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43and organic. Their
cows would graze in
the field. Aubertine
would buy no herbi-
cides, no grain feed,
no nutritional supple-
ments, no hormone
treatments. Instead
of acquiring the huge,
high-powered heif-
ers that produce
90 pounds of milk a
day, he assembled a
herd of smaller cows
that might give him
- Because of the ani-
mals’ reduced stress,
he could keep them
on the farm longer,
saving on livestock costs.
“I’m a realist, and I expected bumps on the road, but—and
I shouldn’t say this out loud, probably—but it’s been beyond
my expectations, what we’ve been able to do,” Aubertine
says. The price he commands for grass-fed organic milk isn’t
double that of regular milk, but it’s close, and his expenses
are a fraction of what a modern dairy would require. He can
raise his kids, take them on vacations, buy nice things, and
preserve precisely the things about dairy farming that he
believed were worth preserving.
“It’s not even so much the prices you’re paid, but it’s the
consistency of the prices,” he says. “We can make a bud-
get, because we know what we’re going to be paid—we’re
guaranteed each month’s prices a year in advance, and they
don’t come off that price, unless they go up and pay more.
So I’m not one of those dairy farmers going to the mailbox
every month and worrying about what’s going to be in the
milk check.”
He sells to Maple Hill Creamery LLC, a venture-capital-
backed company specializing in organic milk from grass-
fed cows. It collects milk from 158 farms, all in upstate New
York. The average farm keeps 48 cows. CEO Carl Gerlach
says he believes increasing demand for milk from grass-fed
cows has the potential to transform the American dairy farm.
“When I think of what dairy will look like in 20 years,” he
says, “I believe it’ll look like it did 100 years ago.”
If that transition actually occurs, Aubertine knows it’s
unlikely to be a smooth one for farmers currently operat-
ing within the standard, modern dairy system. Aubertine’s
organic certifications—the ones that enable him to get pre-
mium prices—require that his land, for example, has been
free of herbicides and synthetic fertilizers for at least three
years. “If that’s what your farm is running on, how is a farmer
going to just stop doing that for three years, and still keep his
head above water?” he asks. “So we were kind of lucky, in a
way. It’s easier to start from scratch.”
en dairy cows no longer pay for themselves,
hey’re often culled—the polite term for being
ent to slaughter. As small farms fold, their cows
are rarely incorporated into the herds of large dairies; older
animals don’t handle the transition to a new milking system
well and produce less milk than those raised in the system.
According to industry figures, only four times in the 25 years
before 2019 did the national weekly total of slaughtered dairy
cows exceed 70,000. Every one of those times occurred in the
second week of January, when slaughterhouses reopen after
a holiday hiatus and catch up on a backlog of work. In 2019
it was a rare week when the cull total didn’t exceed 70,000.
Yager, on his farm in Wisconsin, watched his nephew try
to sell off his cows last fall. “Anything that was over four years
old, people didn’t want,” he says. “He had to haul them out to
be culled.” The very thought pained him. “I know every one
of my cows,” he says. “I love these animals.”
On a winter weekday morning at Fair Oaks Farms, a traffic
light outside the Birthing Barn, a red-painted structure near
the Cowfé, turns green. That means another show is about
to commence inside. About 30 people gather on bleachers in
an amphitheater-style room. Two cows stand onstage, sep-
arated from the crowd by a glass wall. Jumbo TV monitors
hang above them. The backside of one cow faces the audi-
ence; extending from it is a small, glistening hoof. The cow,
breathing heavily, convulses slightly. The hoof extends fur-
ther, exposing a foreleg. “Ewwwww!” a little girl in the crowd
says. “Is that a baby pig coming out?”
Within minutes—at 11:48 a.m., precisely—a Fair Oaks
employee tugs hard on the calf ’s protruding legs, and with
one final push from its mother the animal falls in a messy heap
on the straw-covered stage. It’s one of about 80 to 100 calves
born that day, and every day, at Fair Oaks.
After the mother licks the calf awake, the newborn is
ushered offstage and outfitted with an ID tag: 36,873. <BW>
�With Deena Shanker and Lydia MulvanyYager’s 300-cow farm, once considered a sizable operation, is one-hundredth the size of Fair Oaks