook so as to keep it from swatting the milker and doing serious damage to the eyes. Parallel bars kept a stray kick from hitting the milker in the head.
In a video at the cheese factory, the cows were shiny and clean even before they were hosed down. One calf’s legs were so white that the sun radiated off them into a little of aura of brightness. In reality, the cows’ hooves kept sliding on metal grates designed to carry off their excrement. And there was shit, pee, and mud all over the cows.
The metal barn was large shadowy with a cement floor and row after row of stalls separated by metal bars. As we passed through on the way to the calf pens, cows were moseying back from the milking parlor and settling down on the staw bedding in their stalls. The barn was clean in that the walkways between stalls had been bulldozed and hosed down and fresh straw laid in each stall. In contrast with the clean bright shelves of milk, butter, cheese, and yogurt, the smell of shit and pee was everywhere. I suddenly felt extraordinarily urban and foolish in my white sneakers and cow socks.
His father, Riff was saying, knew all one hundred and fifty-eight cows by name, as well as each cow’s heritage described in a log inside the house. For those who couldn’t keep the herd straight, each cow had a yellow tag with a number attached to its ear.
At the calf pens, we met Riff’s mom who looked after the young bovines. Currently she had twelve girls under her care, each in its own little stall made of hay bales. While feeding them milk out of big nippled bottles, she spoke and cooed to them as if they were children.
She wasn’t as friendly to the five boys crowded into a small pen until later that after noon when they would be trucked off to market. Probably to become hot dogs or baloney, Mandy said. Better that, I thought, than a slow hobbling of body and spirit into veal.
In one stall was a new-born calf taken just hours before from her mother who was now stretching her neck through metal bars, calling pitifully toward her baby. This is standard procedure, Mandy said, because in the crowded conditions a new born would likely be stepped on. The mother is taken immediately to be milked, and the baby receives its first milk from an oversized baby bottle.
Responding to the anguish that rippled through the group, Riff's mom said, with just a hint of edge, that “In the end, farming is a business.”
Responding to the anguish that rippled through the group, Riff's mom said, with just a hint of edge, that “In the end, farming is a business.”
A man from Portland asked if they’d been affected by the flood of ’96. Riff said it came so fast that many farmers couldn’t get their cows to higher ground but luckily their farm had been spared.
Still, his mother added, high grain prices can wipe out profits so that steady incomes in dairy farming don’t exist. Sometimes the farm made $1500 per cow. Other years, $100.
There was also pressure from environmentalists to keep all the cows and their manure out of the rivers and streams. For years, farmers used manure shoveled out of their barns to fertilize their pastures. But with increased restrictions, getting rid of waste became an overwhelming problem.
As cows moseyed back from the milking parlor through the barn to their stalls, a woman asked why they didn’t pick stalls closest to the door.
“They each have their own spot,” Mandy told us, “and they never forget where to go.”
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(Click for a quick shutter stock look at the milking process described above)
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