Organic dairy farm field trip

Another dairy farm field trip today! This time, we went to an organic dairy farm to compare/contrast between the conventional dairy farm of last week.

Too bad it was rainy today. But Ithaca is still gorgeous!



This farm was tiny, split across a road. The mama cows are on one side, the baby cows are on the other.



Here's fermenting manure. It's called sedge or something. It smells like acidic hay... but this stuff was beautiful and clean! Good quality poop products right there. I guess that's what happens when cows eat what they evolved to eat: GRASS.



So, to be certified organic these cows must have minimal antibiotics used (preferably natural medicine), no hormones, no alterations to their body (except for de-horning), and everything the cows eat must also be organic. That would be organic hay and grass and grain. These veggies must have no toxins used on them, like fertilizers and pesticides, for 3 years.



What you get are cows that graze and do what cows naturally do: eat grass, walk on grass, lie on grass. Conventional farms feed cows a lot of corn, which is not what cows have evolved to eat. But it doesn't hurt them either, but they are doing studies to see if grass fed cows are healthier and yield healthier products than corn fed cows.



Here are the babies! The moobabies here are # 17, 18, 19. They were cute :)




Note the hills! There were cows grazing on top of those hills too... I wonder if the cows ever trip and fall down......



When the calves are old enough they get a name, and the herdsman know the moobabies by name rather than number.


Yay moobabies! And these babies were not as stinky :) I guess because there were only 130 of them... compared to last week's 1000+.

Yay.

Kay, see ya.