Dairy Farmers Quotes

“The most powerful bond we know of is the bond between mother and child, and we break it in order to make "comfort foods" for ourselves" Michael Schwarz”
― Neal D. Barnard, The Cheese Trap: How Breaking a Surprising Addiction Will Help You Lose Weight, Gain Energy, and Get Healthy

“It’s hard to imagine calling the dairy industry anything but “inhumane” when you consider that on dairy farms, cows are artificially inseminated and forced to give birth, only to have their beloved babies torn away from them so the milk that nature intended for them can instead be consumed by humans. Both mother cows and their calves are emotionally traumatised when forcibly separated from one another. The mother cows bellow in desperation, and their calves bawl in distress. They cry out for each other for days – in vain.

The male calves – often referred to as “by-products” – are either shot at birth or destined to become veal. The female calves, like their mothers, face a lifetime of repeated forcible impregnation and anguish over their stolen babies. Their bodies are strained to the limit in order to squeeze out every last drop of milk. Today, British cows typically produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally in order to feed their calves.”
― Mimi Bekhechi

“Jerseys were for people who were afraid to milk Holsteins and too ashamed to milk goats.”
― David Rhodes, Driftless

“there are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focussing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring fossil fuel input and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing - the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows in demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey