SC - alcohol revisited

[Jenne Heise]

> And it used to be that milk came from cows that had calves, and 
>especially during the weaning period. Cows weren't jacked on hormones 
> to keep it coming... 

You know, this struck me as wierd when I first read it, but I just took 
the time to look into it. The dairy farm I visited (we got caught up in an
Agricultural extension 'barn tour') said that his cows got bred regularly
to keep the milk supply from dropping off, on a time schedule that sounded
pretty close to that I remember from the _Little House_ books (we never
kept dairy cattle so I'm not that familiar with it). I checked the web and
the average calving interval in the Dept. of Agriculture docs that I'm
seeing is about 14 months, and they are recommending breeding the cow at
45 days past calving.

It's possible that the herds which use hormones use them all the time, in
order to increase the total yield per cow, rather than just adding
hormones when the production starts to drop, since that would change the
homogenous quality of the milk from that farm from day to day and make
the milk company have to do complicated math to balance out the mix so the
right amount of butterfat, hormones, etc. was achieved in the final
product.

 -- 
Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
"Our kingdom is a garden and such gardens are not made/By singing "Oh how
beautiful!" and sitting in the shade..." --Kipling, "Glory of the Garden"