MILKING THE SYSTEM - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 128

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MILKING THE SYSTEM
And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result
of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry .
—Wendell Berry, Bringing It to the Table:
Writings on Farming and Food (2009)
One of my fondest memories is of my father coming in the kitchen door carrying a bucket of milk from our
Jersey cow with the cream already rising to the top. Jerseys, originally bred in the Channel Islands off the
coast of England, have a sweet disposition and, as small cows, cost less to feed. As someone who had been a
dairyman in his twenties, my dad always said that Jerseys produce a little less milk, but it is the best, because
of the high butterfat content. My mother and I would wait for gravity to work its magic, causing the heavy
cream to rise to the top. Naturally impatient, I would usually stick my fingers in for a taste. We'd scoop
the cream into a jar and shake it hard until it turned into butter—a low-tech version of the butter churn. My
father had a strong relationship with our Jersey, named Bossy, whom he milked twice a day and considered
part of the family.
John Kinsman, age eighty-six, feels the same way about the thirty-six cows that he milks on his farm in
Lime Ridge, Wisconsin, providing organic milk for Cedar Grove, a specialty cheese maker near his home.
Spry and fit, Kinsman still milks and does heavy farm work on his 150-acre organic farm, where eighty
acres are devoted to rotational grazing and hay production and the other seventy acres are woodland. He
comes from a farming family (his name having originated in thirteenth-century England from Kynneman,
meaning “keeper of livestock”). His grandparents farmed in Vermont in the nineteenth century and came to
Wisconsin in a covered wagon.
His father purchased the Kinsman farm after World War II, shortly after John came home from Guam,
where he served during the war. Kinsman says, “The farm was like Stonehenge, so rocky that weeds
wouldn't grow.” The family used pesticides produced by Monsanto until the early 1960s, when John became
seriously ill with a neurological disorder. His doctor diagnosed the cause of his illness as nerve damage from
agricultural chemicals, and he never used chemicals on the farm again.
Today his organic dairy herd grazes in a rotational system that provides the nutrition best suited to the
digestive system of ruminant animals. No grain is fed on the Kinsman farm. Cows, along with goats, sheep,
and other related species, have difficulty digesting grain, which they are often fed on factory farms. Every
twelve hours, John moves the herd to new pasture; he says that the cows complain loudly if he is late in
moving them to fresh grazing. In the winter he feeds them hay that he has produced on his farm.
Kinsman is as much an activist as a farmer. In the 1970s he helped organize a program that brought
African American children from Mississippi to Wisconsin for home stays, and he became very active on
civil rights issues. He was a leader during the farm crisis of the 1980s and has fought the use of artificial