Dream A Dairy Farming Dream

I look back fondly on one of the many times I swam the River of Righteous Bollocks like a crocodile looking for an antelope to hug.

With its teeth. 

I had a case of misplaced (how else?) jingoism showing itself via a conviction that I was standing up ‘for the right thing’. I don’t blame myself for thinking so. I wasn’t alone in this belief, but this is my story (ours actually, Mani and I) of walking the road, furiously following the scent of what was perceived as ‘the right thing’, only to find ourselves somewhere else entirely.

Rewind to 6 years ago.

It began with wanting to set up a dairy farming unit (easy enough?) only to chance upon several things we weren’t prepared for. 

Information on the decline of the local breeds of cows, how dairy farming was increasingly starting to look like industrial machine complexes everywhere, instead of the farmer/herder-animal keeping relationship, and what the use of cow dung and urine meant for something called ‘natural farming’.

We were very taken up by the concept of natural farming. Natural farming in itself isn’t a singular way of farming, there are those who practice this with cows and those who don’t. 

We were interested in going the way of the cow.

Learning about Panchakavya, which made use of cow dung and urine, made us feel like Getafix knowing how to brew the magic potion to make our crops grow without mass poisoning them with industry grade fertilizers.

We also came across numerous articles about how the gut bacteria present in the dung of local breeds were better at encouraging soil bacterial population and by that extension, better soil nourishment.

We didn’t contest that claim as much and took it at face value, using our neighbour’s local cow manure to use on our fields then and in preparation of Panchakavya (the one time we did use a mixed/foreign breed cow's dung, the difference we did notice was in the consistency, which was borderline diarrhoea at the time). 

We were interested in the outcome of using something like Panchakavya and the result was that it did help give our crops a boost.

Dude failed agriculture.

Having learned about the lived experiences of farmers who were massively hit by the Green Revolution, not to mention the toll it took on farming lands, Mani and I were now very inclined towards natural farming . We were deeply invested by then in the fate of local cow breeds for this reason.

This was also around the time that the fervor over local breeds was peaking with the protest on the ban of jallikattu (a traditional sport of ‘taming the bull’ by men #spotthepatriarchy). The narrative at that time was that banning this sport would further lessen local breed numbers since this sport was played using the bulls of local breeds. The belief was that the only way to save the local cows (‘save the naatu maadu!’) was by saving the sport.

Guess who printed posters to hold up in the protests to stand in solidarity to ‘save the naatu maadu’? It was a wonderful feeling to be part of a movement which made you feel like you were doing your bit and being part of the change.

It was also around this time that claims were being made that local breeds produced A2 milk and foreign breeds produced A1 milk. That A2 milk was good for health and A1 milk caused ‘health problems’.  

This information in combination with Hip Hop Tamizha’s chest-beating song with good beats about local bulls meant that we were well and truly in the camp of seeing foreign breeds as *The Villain. 

(*side note: this link takes you to something I'd written for Fully Filmy, a company I'd worked with for 1 whole week! ).

The picture of The Villain deepened further when it came to the question of who was promoting foreign breeds and why. The imagery was one of corporations who set up industrial machine complexes with cows tubed up like soulless cogs (just Google ‘dairy farming’ pictures).

So all in all, in short, these were the causes we were furiously fighting for :

1.    Lifting the ban on jallikattu

2.   Getting local breed numbers up by promoting consumption of their milk ( remember A2 milk is ‘good’)

3.    Boycotting companies which sell milk from foreign or mixed breed cows

The ban on jallikattu was lifted. The sport proceeded. We patted ourselves on the back and sat down for points 2 and 3.

Now this is where I rant and rave about the hypocrisy of people (myself) and the paradoxes we constantly find ourselves in but stubbornly refuse to acknowledge at the altar of our stupidity.

Insert *beep* till the end of this offending article.

Important FAQ’s

1.    What the flying dung cake is A1 and A2?

Well hello Chemistry lesson!

Cow milk is made up of water, sugar, fat, protein and minerals. Beta-Casein is the name of a protein present in milk. Proteins are made up of amino acids. The beta-casein protein is present in milk as either A1 beta-casein or A2 beta-casein. What makes it A1 or A2 beta-casein is the difference of a single amino acid. And this difference means that when milk with A1 beta-casein is digested, what is called beta-casomorphin-7 is produced. BCM-7 for short.

TLDR : When A1 milk is digested, BCM-7 is produced.

2.    Why is A1 milk the Bad Guy?

This is where the science gets murky. There’s been a lot of push recently to publish papers on A1 and A2 milk. Propaganda is written in invisible ink over so many articles, it’s hard to tell the bull from the bullshit. A lot of it has to do with the BCM-7 that’s been produced by A1 milk when digested in the body. It is this BCM-7 which is attributed to causing ‘health issues’ and thereby the label on A1 milk as Michael Jackson level Bad.

TLDR : BCM-7 is supposedly bad

3. What are these ‘health issues’? Why does it sound like I’m using air quotes?

Because I am.

BCM-7 in varying degrees ‘allegedly’, ‘probably’, ‘adds to’, is ‘one of the factors’ causing ‘increased risk’ of diseases like heart disease and diabetes, which on a normal day have fifty other things causing them. Some articles quote ‘conclusive proof’ while others debunk this ‘proof’.

In short, there’s no way we can go around claiming in black and white that A1 milk is ‘Bad’ and A2 milk is ‘Good’ (much like everything else in life to be honest)

The moral posturing over this is staggering. 

An entire brigade of 'naatu maadu paal' (local cow milk) and 'A2 milk' sellers and consumers have cropped up, shaming everyone who dare cross their path with an Aavin milk packet.

Aavin like Arokya and Hatsun are milk companies who have been providing milk to households for decades. Every house is given a milk card so you pay once a month and everyday like clockwork, milk is delivered to you in one or half litre packets. 

This is on the receiving end. 

On the production end, these companies have what are called milk societies in villages. Villages are where cows are reared the most, thanks to being able to graze them on grass in open fields and not rubbish, like the cows in the city. Most villagers who rear cows are farmers who supplement their income by selling milk. Most farmers who do the actual cow rearing are women and this income is essential to managing their households.

Farmers supplementing their income by selling their cow's milk to the milk co-operative

(above picture is one of Aavin's co-operatives)

Thenmozhi our neighbour farmer in the village and her family have two cows who's milk they sell to the milk society. In our village, the milk society is run by Arokya. Thenmozhi along with the rest of the farmers who own cows, sell their milk here. They are paid Rs.23 per litre. Thenmozhi's cows give about 8 litres of milk together a day.

Their breed?

They are the famed 'foreign' and 'mixed' breeds that have been painted by those in the city as some kind of villains in an Ajith movie. 

And this is where the hypocrisy begins.

The same folks who go around hash-tagging and fighting to 'Save Farmers!' are the ones asking everyone to boycott the milk sold by farmers like Thenmozhi and her neigbours.

The very same folks claiming to 'save the naatu maadu' are rearing local cows in sheds and selling their cow's milk for Rs.100 per litre. 

Take two seconds to ask yourself who this milk is for and who can afford it. 

Countless articles by magazines like Pasumai Vikatan speak about 'farmers' who quit their IT jobs to raise local breed cows (while the rest of us raise our eyebrows) and 'earn lakhs of rupees'. 

These 'farmers' are hailed as heroes. 

They follow the very same manufacturing unit template of dairy farming and employ people to do the milking, the feeding, the cleaning. For the photo op though, these employees will be unceremoniously pushed to the background and you will see one of these self-proclaimed 'farmer' kooks wearing a veshti and standing next to a bull, smirking like they are the David Attenborough of the local bovine conservation movement.

These stories of 'farmers' in the city who earn 'lakhs of rupees' are a slap in the face of farmers in villages who have to live with the constant presence of debt looming over their everyday lives. Who have to live with Rs.23 for a litre of milk. 

The question comes up of why farmers like Thenmozhi in the village don't rear local breed cows.

Why? 

Because they give very little milk per day in comparison to the mixed breed cows. 

Because no one in the village or anywhere nearby is going to buy milk for Rs.100 per litre. 

And lastly, because she isn't going to be able to transport her milk in glass bottles to households in the city wanting 'pure naatu maadu pal' (pure native cow milk) for their suvaiyaana filter coffee.

Remember points 2 and 3 of the causes we were fighting for? 

Because I don't. 

I will save us all some scrolling and wading through the dung pats of my point system. 

No. 2 : Getting local breed numbers up by promoting consumption of their milk

No. 3 : Boycotting companies which sell milk from foreign or mixed breed cows. 

The current reality is that point 2 has been co-opted by the urban rich as a selling point to set up dairy farms and market ridiculously expensive milk. And point 3 has meant the side-lining and invisibilisation of the work and contribution of rural farmers who are mostly women. 

So what do we do? Give up the fight? 

Yes. 

Ok no, but it felt good for one second to just give up.

This is what I've realized, my 2 cents (50000 bitcoins) on understanding the issues with dairy farming and what we can do about it. 

We're going to have to constantly nurse our wounded egos as we come across new information at odds with our stand. We're going to have to admit that we were wrong at several times along the way and adjust our footing accordingly.

And that is completely ok.

All of us in our own pig-headed ways have found something which works for us to do our bits to save the farmer, the cow, the environment and our egos. 

(we will come to this trend of putting 'save' in random places and where it can best be shoved up instead.)

But these are just bits. 

We've still got the difficult task of setting things up together as a collective (yuck, group work, I know). The collective, as opposed to the corporate, doesn't look for the sacrificial scapegoat (bleat?) to profit off of. The collective looks at the strengths of its community to weave together to benefit everyone.

In permaculture design, there's this concept of the feedback loop where we look at what each element of the system both takes and gives.

It's usually illustrated with the example of a chicken.

 Picture from the Abundant Permaculture website

Imagine if we replaced the chicken with ourselves. Looping in both our needs and what we have to offer, as part of the collective. This is something farmers and milk co-operatives already do in villages. It's not a perfect system, but it's an existing framework we can work with.

My hope in the coming 6 years (if we're still around), is that we've set out and found our inner chicken's place in the collective, even as we continue to call out our own bullshit.

For a very good antidote to jingoism I strongly recommend reading Terry Practhett's 'Jingo'. Most of the quotes here are from this wonderfully written book!