After two years on the farm, I thought I had left behind a lot of my stupidity, but when I took part in the regular culling, I discovered I still had plenty in reserve. This culling was based on hard pragmatism—determining which cows had lived out their profitable milking lives and then selling them off the farm. It occurred regularly, but I had never taken part in selecting culls; Brassard himself oversaw it.
Before coming to the farm, I unconsciously assumed that cows just gave milk automatically, the way hens lay eggs. But that’s not true: They have to get pregnant and give birth to lactate. Once impregnated, they carry their calf for about nine months—amazingly, still giving milk to the tube for seven of those months. A cow’s milk production is highest just after giving birth, then dwindles until, after about ten months, she’s allowed to “dry off”—not be milked—for two months. Calculating these cycles for a hundred cows; maintaining another sixty heifers at various stages of maturity until ready to breed; staggering the timing of impregnation, milk giving, drying off, and calving; and projecting cash flow from it all—I couldn’t imagine how Brassard or any other dairy farmer did it.
Calves arrived throughout the year. We took them away from their mothers three days after their birth, moved them to a different shed, then fed them by hand on a mix of milk and other nutrients until they matured enough to eat grain, hay, or grass. At first, the calves were bawling, lonely, hungry little animals, and their vulnerability awakened the maternal instincts of Robin and Lynn and me. But they calmed quickly and started eating grain and forage within a few weeks, and their frisking told us they enjoyed the company of their fellows in this cattle kindergarten.
But Brassard didn’t need the calves; they were largely a by-product of his need to keep the herd in lactation. He sold the males immediately to be raised for beef or veal; he also sold some females, keeping only enough to replace the older cows who would be culled. The ones he kept would mature to about fifteen months—that’s what a “heifer” is, a young cow before her first pregnancy—and then he’d impregnate them.
When I first started at Brassard’s place, I helped feed the calves but didn’t participate in the removal of the ones to be sold off the farm. As low man on the totem pole—Earnest loved calling me that—I was the designated specialist in manure management, so I was usually otherwise engaged. Anyway, I had too little experience to help choose the older cows to be culled; in fact, it had never completely dawned on me that if new cows were entering the herd, an equal number had to leave it to keep the overall herd size constant. I didn’t really know what became of these healthy cows, only five or six years old, when they left the farm. If asked, I probably would have said they went to someone else’s farm, or to some vast cow retirement pasture to live out their lives in contentment.
But that’s not how it goes. When they get culled, they’re trucked away to be butchered.
In big commercial operations, farmers pump the cows full of hormones so they produce lots of milk. Such cows get used up fast, typically lasting for only three lactation cycles before becoming a “loser”—that is, she’s costing more to feed than she’s earning from her milk output. At four or five years old, she’s culled and shows up at McDonald’s or in your supermarket’s meat or dog-food section.
Brassard’s cows were not exploited so hard. He ran an old-fashioned farm in that his cows spent five months outside each year, eating fresh grass along with high-quality foodstuffs we put out for them. Even in the cold months, they ate mostly hay and corn silage grown on the farm, and since Brassard bought less feed, his costs were lower and his cows could remain profitable longer. A few had been around for as long as ten years.
Given that he really was a cow whisperer of sorts, Brassard amazed me by his ability to accept the necessity of culling, while sincerely feeling affection for his animals. His gentle but firm treatment always calmed them and made them more amenable to being compelled to do things. He talked to them fondly and his goadings were more like suggestions. Certainly, I had no such talent.
When he asked me to help with selecting culls, I told him I didn’t want the responsibility. I wasn’t up for handing out death sentences. I couldn’t maintain objectivity about those cows I had come to know as individuals and had given names to. But when he insisted, I understood his rationale: By now, I had seen each cow up close every day and had a good idea of her health and behavior and milk output.
I also figured I should face into this hard fact of where the food I ate came from. Feel like a burger? A cow has to die, I told myself sternly. Put cream in your coffee or have a cheese sandwich, a cow has to be milked, and every cow that’s milked eventually gets culled and killed.
Reasonable cognitive dissonance, mentally balancing two conflicting imperatives? Or just hypocrisy? I still haven’t entirely decided.
Will and Erik inadvertently made culling much more difficult for me.
One evening after Robin and Lynn left, milking and cleanup done, I came out of the barn to find Will standing with one foot up on the wooden fence, staring out across the pasture. The fields were still lit by a gentle sunset glow, and a faint mist had lifted from the soil of the valley and hillsides, softening all forms. The cows stood out in black and white relief on the distant pasture slope, scattered widely, heads down, cropping up grass.
“What’re you up to?” I asked.
“Nothing. In itself rather nice.”
It was. I stood with him and shared the tranquility of the fading day. Far across the pasture, in a thin belt of marshy land near the stream, the spring peepers were tuning up: a few questioning calls, then more, then more until, within three minutes, they sang out a continuous racketing chorus. From farther down, the peepers in one of the small ponds at the end of Brassard’s land joined in.
“Amphibian love songs,” Will said. “My favorite sound on Earth.” He got quiet, then asked, “What are your plans for the evening?”
They weren’t plans so much as necessary rituals: “I’m going to cook dinner in my apartment down here and then I’m going to head up to camp. Why?”
“Because I just remembered something I used to do when I was a kid. And I thought I’d try it again and wondered if you might want to come along.”
“What is it?”
He laughed. “It’s sort of stupid and sort of magical. Why don’t you have dinner, I’ll cook up something for Dad, and let’s get together in another hour or so. When it’s full dark.”
Mystified, I agreed, and he headed off to the house.
An hour didn’t leave time for me to hike up to the tent for dinner, so I went into my tiny Spartan apartment. I blinded myself by flicking on the electric lights, then set to boiling up two packets of the ramen I kept in the cabinet for times when I was too tired, or the weather was too rough, to trek back to camp. The noodles were exquisite, as almost any meal will be when you’re very hungry—no other seasoning is as good as a hard day’s work.
I had just finished when Will knocked and stuck his head into the doorway. “Ready?”
“What exactly should I get ready for?” I asked.
“Just a short jaunt. Regular boots, a sweater or jacket. Pullover hat is optional. That’s about it.”
We went out into the night. The motion lights didn’t switch on, and Will explained that he’d turned them off for now: “Better in real darkness.”
He led me to the wooden fence and climbed over, and when I joined him he headed without a word into the night. I assumed that not talking was part of this; up on my land, I had learned the value of silence. We went diagonally uphill and across the pasture, into the vague dark, toward the peepers and toward the scattered white blotches that emerged from the darkness—the cows’ black parts had melded with the night. As we got closer, I could see them react to our approach, lifting their heads from the grass, or standing up quickly if they’d been reclining. Will headed toward the densest cluster of t
he herd.
We plugged onward. After another few minutes, we were far enough into the darkness that the house lights were no longer rectangles but just a cluster of dots. Then we came over a slight rise and started down toward the wetland where the peepers were now rioting, deafening, and the house lights were lost from view. We were between the roll of the hill and the black mass of Brassard’s eastern forested ridge, with no visible lights or any evidence of mankind’s existence at all. This could have been the twenty-first century or the Stone Age.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark by the time Will signaled that we should stop. He was a colorless man-silhouette, and the blotched cow shapes were inexplicable as they moved uneasily in the darkness.
Will lay down on the ground, signaling me to do the same.
I hesitated. It was chill and felt wild here, and I knew what a Holstein cow was. Their long-lashed, docile eyes are misleading: They can be stubborn, obnoxious animals and, if you’re not alert, dangerous. Each was ten times my weight, and when I was standing, the heads of some were higher than mine. There were times when I could have sworn a group of cows literally didn’t even know I was there and therefore didn’t obey my shoves and scoldings. Even their absentminded unruliness could knock me over, and the bad mood of one could send the whole herd into uneasy motion that threatened to become a stampede. And Queenie—just the sight of her war-paint facial markings in the milking parlor gave me a flutter of trepidation.
I was leery, but I lay down near Will, belly to the ground, feeling very vulnerable and wondering what we were doing.
The peepers racketed. The white blotches moved in the darkness and after a while I noticed the blotches growing and gathering, and soon I could see the whole cows, dozens, coming toward us. Some were clearly agitated, approaching us sideways, bucketing in defensive display as they came.
Will lay contentedly on his stomach in the grass.
Soon we were surrounded by a shifting, shoulder-to-shoulder circle of Holsteins, craning their necks to bring their noses closer to us, jostling, stamping, uneasy but curious. Did they recognize our scents? If they did, why were they so jittery? I lay there, paralyzed, surrounded by a towering wall of huge animals, rows of knobby forelegs, faces as big as my body. They were huffing heavily, not at all calm, and their eyes were wide and wary, showing white. Some pounded their hooves an arm’s length from my face.
“Rose! Rosie!” Will whispered. He held out his hand toward one of the cows, and now I recognized her, too: a sweet-tempered smaller cow whose side markings vaguely resembled roses. Rose cautiously extended her nose, snuffed at Will’s hand, and seemed to calm.
Then a commotion started. Back in the herd I could hear scuffling and the shifting of hides against each other. And then Queenie burst her way through the inner ring. The others sidled away, deferring to her. Of all the cows, she was the one I least wanted to see out there.
Her appearance agitated the others and I grew terrified of them all. We humans didn’t really command them, I realized. At milking time, they obeyed the demands of their swollen udders, not our goading and cajoling. In the dark, I could feel their animal natures and knew that their fear could easily turn to desperate, defensive aggression.
Queenie shouldered closer, leaned her massive face so close that I felt the moist heat of her heaving exhalations. The peepers seemed to be screaming. Will didn’t move or speak.
We spent a full minute in stasis. Then, as if some message had passed among them, other cows moved forward, shoving aside the first circle. I felt them—their individuality, their identity within their natural social structure, the herd. Did Queenie signal her approval of us? I don’t know. But one after the other, they approached. I’d named several of them myself and called to them by name as they came near: Bertha, large and rather clumsy, thickset in body but with a relatively small bag. And Twiggy, overcoming her skittishness to satisfy her curiosity. Each one calmed further when they recognized us and felt reassured.
They began to drift away. Perhaps we’d only bored them with our stillness. Or the allure of grassy slopes drew their ever-hungry mouths. We lay there as the circle reconfigured and thinned; after fifteen minutes, the last of them had wandered back into the darkness.
Will rolled over onto his back. I did the same. Through the mild haze, I could just see the blurred stars. We were alone on the gentle slope of Brassard’s upper pasture.
“Cool, huh?” Will said. He put his hands behind his head and looked over at me. There was enough light to see that his face was split by a boyish grin.
We walked back in companionable silence, hugged goodnight in the farmyard, and then I crossed the road and headed up the steep track to my tent home there in the forest darkness.
Erik also showed me another dimension of bovine character and made culling all the more awful. He always carried his harmonica with him and often improvised bluesy meanders on it when he was trying to make a decision. He discovered that the cows were fascinated by it. When he wheedled near the pasture fence, they’d drift toward him from all over the hillside, a slow avalanche of ambling black and white forms. They pressed forward against the fence and watched with fascination, ears upright, lifting their wet snouts and snuffling for olfactory clues to what this strange sound meant. Within a few minutes, scores of cows would be crammed together in a semicircle, rows of bony backs radiating from its center, Erik.
Their fascination, their wonderment, moved me. Like anyone, they were bored by their regimented lives and welcomed having something new to inspect. As they watched and listened, jostling and craning around each other’s head for a better view, they struck me as simple souls—gentle, innocent creatures. They snuffed and shifted, marveling and puzzling. Their faces struck me as expressive, and watching them as Erik played, I realized how individual and distinct each face looked now that I knew them better.
Erik got a huge kick out of their attention and took pleasure from giving them some entertainment. I loved seeing it, too: Erik at the epicenter of this checkered crowd of big, inquisitive animals. I empathized with the pleasure they took from this departure from daily routine. I felt for them and knew them. After all, I had milked them and spoken to them and pushed them and washed their teats and rubbed Bag Balm on their chap, fed them and watched them gratefully chow down. Some of them I had nursed by bottle when they were calves. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d also have to help kill them.
On the day appointed for my first culling, we herded them all into the cowshed. Will and Brassard and I walked among them with clipboards and pencils, pages of notes we’d taken throughout the year, and Brassard’s spreadsheets. We jotted ear-tag numbers to identify likely culls. Will had done this many times before going off to college and knew a lot about it from making his films; he was a good judge of a cow’s health. Brassard checked various signs of vigor and energy level and bag health. We chalked the bony rear ends of some and put pink tags on their ears. I knew half of them by name. Bertha got chalked—she was robust in body, but that small bag doomed her. So did Savannah, for whom calving was difficult and required long recovery and vet bills; she was simply not pulling her financial weight on the farm.
Will noticed my increasing reluctance. He took my elbow and asked, “You want to keep going? It’s hard if you’re not used to it.”
“Yeah, I should keep at it,” I told him. I set my teeth, and when Brassard asked me I grimly told him what I knew of milk production for each, and read him information about health issues and birth dates from his spreadsheets. As we went, I plunged into the self-punitive state I’d arrived in. I knew how Diz would have put it to me as she scorned my sentimentality: You want to wrestle with your Inner You? You want opportunities to Prove Yourself? Here you go. I agreed with her voice in my head and decided that I had to see this process to the end.
We separated seven culls and moved them into a small paddock defined by temporary electric fencing we had
set up. They were to loiter here, wondering why they were pulled away from the herd, until the knacker’s wagon arrived. Released from the shed, the others wandered off into the pasture, disinterested.
Brassard went inside to call the buyers. Will and I leaned on the wooden fence, looking at the culls in the paddock. We had put in a feeding trough and filled it with good silage, a last meal for the condemned, and they went to it and did what they did best: ate.
“So,” Will said, “where are you at?”
“In an urban, stupid, naive place. A hypocritical place.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. We’re looking at death row. I can see how it wouldn’t be easy, especially first time around.”
“Thanks.”
Trying to cheer me up, Will told me about Robert E. Lee, the fierce devotion his soldiers had for him, his love for them, and his agony over the fact that “to be a good commander, you must order the death of the thing you love.”
“I’m not a commander. I’m a farmhand,” I told him bitterly.
He nodded equivocally at that. “Lynn and Theo, down at their place?”
“What about them?”
“Lynn raises goats.”
“Yes, she makes soap from their milk,” I snapped, impatient with him.
Will seemed oblivious. “Great soap, too. So … she has to breed her does every year, right, to get the milk? And can’t keep growing the herd forever, same as here. What happens to the male kids, or the extra does?”
“Sells them, I suppose.” I’d never thought about it.
Will kept on, breezily: “Well, she does sell a couple. But she and Theo butcher three kids every year and put the meat up in their freezer. They had an outdoor roast a couple of years ago, people came from farms all around, one of the kids spitted and slow cooking over a wood fire. I helped baste. The meat was delicious.”