Ep 205: National Dairy Month - Milk Sales and Manure
June, is National Dairy Month!
Cows produce milk, and they have been producing milk in America since before America was America. While cows were brought to the continent as early as Christopher Columbus’ second voyage, they were not introduced to the parts of the continent that would be the United States until the 1600s. While there is record of cows in the Jamestown Colonies, usually by ways of referencing a local dairy farmer, it was 1624 is the first recognized cows. This was in the Plymouth colony by Edward Winslow who had 3 heifers and a bull.
While you might buy milk or other cow products from a local farm or dairy, this was still very local. Milk spoiled, refrigeration technology was less advanced. Yesterday's milk might be today's butter, or in time, cheese. As they needed to preserve milk so it did not go to waste, early colonial settlers practiced European methods of cheese making. In fact, the cattle and the products which resulted from it, were of such quality in the Americas, that there was a demand for some of the products back in England.
Dairies in the US remained mostly local. That is until the industrial revolution. It turned localized dairy farming and cattle raising into a more automated and efficient money making system. Advancements in refrigeration allowed products to be kept without spoiling for longer. The first regular shipment of milk was sent via the railway system from Orange County to New York City in 1841. This was a feat since refrigeration and pasteurization was not what it is today.
The processes and methods of pasteurizing milk and other products to kill the bacteria which would cause it to spoil develop. This coupled with machinery which actually interfaced with the cows such as milking machines and automatic feeding systems. However, it should be noted, a lot of times the conditions for the cows and other animals in these systems at this time were not the best. As money could be made, the feeding, breeding, harvesting, and killing of animals took precedence sometimes over the quality of life of some of the animals in question.
Machines such as the automatic bottle filler, bottle capper, the centrifugal machine to make butter and cream, pasteurizing machines, and more science to determine the fat content. Over the course of the next 100 years developments in nutrition, packaging, and farm, as well distribution continued to expand until the milk we know and love today. It’s undergone a lot, from the olden days of milking cows in the back yard. There are two things which developed alongside all of this hubbub of technology and practice in bringing us our gallons of milk.
One is the marketing around milk and dairy.
Marketing.
When we discuss the growth of the dairy industry in the United States, especially as we do so from the angle of it being National Dairy Month, we would need to discuss some of the various marketing campaigns which have been used to sell the sweet cow juice.
To track this, I think it is most interesting to work backwards from where we are today.
A lot of the dairy branding and propaganda is to draw attention away from the alternative milks back onto the genuineness and health benefits of “real” milk. Much of this work is done by a group called MilkPEP. MilkPEP is the Processor Education Program and they are funded by milk companies that work to both have oversight of and drive sales to the dairy industry. MilkPEP relaunched the “Got Milk?” Campaign of the 90’s more on that in a moment. This time they revamped it and aimed it at a chronically online influencer generation.
The Got Milk campaign kind of came to a close in 2014 after it failed to drive milk sales. The 20 year long campaign, still by MilkPEP, was most known for the Milk Mustached celebrities asking if you had milk. It saw declines in changes of opinion related to health. They began choosing those nut and soy milks or diet or low sugar sodas. From 2014-2019, in the interim, they switched from Got Milk to the “Milk Life” campaign which was supposed to help milk seem like a healthy option to consumers.
In fact, this current MilkPEP has been in place since the 1990s and has been influential in the steering of dairy marketing. Prior to the PEP the National Dairy Board played a role in directing the marketing of milk and dairy in the US. In the 1980s they hired an advertising company called McCann-Erickson who made the “Milk: It does a Body Good” campaign. In it again, the health and strengthening benefits of milk were highlighted. This campaign ended as we said in 1994 because it turns out, people knew milk was good for them, they just needed to go buy it.
Prior to the 1980s the primary tools used for advertising and marketing milk were print and radio. But there was a new technology of the time which led to the campaigns of the 80s, 90s and 2000s. The television. Early advertisements included paid ads as well as sponsoring TV programs outright, giving the show money to have them talk about and feature milk in a positive, healthy, and cool way. One of the most popular examples of this is the American Dairy Association, who was one of the leading directors of things for the dairy industry in the US at the time, sponsoring the TV show Ozzie and Harriet.
The goal was to promote milk and other dairy products through advertising. The American Dairy Association was founded in 1940 by dairy farmers with the goal of boosting dairy consumption. It still operates to today and works alongside some of the groups who have sought to create dairy marketing. The 1940s was essentially the beginning of milk advertising as well. Spurred by FDR’s New Deal and the work of the Works Progress Administration, milk advertising in departments of health were the targets of much of their work.
The goal is again, increasing consumer demand in marketing and to deal with surpluses the farmers faced as public opinion and other drink options caught up with the booming industry that had arisen out of the 1800s. This whole thing was originally started in 1937 with the creation of National Milk Month. National Milk Month was created to promote drinking milk to US consumers to deal with the surplus.
National Milk Month didn’t last long, because the National Dairy Council changed it to be National Dairy Month. They named June National Dairy month to deal with a lot of the surplus milk which seems to be a problem in the months of June and July. We are almost a full century from the beginning of National Dairy Month. And while there have been a number of marketing campaigns thrown at the American public throughout all that time, one thing is clear. Dairy farmers MUST sell the cow juice and they will need to make the cow juice desirable to the American public to do so.
Got milk, real milk, dairy farmers just want you to drink the milk. And while there has been much output to get people to consume milk and in turn a growing need to produce that milk… All those cows and all that production has a different output.
Manure.
Cows, like all things that eat poop. And healthy cows poop a lot. In fact it is estimated that a single cow produces 65 pounds of poop every single day. It’s a staggering number. I think it’s one of those things where if you asked how much the poop of an animal in a day weighs, you would be perpetually shocked. So even if you use the metric of the earliest dairy farmer we have on record in the Americas, owning 3 cattle in total, that’s approaching 200 pounds of manure every day. The question is… what do you do with it all?
This is a tale as old as time. When we talked about fertilizer a year or so ago it came as no shocker to everyone to hear that the relationship between fertilizer and poop is for much of the history of the world, a complete overlap. Cow poop would be spread on local fields and pasture land. It was good for the plants, and the cows eat the plants, and I can hear the lion king song being keyed up for the circle of life in all this.
In tough times, people would often resort to burning cow poop for fuel. When dried, it actually does an ok job as a firestarter. Stinky firestarter, but nonetheless. However, as the dairy farms were more industrialized and had higher productions coming out of the industrial age, there was a higher demand for milk and dairy products, directly impacted by the work of the aforementioned marketing.
All that commercializing the dairy industry served to produce a commercialized amount of cow poop. So… where were they going to put it. Simply trying to reuse the manure as fertilizer by spreading it on local farms was no longer feasible or cost effective. For some time, the cow poop was left, leading to problems of disease. However, this was one moment where regulation actually helped everyone out. While most reputable farms and dairies never treated and left cows in unhealthy conditions, many industrialized dairy centers did. Not being able to remove the cow poop fast enough resulted in cutting your losses, leaving it, and hoping for the best. When it comes to poop, it isn’t a path forward.
In time, developments in industrial technology also helped the cleanliness of these large scale dairies and the efficiency of the fertilizing aspects of the manure produced. Much of the manure in these later development farms operates on a system of making a cow turd slurry that washes it out from where the cows are to be manipulated for further use. First, there became a growing market for fertilizers. This caused research and further development of the most efficient composting mixing the manure with other plant material for maximum effect.
Often cow poop is washed into closed loop anaerobic tanks where the organic material is broken down. This produces methane which is captured and used to produce electricity or heat. This is used directly to power and assist with the farm's day to day functions. Other farmers, once the organic materials are broken down, will take dried out physical portions of the manure and mix it with other dried products for cow bedding in the farms and pens. The liquid portions of this cow poop slurry are often filtered to a degree and used to water crops.
Depending on the scale and scope of the farm, it directly impacts the amount of access they have to the tools of the trade for harnessing the power of cow poop. Mega dairies, which when I hear all I can think of is mega churches, have systems which break down the manure at a chemical level and resaturate the soil through the nutrients they retrieve from it. Still, sometimes they cannot use it all as quickly as they need. Manure pits will be dug to store large amounts of manure. I like the idea of a manure pit. Mostly I like the thought of someone accidentally falling into it or like driving a car into it. I think that might be possibly where the turn craphole comes from? Maybe. It’s hard to tell.
