Milk it for all it’s Worth, Part I: More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Milk Production

“Those two cows are mother and daughter and they always come into the milking shed together”, noted the West Coast New Zealand dairy farmer, amused. Row after row of cows come and go. I am amazed that he can keep track of who’s who by looking at them. I just see four tits and a big butt ready to poop on me as I clumsily apply the milking cups. (I'm a rookie at this).

“That one is always the first to come into the shed in the morning. She runs in and goes straight for the feed”, said another farmer across the majestic Wanganui Valley. It’s 5 am and no fewer than 5 shooting stars, visible planets, the milky way galaxy, and reddish twinkling stars line the horizon as the morning milking ritual winds up. The farmers meticulously check each cow’s milk for signs of infection. I find it amazing that 400+ individual cows are personally seen by a farmer at least once per day. These cows are well looked-after with ample grazing land, extra feed in fall and winter, and a million-dollar view of the sometimes snow-covered foothills of the Southern Alps. The practices on these farms do not seem to line up with the horror stories you sometimes hear about in the US. For example, here they only use antibiotics on a cow if she is sick. If the cow is sick enough to need antibiotics, her milk is dumped down the drain until she regains health. I am under the impression that many dairy cows in the US are preemptively pumped full of antibiotics and steroids all the time whether they are sick or not.

Today, I got to “help” (OK, mostly I just watched) work the tractor to spread bails of dried grass (saved from summer surpluses) into the paddock as grass production is slowing for the autumn season. I looked out and saw happy cows all around me. I learned that you can tell a cow is happy when she sits down because it means she’s had enough to eat. However, “happy” might not be the apropos term to describe these cows during calving season. I’ve not witnessed this first-hand, but have learned about it during my time here WWOOFING (Work-exchange for accommodation for travelers) in Hari Hari. Here’s what I have learned:

First of all, what makes cows lactate? The same thing that makes human women lactate: babies! How do they get these babies? They become pregnant via artificial insemination, which is a highly paid profession, by the way. There are people who specialize in collecting bull semen and shoving it shoulder-deep up cow vaginae. That is a job. Apparently, it’s a high-risk job, too because if they do it wrong and the pregnancy does not take, the cow will be dry (won’t produce milk) for a whole year, which translates to a loss of about $2K-$3K NZD in revenue (extrapolated from figures provided here). Artificial insemination specialists have practice their craft within 1-2 days of a cow going into heat, which happens on a cycle about every ten days during the two month mating season. Toward the end of the heat cycles, remaining non-pregnant cows have a go with a real, live bull. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that children who grow up on farms are fairly clued into the birds and bees from a young age.

After 8 months of pregnancy, most cows give birth naturally, licking their calves clean and eating their own placenta (Mmm, yummy). A handful require assistance and by assistance I mean a farmer has to go stick his or her hands all up in the cows business and to help yank the cow outta there. If that fails, the cow must walk to the barn while in labor so that the calf can be removed by force with a rope. Then, if that fails the vet (who has a better rope) is called.

Within the first day after birth the calves are separated from their mother. A farmer literally drives a truck around the paddock picking up calves by hand and hauling them off in a trailer. Some mothers and babies cry out to one another in agony as the cows follow the trailer containing their precious cargo. The bitchier cows don’t give a flying bovine turd about their babies being taken from them. They just continue to eating grass without an upward glance.

At this point, you may be wondering what happens to the babies. Most of the girl cows are kept and raised to be baby-producing milk making cash cows (Haha, I made a funny) when they reach age two. At this stage, they are called “heifers”, and they can be a skittish pain in the ass in the milking shed because they don’t know where to go and they are not yet used to having people touch their boobies twice a day for milking. And let’s just be blunt about what happens to the boys: they are slaughtered for meat, as are cows that are too old to have babies and produce the good stuff that makes all that yummy cheese and butter we know and love.

Once calving is done, cows must be milked twice per day throughout most of the year until the grass thins out (and thus milk production slows) in the fall when farmers move to a once-per-day schedule. Cows are then “dried off” for the coldest two months of winter. Because of this rigorous milking schedule, dairy farming is one of the more intense types of farming one could do. It’s not like farmers can decide to sleep in one Sunday and skip a milking; if a cow goes a single day without being milked, she will stop producing milk for the rest of the year, which would result in thousands of dollars of lost revenue. 

After being filtered and chilled in the milking shed, milk is picked up by a Westland Dairy Cooperative truck every day. The Westland milk is then processed mostly into milk powder and butter. A large portion of the finished product is exported, especially to China.

Largely due to this recent Chinese demand, New Zealand sheep and beef farmers have been converting their farms over to dairy, where the dollar signs are. This was especially true in 2008 when the price of milk solids increased by 72%. This increase may have been due in large part to China’s domestic dairy safety scandal which resulted in the deaths of babies and caused Chinese consumers to demand foreign milk powder exports. In the same year, China and New Zealand formed a timely Free Trade Agreement which began reducing milk powder tariffs. These tariffs will continue to taper until 2019, which will likely aid Chinese demand of New Zealand dairy over the next five+ years. That is if NZ dairy can avoid another botulism scare. Since 2008, milk solid prices have come down from their lactic high. But having already spurned Chinese demand, prices have remained higher than ever (p. 49) and are stable or growing. Needless to say, dairy farming in New Zealand is very profitable.

Next time you see a herd of 500 cows sitting on the side of the road somewhere, consider that they will probably generate about $10MM NZD in lifetime revenue for someone. Of course as more farms are converted to dairy, oversupply will eventually cause a price drop, but hopefully for the folks in Hari Hari, Chinese milk consumption growth will outpace Kiwi sheep farm conversion.

More images from around Hari Hari:

Conquering Mount Doubt

I carefully place each shaky step, trying to calm my breath as I take in the 360 degree ridge-top views. Low-lying clouds make for hanging summits that appear to be wrapped in silky white scarfs. I feel like I am in a movie. I feel like I am in a virtual reality game. I feel like I am on a roller coaster. I am on top of a mountain, and alive as a person can be, yet this feels unreal. On either side of me are valleys that plunge into expanses of more mountains on a scale that I can’t comprehend. My foot dislodges a loose bit of rock whose progress I watch as it rolls off to one side, bumping against a few bluffs as it tumbles into the abyss. It is a good thing that I chose this week to kick my coffee addiction: I do not need a supplement to my jitters today. Nerves circulate through my veins in liquid form as I contemplate the upcoming descent. My legs literally shake. On the way up, there was a 10 meter section of track that seemed like a near vertical rock climb above a 1,000 meter drop-off. I was surprised to see this since the track description said something like, "If you find yourself on a vertical scramble, you are probably off-track". Yet this is the only part of the track with an actual orange triangle trail marker, so I knew I had to be on the route. As each worried thought comes into my mind, I diligently shove it away in favor of focusing on the task at hand: putting one foot in front on the other. It is just me out here so I have to do it. 

My anxiety is fueled further because I'd slept through my alarm. I didn't get started as early as I'd wanted to, given the weather was forecasted to come in to slicken things up. I nearly skipped breakfast, but thought better of it realizing that it might be two hours before I reached a reasonably horizontal spot in the trail to stop and snack. Besides, when else was I going to have a chance to drink hot Milo (cocoa) besides a thunderingly melting glacier reflecting the pink sunrise backdrop? Maybe I slept through my alarm because I was awakened every 15 minutes by that glacial thunder all through the night. I cannot believe how quickly the ice is literally falling from the earth. The possum didn’t help my sleep either. At first I'd thought that maybe there was a lone mountaineer trying to break into the hut in the middle of the night. Then I'd thought maybe it was a cheeky Kea bird (a smart bugger of a bird that likes to eat your boots and steal your socks). But all the sudden, perched on the windowsill, back-lit by the moon against the scraggly mountain silhouette there was a cat on the hut's window-sill! “Should I let it in?”, “ What is it doing up here?”, “Oh wait, no, it's a possum!”, I thought in quick succession. That stupid thing scratched at the roof for a good twenty minutes around 4 am. I had decided to leave my boots outside to avoid stinking up the tiny mountain A-frame bivouac (bivvy). To keep them from getting rained on, I'd stuffed them underneath the hut, but not before tying my laces to the foundation. There are only a few feet between the edge of the bivvy and a very large drop-off. I just didn't want to take a chance that my boots would take sail in the wind off the cliff. This was a fortunate decision because the damn possum took a go at my boots, dragging them perilously to the edge of the cliff, restrained only by the tied laces. Safe boots aside, I didn’t sleep well last night.

The clouds begin to darken, so I quicken my step wanting to hit the hard section before the rain beats me there. My foot catches a smooth, flat rock sending me to my bum in one of the few sections of track with a wide margin of error. Rattled, I take it as a sign to slow down, and utilize every calm-down tool in my mental arsenal. 

I think about all the people who have come before me; Sefton, unlike other New Zealand huts I've bagged in was built as a mountaineer's basecamp and it is the oldest structure in Mount Cook National Park, built in the early 1900’s. It's the sort of place that incredibly badass people sleep for a few hours before waking up at 2 am to go ice climb the glacier in rope teams summiting one of several surrounding mountains. I consider the impossibility of this, especially 100 years ago when people were mountain climbing without modern gear. Furthermore, this hut would have been built without the aid of helicopters to transport in the supplies. How did they build this thing? The bivvy sits on a rocky ledge sticking out of a much bigger mountain. I felt like part of a select club sleeping there. I am not (yet?) a real mountaineer. But at least I can say I've slept on a mountaineer's sleeping mat in a tiny A-frame where I could stand up only in the middle next to my wet clothes that hung on prayer flags dangled from the ceiling. Other huts I've bagged originated as campsites for hunters, gold miners, cattle herders, or Maori greenstone (jade) seekers. This one has Canterberry Mountain Club magazines with stories of people conquering icy crevasses. Low and behold, there was a story about people camping at Sefton and climbing Footstool, a nearby peak. I checked the hut book where people log their trip intentions (which among other things include things like "eating gummy worms") to aid Search and Rescue should such a need arise. I couldn't believe it! There, in the hut book were the signatures of the people mentioned in the article! There I was, snuggling in my sleeping bag in their basecamp reading their story, looking at their actual signatures! I belong here, I reassured myself. I can do this.

I take one last comforting glance across the substantial valley to Mount Oliver where I'd watched the sunrise just the morning before. I could see the red speck of Mueller Hut tucked away. Somewhere in that hut is Bridget the volunteer Hut Warden; someone rooting for me to succeed. She encouraged me to tackle this tramp the night before. Through the binoculars, she showed me the tiny orange pin point which marked Sefton bivvy across the way. The ridge below it looked formidable, but she told me that I could do it. Given that Bridget is a member of the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council, is a wilderness survival teacher, avid tramper, and outdoor educator, I decided to trust her assessment of me. Further, I bet that as a Mueller Hut warden, she would be good at picking out idiots from competent hikers. Mueller is on top of a legitimate mountain with steep, loose climbs and the sort of weather changes that happen at 1800 meters (6,000 feet). Yet it's only a 3-5 hour climb from Mount Cook Village in Mount Cook National Park. So it attracts an incredible array of people in jeans and cotton t-shirts with big cameras and insufficient jackets; each appearing to be less prepared than the last. While I warmed up in my sleeping bag in Mueller Hut, I read an article in Wilderness Magazine describing Mueller as New Zealand's highest altitude Backpackers (Youth Hostel), and I couldn’t help but nod my head in amused agreement. Before I set out, Bridget instructed me to flash my light from Sefton back at her on Mueller Hut. I felt a little less alone out there, recalling her five long, steady flashes in response to my signal.

Rapidly approaching the most treacherous section of the tramp, I review my contingency plan. If I can’t safely make the descent, I will go back to the hut and get on the radio to the base station. I have an extra day of food in my pack, so I can stay and wait for help, if needed. The previous night, I'd botched the radio communication on the 7 pm "all hut" call where the base station sets up a sort of radio conference call to all the area huts to check that everyone made it to their intended destinations and report out the next day weather forecast. I was a little over-eager to use the words "over" and "copy", so I ended up speaking out of turn. My nerves turned to giggles as I recalled my embarrassing radio flop. Still, as good as it is to have a back-up plan I do my best work when I am convinced that there is nobody to rescue me. I'm constantly amazed by what people (including me) are capable of when they have to be capable. Orson Scott Card was onto something when he wrote about this in Ender’s Game; Ender becomes a capable battle commander because during training, nobody came to his rescue when he was being dangerously bullied and he learned to survive, waiting for no one.

Finally, as I approached the dreaded steep bit, I decide to do a few practice runs turning toward the mountain to lower myself down backwards. Though I could do these sections facing forward, it would be good to try out my footing backward, feeling out how the weight of my pack affects my balance…And then all the sudden, I reach that orange triangle that marks the end of the steep part, and I wonder what happened to that scary vertical section? Conclusion: while the route is quite vertical in my imagination, it is a much more reasonable angle in reality. It seems I have "practiced" my way down the hardest bit and didn’t even realize it! Stunned, that it’s over already, I remember why it doesn't pay to worry: Worry distorts reality and we probably worry about all the wrong things anyways. I recently went to dinner with a rafting guide who told me a story about how a sheep fell off a massive cliff into the river and exploded on impact, such that its guts and entrails dispersed into the rapids. When the sheep's head started following the boat, his non-English speaking clients panicked, stopped listening to his commands, and ended up underneath the boat with the sheep head. First off, I just want to point out that this story is so Kiwi. This is the sort of thing that can happen in a country with 40 million sheep per 4 million citizens. Second, I mean, you just can't make up stuff like that to worry about. It would seem reasonable to worry about someone falling out or about the raft popping. But you might as well not bother to worry about any of it, because you will inevitably forget to worry about the exploding sheep.

I continue along the sharp, but navigable switchbacked ridge down toward the river, formed from the glacial melt I'd witnessed earlier while taking a dump on the World's Most Scenic Toilet, which has a full 180 degree view of the Southern Alps, right up close and personal. (P.S. You haven’t lived until you’ve used a toilet with a view like this). Stressing and straining my quads on the way down, I looked around for the next sign of a footprint or rock cairn as this is technically not a "trail", but an off-track route-finding challenge. For the most part it is easy to see where others have been before me except for a few sections when the track takes an unexpected sidestep with a hard-to-find cairn marker. As my nerves calm from the earlier excitement, I wonder why it is that I'd imagined the track to be so much harder and more dangerous than it is. Perhaps it is because of the doubting Negative Nelly DoC (Department of Conservation) officer I'd spoken with when I registered my trip intentions at the base station. Without knowing anything about me and my abilities, she spoke to me as if I was 100% destined to fail. Instead of helpfully delivering critical safety information, she said things like "well you can just find somewhere out there to sleep until we send help for you in the morning". Her negativity was so strong that I almost cancelled my trip since a supposed "official" was doubting me. But then I asked to speak with another ranger who had actually done Sefton. He explained important navigational pitfalls to watch for. Then, I wondered why I should trust the opinion of someone whose default is to doubt everyone without knowing anything about them. She had also spoken to me that way when I registered my intentions for Mueller. I decided to trust my own judgment and the judgment of the hut warden who'd actually spent hours getting to know me. Still, I think that little seed of doubt was enough to inflate my perception of the situation when things got a little bit intense. It is disturbing that it took me a few hours of chatting with a qualified person to believe her assessment of my competence whereas it took only a split second for my confidence to be shaken by someone whose default is to assume that I am an incompetent idiot. 

How many unqualified doubters have thwarted me from succeeding before I even try? How many times have I indiscriminately judged and doubted someone else, discouraging them from attempting something? I bet it happens so often to most of us that we don't even notice when it does. In the First World, we worry about additives in foods poisoning our bodies, but we fail to recognize the extent to which we allow ourselves to be poisoned by unqualified negative thoughts. In the wilderness, doubts can lead to panic which leads to bad decisions, which lead to emergency situations. In everyday life, negative thoughts are just as dangerous, but they affect us in a slower, long-term fashion which is difficult to notice. In this case, I’d say I bagged Sefton Bivvy and in the process, I bagged Mount Doubt.

Luffa Tutus: A New Zealand Tramper’s Guide to Sydney Fashion

There it was! A palate of purple shower luffa fluff balls at just $2 each; perfect raw materials for tutu-making. Given the dearth of alternate tutu choices and my imminent need for a ballerina-themed hen’s night (bachelorette party) costume luffas would have to do.

There are roughly three cities in the whole country of New Zealand that feature multiple large shopping stores. Even here at The Warehouse which is the closest approximation to Wal-Mart or Target within a 6 hour drive, the cereal doesn’t take up an entire isle. In fact, there are only one or two brands of cornflakes. Also, it turns out people get by just fine in life without the option to choose from 7 different brands of white refined sugar. Unfortunately, at this moment I needed choices and fast. I was to board a flight to Sydney, Australia the next day and I needed a cheeky ballerina dress!

I went over to The Department Store (creatively named) and promptly wondered where all the departments were. As far as I could tell, there was one department which could have been named “The Frumpy Old Lady”. The only other clothing store in the area may as well have been named “Out Of Your Budget”, leading me right back to The Warehouse where I clamored into the dressing room in the farthest corner hoping that the stink from my hiking boots wouldn’t radiate to innocent nearby shoppers. I awkwardly tried on dresses and skirts judging their merits based on factors such as their ability to conceal my growing collection of traveler/tramper/mountain biker cuts and bruises. I seem to be off to a great start temporarily reentering into “normal” society to do “normal” things like, you know wearing a lufa tutu, and all. I settled on a skirt "shirt" combo in which the shirt was actually a swimsuit top on sale for $5. Um, do I have a swimsuit theme going on here?

After back-to-back wilderness excursions with cherry chapstick and a small comb (which I’d cut to save weight) as my only luxury cosmetic items, I busted out my horrific toenail painting skills where I succeeded in covering up pretty much my whole toes (not just the toenails, some of which have blackened). As the paint dried I assembled my tutu, cutting strands of the lufa and tying them to a ribbon. Then I reconfigured my carefully arranged pack to accommodate the new outfit. In case you ever need to know this, tutus smoosh nicely into a stuff sack and a first aid kit is a good place to store fragile items like hair ribbons as they can be cushioned between gauze pads and emergency blankets. Needless to say, this was not my usual packing routine.

Upon boarding the Virgin Australia flight from Queenstown, New Zealand to Sydney Australia, the differences between the neighboring nations began to emerge. The Aussie flight attendants’ bright red lipstick and trendy up-dos  were the first hints. To put New Zealand fashion into context, let me just say that they have 10 sheep per capita and I easily went two months without seeing a single stoplight. Even the internet and smartphone usage has limited reach due to large swaths of coverage holes and very expensive data plans with low data caps (even for home wifi)…PS, they still rent movies from the DVD store and some under 30’s use a paper phone book and look up concert times in the local paper (the hard copy one). Thus, outside influences including fashion are heavily diluted by the time they reach the land of the Kiwi. (Unless you count homegrown fashions such as gators worn with shorts…definitely a good look). By comparison, Sydney (though I can’t speak for the rest of Australia) seems to think it is New York. Most women don’t leave the house without makeup. They have fantastically bright colored flowy layered beach styles, inspired by the local climate and animals, terrible but trendy mom jeans and *ack!* high heals! Let’s just say most Sydney-siders have “a look” of one sort or another.

This is not to say that there aren’t fashionable people anywhere in New Zealand, and if they are, I imagine they live in the capitol city, Wellington. But as an aggregate cultural generalization, New Zealand doesn’t not have a Fashion Culture. Whereas in Sydney, wardrobe choices appear to be influenced by the environment, local and international media, fashion designers, peers, history, current events and social niches. Social niches (punk, gothic, preppy, hipster); this is another Oz-Kiwi difference. Australia has them. Even the junior high and high schoolers in New Zealand don’t seem to have pronounced social/stylistic niches. On a city bus in Christchurch (New Zealand’s second largest city), I ended up on the route where all the school kids got picked up. We must have passed three different high schools, one university, and two junior highs, both public and private. I got a good sampling of what urban kiwi teenagers wear. Among all of them, I found just one head of pink hair and another isolated nose ring incidence. Otherwise, there was absolutely nothing noticeable, notable, unique, or non-generic about their clothing and styles.

I’m not necessarily saying that Australians are better dressed than Kiwis. I’m saying that Sydney-siders get dressed within the context of many culturally influencing factors. Kiwis simply get dressed. And there is no web of historical fashion iterations that come into play when they do. Fashion culture (or lack thereof) doesn’t necessarily mean that the net result of wardrobe choice is better or worse. For example, San Francisco has a fashion culture driven in part by 25 year old post-IPO tech geek millionaire Silicon Valley folk who go to work barefoot and in shorts so ratty they might as well be wearing assless chaps. The underlying idea behind this wardrobe choice is that one must not be very competent if he or she has to dress well to garner respect at work. The work should be so good that one can wear anything and still be in high demand. This attitude intersects with Wacky San Francisco’s “I want to be different like everyone else” mindset which is fed by the many facets of the LGBTQ community combined with migrant international flare and the occasional high fashionista. The net result is often an unfortunate combination of passionately ambivalent hipsters wearing glasses frames with no glasses, an apathetically fervent owl watch (worn ironically, of course, because who uses watches these days), topped off with a giant bright yellow rotary phone iPhone attachment.

In any case, I’m going to keep rocking my jegging yogapant-skinny jeans. They’re light weight, quick dry, and can be worn as jeans or as a thermal base layer!