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42—Fellini At the Honor Dairy

On the morning of my second farm tour, The Complete Cow by Sara Rath arrived. On the first page, this quote from Frank Lloyd Wright: “Has anyone sung the song of the patient, calf-bearing, milk-flowing, cud-chewing, tail-switching cow?” 
Wishing to be a singer, I boarded the little yellow cheese bus that afternoon with great enthusiasm.

In short order, our tour group was disembarking in front of the no-frills farmhouse—me in my cow socks followed by a young Phoenix couple with two boistrous and chatty children. . . a small nerdy hunchback dressed in white from his blousy linen shirt to his canvas boat shoes. . . and a gregarious beef farmer on vacation from Missouri with his chipper wife, and rosy-cheeked teenage son and daughter, both bred and raised on that midwestern can-do confidence and red meat.

The sign at the entrance to the farm proclaimed it an “Honor Dairy,” and welcoming us was the dairy farmer’s wife. A hearty woman, she was clad in faded denim and a demeanor suggesting her idea of relaxing after a long day in the field might be bench pressing a 90-pound calf. 

As she led us toward the big metal barn and milking parlor, the air grew thick with the smell of excrement. My eyes began watering as we stepped from the sunny blue day into the big dark barn, damp with the reek rising up from the mucky ooze of manure and urine on the cement walkways between the empty stalls. 

Where was Hercules when we needed him? As partial punishment for killing his wife and children—a crime he was unwittingly condemned by the goddess Hera to commit—the hapless hero was assigned the task of cleaning the Agean Stables. Home to thousands of cows, goats, bulls, sheep, and horses, these stables were a wretched mess. To begin, Hercules knocked a hole in each side of the stable, then dug trenches to the stable from nearby rivers and rerouted the water. As the rivers rushed though one side of the stable and out the other, the water took all the muck with it. 

Moving around the periphery of the barn, we came to a dozen corralled in a pen made of metal bars.
The boisterous children, catching sight of kittens frolicking on some hay bales, went squealing off in pursuit of the terrified kittens. The twenty-two heifers in a metal corral across from the calves grew agitated and—with the slippery stinking mud of their own excrement up over their hooves—began sliding into each other like bumper cars.

You’ve got a great operation here!” exclaimed the beef farmer enthusiastically. 

At first I thought he was being sarcastic. But the beef man was breathing it all in, loving the smell of napalm in the morning.

“There appears to be an abundance of feces,” noted the hunchback inspecting the soles of his white boat shoes.
“It kind of goes with the territory,” observed the Missouri farm boy.

For a surreal and unsettling moment, the clash of realities gave flesh to the stench.
I felt a swell of nausea. 
But then the dairyman's wife led us outside to a stall where her thirteen-year-old son was feeding the bull he'd be showing at the 4H fair in two weeks. The big brown and white animal named Albert would be auctioned off “for a lot of money and then slaughtered,” the boy announced with great excitement, the chest of his Chicago Bulls T-shirt puffing out. 
The hunchback asked what 4H stood for. Neither the boy nor his mother knew.  
“Heart?” she guessed, then said mind and maybe happiness.  
The son pointed out that mind didn’t start with H.

“Hand, Heart, Head, and Health,” I volunteered. “I learned it in seventh-grade health class,” I added apologetically, feeling like the despised teacher’s pet when our hostess and the beef-farm family turned toward me in taciturn unison.

The hunchback remarked that the ubiquitous presence of feces seemed to deny the motto.
“You certainly seem very concerned about feces,” our hostess snapped. “Do you have a particular question?”

When he declined to push the issue, she said, “It’s unrealistic to think that when you have nearly 300 animals in different stages of development, they can all just wander around the pasture. Some farms are cleaner than ours, and we applaud them. But this is our farm and this is the way we do it.”

"What's the difference between heifers and cows," asked the young mother as her children came running and collided with the hunchback, who would have tumbled face first into the calf pen if the Missouri beef boy hadn't caught him. 
The father took the children back to the bus, threatening them with no ice cream if they didn't behave.
“We think of our heifers as teenagers,” the farm wife replied to the question left hanging. “We raise them until it’s time to breed them. Then they join the herd and start producing for us.”

Her sixteen-year-old daughter took over the tour when we entered the milking parlor. The milking process was the same as the other farm, except that the milker squirted the cows teats with iodine instead of wiping them off. 
The cows were already lined up for milking, and it seemed to me that their eyes were vacant, not like the doe eyes of the cows I'd seen the day before. The  farm daughter said their cows kicked a lot, more than at other farms. She didn’t know why.

We each got a chance to try milking a cow. Reaching between the Holstein’s legs was scary. A kick to the head could kill you. But the farm daughter assured us that the metal bar along the cows’ flanks would protect us.  
The teat of the cow to be milked had been cleaned to a bright pink and was soft, sexy even to the touch, and a gentle squeeze produced a spray of hot raw milk.
Treating us to a little farm humor, the farmer’s wife angled another cow’s teat outward and squirted us.  

When I got home, the stench of manure was still in my clothes. I felt depressed and began to ruminate on the dissolution of my sensibilities and how the meaning of the "sacred cow" had changed over the centuries.



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