The hope of the graziers

Yesterday, I blogged about NPR’s John Burnett’s story about mega-dairies polluting the environment. Today, Burnett brings us the opposite perspective on the dairy industry: a dairy farmer in Ohio who sends his cows out pasture and believes his milk will sell because it tastes better than the commodity milk produced (mostly) at mega-dairies.

A bunch of years ago, I profiled Kevin Sullivan, a North Country grazier. Grazing makes uncanny sense, compared to the contemporary mode of farming. And graziers like Sullivan seem baffled by the way most dairy farmers do it:

Why would we want to keep her on concrete and haul it to her and then haul her manure back out here. It’s pretty simple really.

It’s impossible to graze 1,000 or 2,000 cows. Would it even be possible to graze 400 or 500 cows? A return to grazing would mean reversing the “get big or get out” trend of the last 30 years.

But this year’s milk price crisis has farmers rethinking everything. The biggest question is whether farmers who have done a certain thing their whole lives can – or want – to change.