This is something we as a Creamery, and Keith as a Dairy Farmer grapple with a lot. We don’t like some of the Organic Standards because we find they are not animal friendly enough. According to the Organic Standards, if an animal needs to be given an antibiotic even once in it’s life, it has to be removed from the herd, permanently. We don’t agree with this. We are not against modern medicine. It is the overuse and abuse of modern medicine that is getting us all into trouble. Keith’s cows are very healthy and hardly ever have to have medical intervention. But he likes to keep those tools in his tool box although he uses, preventive medicine as a first choice, Naturopathic medicine as a second choice and conventional medicine as the third choice.
The Organic Standards are great about soil health and conditions, and the animals’ need to have a minimum amount of time out on pastures. We totally agree with that. Many years ago Keith transitioning his land to Organic. This was not such a big step for him, since his only exception to following the organic standards previously, was spreading nitrogen on his fields in the summer. Nitrogen really makes grass grow fast after it has been hayed or eaten down. This was a great help in preventing the fields from drying up too fast after they were hayed, but as Keith has reduced his herd from 70 to 14, there is less pressure to grow a lot of hay.
In the last many years Keith has experimented with various ways to improve the microbial life in the soil. He has tried fish fertilizer, funguses, milk and yogurt. To our surprise yogurt has shown the most improvements. The grass is noticeably darker green in areas where he has spread yogurt. He often has extra milk to spare, so now he turns it into something useful like yogurt fertilizer for the fields. This is all work in progress and we hope this fertilizer will bring the nutritional levels in the grasses up even higher then they were.
Keith has been feeding organic grain for many years. As the creamery grew and Keith was able to step away from his dairy Co-op, reduce the number of cows and only provide milk to the creamery that pays much higher than the Dairy Co-op, he was able to afford to buy organic grain for his dairy cows. The cows are not fed grain except when they come into the milking parlor and get milked. Otherwise they are entirely grass fed.