Excerpts
Charlie (02:44.189)
I actually went to veterinary college because I wanted to work with dairy cows. And my uncle convinced me I didn’t wanna be a dairy farmer. So I ended up as a veterinarian…pretty much specializing in dairy cows. Although early in my career, I did general practice, dogs, cats, sheep, horses, but my emphasis was always on dairy cattle. And then interestingly enough, my father was a businessman. He had his own business and I ended up being fascinated with the business of dairy farming. I eventually got a business degree because I wanted to work with dairy farmers, not only on treating their cows, but on being able to help them manage their business.
Charlie (05:36.659)
Well, I’m going to kind of focus today on what I would call the family farm. that definition, that can vary widely, but I’m going to offer a definition for today that a family dairy farm is one where members of a single family own at least the cows. They may rent the ground, but they own the cows and the equipment and they provide the bulk of the labor and management of that farm. Now,
Charlie (06:44.863)
Okay, well typically they’d have anywhere from 60 to 100 cows.
Charlie (06:52.639)
They, those cows would produce somewhere between 70 to 80 pounds of milk a day, which is equivalent to maybe nine to 10 gallons. So if they had, you know, 70 to 80 cows milking nine to 10 gallons, they might get 800 a gallon of milk per day. And that would usually be shipped to a processing plant.
Charlie (07:21.883)
some ownership in it. And that milk plant would turn that raw milk sent from the dairy farm, they would pasteurize it. If it’s going to be used as fluid milk, they’d homogenize it. And a lot of it would in turn be processed into cheese or butter or ice cream. In today’s world, only about a third of all milk goes into fluid milk that, you know, we would drink or put on our cereal. The rest goes into products, cheese, butter, or ice cream.
Charlie (08:40.531)
homogenized so that the homogenization prevents the cream from separating.
Charlie (09:13.577)
Pasteurization goes back, I’m guessing in maybe the 1920s. It essentially heats the milk to a point that will kill off any, not all, but 98 % of any bacteria in the milk. And that was very important back in the day, say in the 1920s, because at that time there were two diseases that could be transmitted to humans from cows, brucellosis and tuberculosis.
Charlie (34:48.507)
Okay. The thing I would like the listening public, many of whom are not familiar at all with the modern dairy industry, is to know that modern farms take good care of their cows. They do that partly because they like their cows, but let’s be honest, what drives it is comfortable, healthy, well cared for cows, are more profitable. That’s undeniable. And that’s true on a small farm, it’s equally true on a big farm. So I would like to dispel any myth that modern farms don’t take care of their cows because they’re only interested in profit. Yes, they’re interested in profit. And one way to get that profit is take excellent care of their cows. That’s an important point I’d like to leave you with. In regard to if you’re interested in some stories from veterinary practice and life in general, I’d encourage you to visit Amazon.
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