Calves. The natural way we do it VS what most other farms do.

I went out to Leon's a few weeks ago.

Leon is one of our two dairy farmers. His herd supplies the raw milk for all of our raw yogurt and raw kefir (his wife Annie makes it by hand, in small batches, right there on the farm) plus some of our fluid milk. Our other dairyman is Elmer, not far away, and he supplies nearly all the fluid milk along with the cream and butter. Elmer runs Jerseys, which give that high-butterfat milk you want if you're making cream.

I do marketing for Prairie Foods. But I also homestead, and I've been deep in the real food world for years, so I show up at these farms already knowing a fair amount about what I'm looking at.

Which is exactly why I ask so many questions. The things I know are things you deserve to know too. That's most of my job as I understand it.

I showed up around milking time.

We walked down into the pastures to bring the herd up, which I'd do nearly every day of my life if somebody would let me.

I don't know how to tell you about Leon's place without sounding like I'm exaggerating. Lush green pasture rolling out in every direction. Dirt paths winding down through it. The whole thing looks like somebody painted it. If you closed your eyes right now and pictured a regenerative dairy farm, the way it's supposed to look, you'd be picturing something close to Leon's.

And out in the middle of it, cows everywhere, and calves mixed in, and the calves are with their mothers because on this farm that's just where calves are.

Then we started them toward the barn, and that's where it got complicated.

The cows go in. The calves are not invited. But nobody's explained this to the calves, so they come right along with their mamas… like of course they're going in too, and Leon and his two sons have to head them off. Some get turned back at the door. Some slip in anyway and have to be walked back out.

It's thirty minutes. That's all milking takes. The calves wait outside and the second the gate opens everybody's back together.

While this was going on I asked Leon how much milk they even get from a cow who's been nursing a calf all day.

Not much, he said. The calf takes nearly all of it. But every drop counts. Side note: I followed up on the phone with Leon after the visit to get even more info about this.

I stood there a minute with that. A man and his two teenage boys, sorting calves out of a barn twice a day, for whatever the calf left behind. That's the whole story really. Everything below is just the details.

The one thing that makes all the difference

I want to say this plainly before anything else, because everything else comes back to it.

On Leon's farm, the calves stay with their mothers. They nurse from her, live alongside her, go out to pasture with her. Apart from that half hour at milking every morning and every evening.

On almost every other dairy farm, they don't. The calf is taken from its mother within the first day and fed by a person, out of a bucket or a bottle, twice a day.

That's the difference. One sentence.

It sounds small written down. It isn't.

Why nearly everyone does it the other way

I'm not writing this to make anyone a villain. There aren't any villains here. This is just how the dairy business works, and I understand why.

The biggest reason is straightforward: milk.

A calf on a cow drinks nearly all of what she makes. That's what Leon was telling me at the barn door. Whatever's left for the machine is the leftovers.

Take the calf away and every bit of that milk goes in the tank instead. Not a little more. Almost all of it.

On an operation with a loan payment and a milk check, that difference decides things.

There are other honest reasons too. You can measure exactly how much colostrum each calf got instead of hoping. Disease doesn't move from cow to calf as easily. You catch a sick calf sooner because you're handling every one of them twice a day.

Those are real arguments made by real farmers who care about their animals.

But once that first decision is made, a lot of other things follow from it. Some of them are hard.

The part that's hard to read

A dairy cow has to have a calf in order to give milk. That isn't a policy, it's biology.

But the farm doesn't need most of those calves. It only needs enough heifers to replace the cows aging out of the milking herd. Everything else, most of the bull calves and a fair share of the heifers, is what the industry itself calls “surplus”.

Leon's been in dairy a long time and knows a lot of people in it. He'll tell you straight: plenty of farms put those calves down, or run them to the sale barn at a few days or weeks old and never think about them again. It isn't cruelty. It's that on that kind of operation, a calf who will never fill a milk tank isn't an animal to look after. It's a line item that isn't earning.

I understand the math. I do. It's just not how Leon does it.

The calves who get sold usually end up in veal. And here's a piece of it most people outside the industry never hear.

Veal calves aren't fed milk.

They're fed milk replacer. It's a powder you mix with warm water, made mostly of dried whey and whey protein concentrate with fat blended in. One formula patented for veal specifically calls for a fat portion that's 65 to 89 percent partially hydrogenated soybean oil, plus some coconut oil and lecithin.

Partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Fed to a baby cow. If you've spent any time reading labels you already know exactly what to think about that. Yuck!

And the iron is deliberately kept low. Not to save money. Low iron is how you get the pale color the veal market pays for. The calf gets nothing solid, so his rumen (the stomach a cow is supposed to have) never develops at all.

The results are about what you'd guess. Research on calves fed low-iron replacer found them anemic, growing slower, and running into more infections, more fever, and more antibiotic treatment than calves who got enough iron.

I'm not telling you this to be grim. I'm telling you because it sits somewhere in the supply chain behind a gallon of milk at the store, and almost nobody mentions it.

What Leon does

Right now, every calf on Leon's farm is raised by its own mother. That's it. That's the system. It's why the barn was such a scene the day I was there.

But he's working toward something else on top of it, and this is the part I found clever. It’s a way to take the best care of the calves while also keeping milk costs down for you.

Nurse cows.

The idea is that one cow can raise about four calves. So when you've got a group of calves born close together (Leon expects a batch like that in the spring), you pick a cow for the job and put four of them on her.

How do you pick her? Usually she's a cow who's got something going on. Healing from a thorn in her hoof. High somatic cell count. Some issue that means her milk shouldn't be going in the tank right now anyway, or that she'd be better off out of the milking string for a while.

Instead of that cow being a problem, she's got a job. And four calves get raised by a cow instead of a bucket.

Then it mostly runs itself. They nurse when they're hungry and quit when they're done. No hauling them into the barn twice a day. The whole outfit goes out on grass together.

What he needs for it is dedicated space. A box stall ready before the calves come, and he's been thinking about putting up a greenhouse with deep bedding and gates so there's real room to work. And somewhere to graze, which is where his brother-in-law's farm comes in. Nurse cows and calves out there together all summer would be beautiful. 

Leon calls the older calves the biggest babies in town. Having seen them, that's accurate. They're enormous and still nursing like they're a week old.

Why on-demand matters more than I realized

I asked whether it truly makes a difference, since a bottle-fed calf still gets its milk.

He said go stand in a calf barn after feeding sometime.

The calves finish in about ninety seconds and then they don't stop. They keep working a nipple that's already dry. They chew on the bars. They suck each other's ears and tails. Some of them just suck air.

They're not hungry. They got the milk. That's what makes it strange to watch.

Drinking and sucking are two separate needs, and a bucket only answers one. The drive has to go somewhere, so it goes into the gate.

You don't see it in calves on a cow. Not because they're better behaved. Because they nurse eight or ten times a day, on their own schedule, until they're actually finished. Nothing is left undone.

Leon takes eight months longer

Conventional dairies aim to have a heifer freshen (have her first calf and start milking) at 22 months. That's the industry target and there's serious money attached to hitting it.

Leon's go 30.

Eight extra months of feeding an animal that isn't earning anything yet. On paper it's probably a bad decision and he knows it. He says let her grow up before you ask her to work, and the paper may look different later.

What the research says, and what it doesn't

I want to be honest about this part.

Leon believes a calf raised on a cow becomes a better cow. Sounder, longer-lasting, less trouble. That's what he's watched over years of doing it, and it's what he hears from other farmers doing the same.

The published research is mixed. Some studies find the advantage holds, some find it's gone by six months, and at least one followed those calves into their first lactation and found no difference.

Two things worth saying about that.

First, look at what those studies measured. Milk yield. Culling rates. Growth curves. That's the industry's own scorecard, built around the 22-month question. Nobody has run a study on whether a calf got to be a calf, because that isn't a number you can put in a column.

Second, a question I can't answer. A lot of agricultural research gets funded by people with something riding on the outcome. I don't know who paid for these particular studies and I'm not going to sit here and tell you they were bought. But it's fair to notice that "the current system is fine, actually" is a convenient finding for an industry with an enormous amount of money invested in the current system. Take that for what it's worth. I'd rather raise it than pretend it never crossed my mind.

So no, we can't tell you science has proven Leon right about the grown cow. It hasn't.

What isn't in dispute is the calf, right now. A calf on a cow eats when it's hungry, nurses until it's satisfied, stays with its mother, and doesn't spend the afternoon chewing a gate. That part isn't a theory. It's just what you see standing there.

Why we're telling you this

Most of you came to us because you were tired of guessing where your food came from.

The dairy industry has some genuinely dirty corners. We're not going to pretend otherwise, and we're not going to act like Prairie Foods invented decency. What we can tell you is that we know our farmers, we've stood in their barns, and the way Leon raises calves is one of the reasons we love working with him.

He does it the slow way, on his own dime, for reasons that may or may not show up on a spreadsheet.

And twice a day he and his boys spend the first ten minutes of milking walking calves back out of a barn, because that's what it costs to do it this way.

That's the farm your yogurt and kefir comes from.