While road use by heavy trucks is indeed regulated, they probably should be regulated more.
It’s a simple concept folks. You want to pump soot or foul gases into the environment? Fine. Pay a fee for it. Just like you pay for the labor, land and machinery used to make any purchased good, you should pay for the damages to health and welfare caused by them as well. Pay your way. Don’t freeload.
Incidentally, there are some technological fixes for bovine methane production. But don’t expect them to happen at a wide scale without incentive to do so. Do cows pollute as much as cars? | HowStuffWorks
Well, while most people are good with goats milk once they get used to the taste, I happen to be allergic to it - no goat cheese, milk or butter for me.
Not to mention, while on chemo, my tastebuds are fried - one of the few things that hasn’t changed taste on me is cheese [specifically cheddar, havarti, swiss and whatever the hell velveeta is made from] so one of my common protein foods is cheese. I drink ‘medsludge’ for at least one meal a day [12 oz whole milk, 4 oz homemade greek yogurt, 2 packs carnation instant breakfast in dark chocolate, 2 tb oat flour and 1 tb ground flax seed. Passed my oncology nutritionist and my diabetic nutritionist both.]
So, nope, I can’t do without cows milk, and I don’t have enough land to raise a single cow and feed it adequately, nor do I have the ability right now to tend and milk a cow, make my own butter and cheese, and deal with the resultant cowshit.
In the days before commercially available baby formula, or even some areas where it’s not easily available, and a woman didn’t breastfeed, they would often give their babies goat’s milk. My grandfather kept goats during the Depression for exactly this reason.
My grandparents when they first moved to their new “farm” (the irrigation canal hadn’t reached them yet) had just dairy cows. The area had been open range land so the cows were allowed to wander off into the hills.
The boys (including my father) would ride out twice a day to bring them in for milking.
So instead of rabbits, deer, etc. eating the grass, it was cows.
Turning rangeland into something productive is a good thing economically. (As long as you don’t overgraze, which sadly happens far too often.)
The turning grass-into-something thing was going to happen anyway. May as well make it something that can be sold and used to feed people.
Now, of course, this sort of thing doesn’t happen with dairy farming in the US (but it still very common with beef cattle). But no doubt it occurs elsewhere in the world.
Just keep in mind that not all dairy farming necessarily involves high density, converting grain, etc. into milk which has it losses in terms of nutrition.
Lots of countries where there aren’t goats, though, but the milk of any decently-milking domestic mammal has been used (I’m reasonably sure stories about she-wolves are exaggerated). Two advantages of formula are that the powder is easier to transport safely than a liquid and that by making it with boiled water you can avoid a lot of health issues. I’ve known people from India who were so used to powdered milk they thought us Europeans were nuts for buying it in liquid form.
Going to have an awful lot of separate comments from me.
Yank subsidies? Run the risk of family farms going out of business, more unemployment, corn wont need to be produced across America as much as we do now. More unemployment
Get rid of milking cows? How do you like your produce from overseas and all the other shit that comes from there?
Yanking subsidies mean higher prices in the store.
Family farms get by and I imagine a lot of them make a lot of money, but not all of them.
Darren Garrison:
I prefer the green stuff, will please set aside some of that for me. Only a few years worth though, not planning on being around too much longer
TooManyCats:
SOoooo funny about the straws!!!
As far as I know there is not being too much milk being dumped in Michigan but I could be wrong. My husband works on a dairy farm and I’ve been to many milk producer meetings…I still might be wrong…
Ehm… “fresh milk” and “liquid milk” aren’t the same thing. Most liquid milk in Europe is UHT, and currently over here “fresh milk” isn’t even used to mean “pasteurized at low pressures and low temperatures for a long time”, but to mean “unpasteurized”. Which, yuck.
Unpasteurized milk in the States is described as “raw milk”, and legally it cannot be sold. Some woo medical practitioners think it has special healing properties. And I suppose it could, if it came from a healthy cow, but I personally wouldn’t drink it. I will admit that I have, and it does not in any way resemble what you buy at the store.
About goat’s milk. They are a very efficient food-in milk-out vehicle. And true, they will eat almost everything. We raised Nubian goats. The ones with the floppy ears. Beautiful creatures! We fed them the best alfalfa we could find. And the result was delicious milk, and cheese.
As to cows, they are disgusting! Talk about ground water contamination. Horrible!
But, give me a high butterfat cow’s milk ice cream, yogurt, butter and life is good. Cows become less disgusting and the water contamination less horrible.
Do goats eats plants down to the ground the way sheep do? That’s not so good.
The cows on the farm where I grew up did just fine on hilly pastures, and always came to the barn to be milked twice a day. They never had to be rounded up, nor did they at any of the local dairy farms.
Furthermore, I can’t tolerate goat’s milk or cheese. It causes immediate projectile vomiting. Other family members are extremely allergic to soy proteins. I’m not allergic to it, but I find the taste unpalatable. Most other fake milks have an unpleasant taste or texture, or are way too high in carbohydrates. Real milk, butter, cream, and cheese for me, thank you. In moderation, of course.