I lived in Indiana for 15 years. About every two or three years, the question of DST would come up in the state legislature, and this was the big issue that most people quoted. The general attitude was similar to that expressed in Wikipedia:
In other words, farmers would have to choose between keeping their cows’ schedule and being an hour off the rest of the community, or changing the cows’ schedule to adapt to the community schedule.
In fact, DST seems completely useless for Indiana, at least in terms of saving energy. The state is on the western edge of the Eastern time zone, and even without DST, there was still sunshine rather late at night (past 9pm) even in the summer. I actually liked not having to remember to change the clocks twice a year, and having my own sleeping schedule altered.
However, shock upon shock, Indiana did vote late last spring to start observing DST next spring. The main reasons given were economic–businesses that do busimess with companies outside of the state had frequent problems with no one knowing what time it was in one place or the other.
The only catch with this is that the brilliant minds in state government ( :rolleyes: ) haven’t picked a time zone yet. So yes, we’ll be following DST like the rest of the country (except Arizona) but no one knows yet whether we’ll be on EDT or CDT.
Daylight savings time affect dairy cattle not one wit. Cows may not be very smart (may, hell, they aren’t at all smart) but they are flexible. Same with the dairy – its not sitting around waiting for the milk haulers and the milk haulers aren’t sitting around waiting for the cows. The milk haulers are pumping cold, raw milk out of bulk tanks in the barns. It makes no difference if the milk sits in the on farm tank another day more or a day less. The only problem is having a bulk tank with enough capacity to hold an other twice or three times a day milking.
No, cows aren’t a problem. It’s the chickens that cause trouble. Chickens aren’t smart and they are inflexible and they can read digital watches. The answer is to put analog clocks in the chicken houses– chickens ave never figured out the big hand and the little hand and sweep second hands just drive ‘em nuts.
A lot of larger operations milk 3x a day. If you’ve got a herd that takes 6h to milk, it requires a little reshuffling on the people side to manage the change.
It’s always “the farmers” who have a problem with DST, regardless of what they raise or what the specific objections might be.
For example, the Canadian analogue to Indiana in this department would be Saskatchewan, our most stereotypically “farm” province (even though other provinces have plenty of farm production); it does not observe DST, with the consequence that it spends half the year in sync with Alberta and the other half in sync with Manitoba. (Which is actually a pretty good political metaphor.)
What makes it slightly difficult is that on both the Alberta and Manitoba borders, there are communities lying right on the border – Lloydminster and Flin Flon, respectively. I’ve forgotten how they manage it, but they do somehow.