Free Milk by Anne Mendelson Page A

changed into other forms, an irresistible stimulus toward expansion at whatever cost to quality.
    As the volume of milk produced by the nation’s farms grew in the twentieth century, the entire system became riddled with struggles for competitive advantage. Investment in advanced devices that reduce labor costs per unit of milk has become ever more essential to farmers’ survival. Obvious instances are electric milking machines andrefrigerated bulk tanks, widely adopted after the rural electrification initiatives of the 1930s and mandatory almost everywhere by about 1950. Another expensive machine that people are likely to know less about is the cow herself, as reinvented for our time.
COW AND SUPERCOW
    There came up on the drive immediately before the front door, under the custody of a boy, a cow. It was an Alderney cow, and any man or woman at all under-standing cows would at once have perceived that this cow was perfect in her kind. Her eyes were mild, and soft, and bright. Her legs were like the legs of a deer; and in her whole gait and demeanour she almost gave the lie to her own name, asserting herself to have sprung from some more noble origin among the woods, than may be supposed to be the origin of the ordinary domestic cow,—a useful animal, but heavy in its appearance, and seen with more pleasure at some little distance than at close quarters. But this cow was graceful in its movements, and almost tempted one to regard her as the far-off descendant of the elk or the antelope.
    ANTHONY TROLLOPE    
The Belton Estate (1866)

    ALDERNEY COW, 1834
    Bessy, Will Belton’s gift to Clara Amedroz early in the star-crossed courtship at the heart of Trollope’s novel, is the nonpareil of what used to be meant by a “dairy cow.” Few of her counterparts today evoke thoughts of deer and antelopes. For many dairy farmers, the ideal modern cow is more like a ruminant SUV. You could call her an expanded and consolidated version of a cow, just as today’s dairy farms are expanded and consolidated versions of farms. A case in point: While the number of dairy cows in this country shrank from about 18 million to 9 million between 1960 and 2005, the total amount of milk they produce increased from 120 billion to 177 billion pounds during the same period.
    In 1856 the English writerGeorge Dodd’s magnificent survey The Food of London reported that one especially fine cow had given 28 quarts (7 gallons, or about 56 pounds) of milk a day for six weeks. In 1975 an Indiana cow named Beecher Arlinda Ellen set the dairy world on fire by pumping out a record-eclipsing average of 152.5 pounds (more than 76 quarts, or 19 gallons) a day during a year’s lactation, for a total yield of 55,661 pounds, compared to a national 1975 dairy-cow average of about 10,000 pounds. Ellen’s feat has since been surpassed several times, and the current 365-day lactation record is the 67,914 pounds yielded by a Wisconsin contender, Muranda Oscar Lucinda-ET, in 1997. By 2005 the national average was almost 20,000 pounds a year per cow.
    The road to such “improvements”—if that’s the right word—has paralleled the growth of the fluid-milk industry since about the early nineteenth century. Scientific breeders then began distinguishing the best milkers by body type and working with local breeds to accentuate their advantages.
    Trollope’s Bessy represents one extreme of the “dairy type.” From his description it’s plain that she was of what we would now call Jersey stock. Doe-eyed and curiously reminiscent of shy, tawny woodland creatures,Jersey cows are the smallest and most enchantingly pretty of the major modern dairy breeds. At the time of Will Belton’s wooing, they and the slightly bigger, less deerlikeGuernseys were usually lumped together as “Alderneys.” Bessy probably weighed only between six hundred and seven hundred pounds; in this country the Jersey was gradually developed into a somewhat larger and coarser animal, so that a