Patrick McIlheran

Farm's critics milking a tired argument
Posted: Jan. 23, 2010

                                         MARK HOFFMAN
A cow lies on a bed of sand in a stall at
Rosendale Dairy in the Town of Rosendale
in Fond du Lac County. “Best bedding on
Earth,” says Jim Ostrom, one of the dairy’s
three partners.Funny thing about the roughly 4,000 cows on a new giant dairy farm northwest of Fond du Lac: The beasts are, as the fashionable term puts it, localvores.

Which means substantial parts of their daily diet come from nearby. When humans eat this way, they are praised by greens, though don't expect such love for Rosendale Dairy, which on Friday got permission from the state to double to 8,000 cows. Still, as one of the dairy's three partners, Jim Ostrom, points out, the corn that turns into his cows' milk grew in the neighborhood.

This means that corn farmers in western Fond du Lac County don't have to truck it a hundred miles to a port or rail terminal. The distiller's corn left over from making ethanol, quite nutritious, is from nearby, too. So are some of the other 15 to 20 sorts of grain and silage that, mixed per a nutritionist's instructions, feed the cows.

You can spur the local corn market and hire nutritionists when you're a big operation. Rosendale is. But it isn't just big. What really distinguishes it is how much thought went into the way it produces a lot of milk. It is, you could say, mindful.

And mindful first about cows. "Our whole aim is to make it low-stress for cows," said Ostrom. He's a third-generation dairyman; his partners learned to milk before they could ride bikes. They know how cows think.

"Being calm is key for them," said Ostrom. So, nobody drives the cows or shouts at them. Cows are happier - and produce more milk - when they can walk at their own pace, which they do thrice daily onto the 80-cow milking carousel that makes one slow circuit every 10 minutes. The cows, said Ostrom, apparently like the movement. If a mat didn't goad them off, they'd go around again, he said.

The cows lie on sand in stalls in the vast barn. Unlike straw, it doesn't harbor pathogens. It conforms to their shape. "Best bedding on Earth," said Ostrom.

Cows can freely walk from the stalls over to the carefully mixed feed whenever they want. "When I was a kid, cows were tied up in barns," said Ostrom. Another thing: Cows like it cool, so the barn uses swamp coolers along one wall to keep the air in the low 70s, while exhaust fans on the other wall generate a constant 6 mph breeze.

It amounts to re-creating the conditions under a pasture's oak on a May day, only on an industrial scale, year-round, without using any pasture land. Ostrom said it shows in the bottom line: The farm, being new, bought its cows from retiring dairymen. Every herd it bought is putting out more milk, which was the point of constructing Cowtopia.

And, contends Ostrom, it's being done cleanly. This is the point on which critics are sharpest. Cows put out a lot of manure. Critics say that the dairy's plan, to spread the manure over about 12,000 acres of farmland, will pollute streams and, perhaps, groundwater.

So some environmentalist groups lawyered up, trying to make the Department of Natural Resources hinder the farm or withhold the approval it granted on Friday. The farm is the first in Wisconsin to have to file an environmental impact statement. The dairy will have to install around 80 groundwater monitors where it plans to spread manure. Critics say it should be about 900. Critics cite manure-tainted wells near Green Bay - but that's three counties away, amid 41,000 cows on smaller farms that handle manure by traditional methods.

Rosendale, by contrast, is watched by hostile critics with the DNR on speed-dial. The partners, said Ostrom, all have children they're hoping will inherit the business. "We owe it to them not to be imbeciles."

So, he said, Rosendale does its own manure spreading to maintain control: "There's no spreading on top of snow." The farm leaves no manure out in rain. It spent $2.4 million building storage for a year's worth of manure specifically so it wouldn't have to spread in the wrong season.

And, as Ostrom points out, the manure - which, tellingly, the dairy sells to farmers - replaces fertilizer made of petroleum.

You have to think what really makes the dairy grate on critics is its size. It was Exhibit One in a snarling story in a Madison weekly about "factory farms," and critics often lapse into laments about how milk should be raised on little farms with quaint red barns. Rosendale's barns are steel and haven't a trace of romance.

"Animals raised there," lamented one blog dedicated to small agriculture, "have never seen a cloud, a tree or a flower." Which is about the level of rationality that, runoff aside, the case against megadairies comes to.

Whether cows prefer hot pastures to the climate-controlled buffet at Rosendale, only cows know. But Ostrom points out he's got a staff full of people with generations of experience and master's degrees in cow science. Sentiment is nice, but they've put thought into what they're doing.

This mirrors the other new thing in Wisconsin dairying: little organic operations. Both are obsessing about what goes into the product, only Rosendale is doing it with the aim of making a lot of protein at an attractive price. It's a hungry world, said Ostrom, and insisting that all dairying must be small isn't going to feed it.

By all means, buy from little farms if you prefer. Never have such options been so available. But if the DNR, dairy science and some entrepreneurial farmers want to try a different route, a sentimental preference for red barns seems a pretty weak basis for a veto.