Writing about the Past and Dairy Farming and rBST and r BGH and . . .

I've been writing a little about my past. Not a lot. It bums me out, writing too much about my childhood. Not sure why. But once I start, I hear my mother's voice in my sleep. A dairy farmer, she loved to lecture about milk, cows, organic food, CAFOs, you name it. I wake up sometimes, mid-lecture . . .

She was like a fact machine. You couldn't just sit back and relax, once she got started.

Here's the kind of thing she would say to anyone who happened to visit . . .about cows and milk and . . .

In case a person wanted to know about such things:


Grass-fed cows produce less milk than grain-fed, but it’s sweeter milk, as long as they don’t get into the onion grass.
Grain-fed cows gain weight and grow faster, but not as fast as those hormone-dosed cows.
But everyone knows. Hormones aren’t good for women or cows. In the case of cows, the hormones, rBST and rBGH, can increase milk production by 15%.
But these hormones are banned in Europe and Canada.
And if it weren't for Monsanto, they'd be banned here, too.
They make the cows sick. A cow isn't designed to be producing but so much milk. And who wants to drink the milk of a sick cow?
The farmers in the States inject the cows with antibiotics, and it’s hard to say just how much of the antibiotics get into the milk we sell. And into the ground water.
Some suspect rBST and rBGH increase the risk of reproductive cancers in humans.
Of course there’s always the others who say everything’s safe.
Go ahead, eat, drink, and be merry.