This significant new study from The Organic Center is a wealth of new insights on the benefits of organic and pasture-based dairy. The results are clear:
- Milk nutritional quality can be improved through management.
- Steps taken to improve milk quality tend to enhance animal health
and longevity and lighten the environmental footprint of dairy farming. - System changes that are good for cows are also beneficial to people drinking their milk, and good for the land and the atmosphere.
- Such innovation can also improve the farmer’s bottom line, especially if the availability of high-quality organic dairy feed and other production inputs increases, a likely outcome as the industry grows in scale and sophistication.
The PastureLand farm families have long decried the lack of scientific evidence supporting the practices that we use on our farms. We had to go instead with what we learned from our parents and grandparents, our neighbors, and what we saw working on our own farms. We saw healthier cows, healthier happier families, and more active, productive soils and pastures on our farms.
We looked around the rest of the countryside and saw eroded hillsides, hazardous manure lagoons, and animals that never made it out on green grass. We couldn’t shake the feeling that the milk that came off these soul-less facilities simply could not be providing meaningful nutrition. We saw strictly “milk’em hard and burn’em out” agribusiness, nothing we would ever want to give our lives to and try to hand down to our kids. We turned back to our own farms and felt again the pull of the pasture-based farming we’d taken refuge in.
Finally we have a major new studying showing in statistically significant ways that organic and pasture-based dairying produces more nutritious milk and healthier environments on – and off – the farms.
Heavily leveraged on cheap oil and a callous disregard for animal welfare and human nutrition, the American conventional dairy industry is a dangerous shell game, somehow managing to waste precious natural resources while simultaneously pumping out “food” that is dangerously bereft of the nutrients we need to build strong citizens and a healthy democracy.
County extension agents, University agriculture departments, and much of the USDA’s promotional and lobbying efforts all work to prop up the modern American Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) -based system of milk production, and have little interest in helping us figure out how to make our grass-based farms run more smoothly. Will this be the study that finally turns their attention toward modern sustainable agriculture?
Please take a few moments to click through the study. We think this is going to be a real conversation starter, even for those of you who never get closer to a cow that the one on our Summer Gold butter label. Let us know what you think.
You can download the Executive Summary, or the full study, “A Dairy Farm’s Footprint” here.
