I grew up on cows milk. When my brother went to work with my father, occasionally he would fill-in for the shepherds too and milk the cows we had on the station—milk that went to all the families that worked on the station farm. And he knew exactly what the cows ate too: either green grass or hay. At all seasons the cows were pastured and were rotated from one paddock to another.
The only thing we had to be aware of when it came to ensuring their health was making sure the paddocks weren’t covered in clover that had flowered. Too much clover in a cows diet he said, and the cows would bloat (which seemed odd to me when that’s how they normally looked). I imagined them blowing up like big balloons and floating away in the sky never to return so I was always on the lookout for flowering clover and floating cows.
It took a long time for me to get use to the dairy products when we moved here. When we lived in upstate New York our accountant’s wife’s family owned a dairy farm that combined with other dairy farms in the area that supplied the milk we bought from the store. One day she invited me for a tour of their dairy and I was happy for it, albeit it was an eye opener for someone from a small station farm that had only 30 cows. Their barns were huge! By the time morning milking was over it was time for afternoon milking. The process was never ending.
During winter the cows were kept indoors and ate haylage. I had never thought about what happened to cows that lived in a climate where it snowed between four to six months in the year so I was glad to hear that they were kept indoors! During the warmer seasons the cows were turned out to pasture. If it was hot however, the cows would literally scramble for the barn to escape the heat. And I mean scramble. I had never seen a cow scramble for shelter before so this seemed very unnatural. But then cows are pretty smart animals too. I just couldn’t get over how much time those cows spent indoors.
The owners grew corn and there were paddocks and paddocks of it during harvest season. I thought the owners grew corn to sell too but the forage was used as silage to feed the cows during the long winter months. I thought that maybe corn was more profitable than producing milk, but maybe it isn’t. It made sense to me if the cows weren’t going to be pastured to use the fields this way.
Also new to me was that cows were feeding on corn silage. Nothing wrong with corn silage just something new I had learned that was different. Haylage or silage is forage that is stored and then fermented. When done right it can be nutritious. Then they told me that they added other products to the silage for added nutrients. Cotton was one and I forgot the others but when they were explaining the process I thought how unnatural it seemed that cows should be eating food not natural to their diet.
Learning how cows were fed wasn’t the reason why it took me a long time to get used to the dairy products. I didn’t think about that until years later. All I know was that the dairy products tasted different from the dairy products I grew up with and that I didn’t like it. It certainly didn’t have the same rich colour I was use to either. And the taste. God it tasted like flavoured water only it gave you flatulence.
