MILKING THE SYSTEM - Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America - page 130

And as one would expect, the largest dairy processor, Dean Foods, has a customer list that matches the
biggest retailers: Walmart, Kroger, Supervalu, Costco, and others. As a large supplier of organic dairy and
soy milk, it also does business with Whole Foods. Consolidation in the grocery industry has dramatically
driven consolidation in all sectors of the dairy industry, beginning with the farms and including the mega-
cooperatives, fluid milk processors, and dairy product manufacturers. 4 They have found it most profitable
to form powerful alliances along the chain of production, which begins at the source of production: giant
factory farms.
The increased scale and production by farms, processors, and manufacturers is causing the country to
hemorrhage dairy farms and farmers, with 52,000 dairies lost in just a decade. 5 As late as 1998, the major-
ity of milk was produced on small farms with fewer than two hundred cows, but today more than a quarter
of all milk comes from industrial dairies that have over two thousand cows. These new megadairies can
house ten thousand cows or more, crowding them into high-density feedlots with no access to grass.
Milk produced on the 65,000 remaining dairy farms is funneled through a handful of powerful buyers
and retailers that use their market power to push down the prices farmers receive for milk. 6 Production has
remained fairly constant, because the scale of the farms has increased significantly. 7 Dairy cows are treated
like milk-producing machines, milked in round-the-clock shifts. Until the advent of factory dairy farms,
dairy cows produced milk for as long as twenty years. In contrast, cows are kept on factory farms for up to
three years, after which they are sent to slaughter, usually for fast-food hamburgers.
Today dairy cows produce milk for about ten months after a pregnancy and birth of the calf—a neces-
sary precondition for lactation. On factory farms, they are impregnated through artificial insemination, and
after the calf is born it is taken from the mother almost immediately. Female calves are usually kept as part
of the herd to eventually produce milk, while male calves are used for veal, which is really a by-product
of the dairy industry. Veal is usually produced using inhumane crates that prevent the calf from exercising.
They are also fed a diet that induces anemia—all for the purpose of producing the pale-colored meat that
veal is famous for.
Dairy herds also spend their short lives in intensive confinement, where they are fed grain and watered.
They are milked with machines as many as four times a day to relieve their udders of the large amount of
milk that they have been bred to produce. They are also sometimes injected with a genetically engineered
hormone, recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), that increases milk production by 8 percent to 12
percent. Almost 43 percent of large-scale dairies with more than five hundred head use the hormone, as do
29 percent of midsize dairies and 9 percent of small dairies. 8
It is well documented that rBGH causes high rates of the painful bacterial udder infection mastitis. The
drug containing the hormone Posilac, originally developed by Monsanto, has been sold to pharmaceutical
giant Eli Lilly, which is promoting sales in the developing world. Significant concerns remain about use
of the drug, because it increases another powerful hormone, IGF-1, that is linked with increased rates of
colon, breast, and prostate cancer in humans. The hormone cannot be used in the European Union, Japan,
Canada, or Australia, and its use in the United States has diminished because of a consumer backlash.
Factory dairies create enormous amounts of waste from the thousands of dairy cows, thereafter polluting
groundwater, contributing to airborne particulate pollution, and producing excess phosphorus and nitrogen
runoff to streams and rivers. Small dairies, in contrast, generate less manure, and they usually apply it to
cropland or incorporate it into pasture as fertilizer. Because big dairies generate far more manure than they
can use as fertilizer, they must either store it in giant lagoons or apply it to cropland at excessive rates,
where it leaches into groundwater and runs off into nearby rivers and streams. Many factory-farmed dairies
have caused significant manure spills and environmental hazards in recent years.
There are many examples of this pollution around the country. In 2010, at a 1,650-cow Randolph
County, Indiana, dairy operation, a manure lagoon liner detached, floated to the surface of the lagoon, and