The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - On-Dairy-o

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Get up close and personal with a truly staggering number of cows. Ben Loewith of Summit Station Dairy and Bill Van Nes of St. Brigids Dairy talk Holsteins, Jerseys, organic, conventional, grass fed and more. Jennifer Howe describes her customer-facing experiences at Summit Station and Stephen LeBlanc, Director of Dairy at Univeristy of Guelph clears up some common misconceptions about dairy quality and safety in Ontario.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Maybe the biggest misconception is that milk is milk. Like it doesn't really matter where milk comes from. Food has never been safer and people have never been more afraid to eat. So we need to be transparent. We need to be open as an industry and as our own farm. We have nothing to hide. Most cows are on a much more intensive health and nutrition program than most people. What we make is a premium product and our goal is to have it remain accessible to the general public. Cows have been domesticated alongside people for at least 5,000 years, so the modern dairy cow is certainly not a wild animal anymore.

I'm Stephen LeBlanc. I'm a professor at the University of Guelph in the veterinary school. I teach veterinary medicine and I do research on dairy cow health and fertility. So there's about 3,100 dairy farms in Ontario. The average herd size now is just under 100 milking cows. The smallest herds would have perhaps as few as 30. The very largest would be around 600. Typically, the milking herd would represent around half of the total animals on the farm.

So from baby calves to heifers, which are the teenagers, to milking cows, and then cows get maternity leave as well just before they calve, not after. So those are called dry cows. So if you add up all the cattle on a farm, typically there would be about twice as many animals total as there are milking cows. Cows get milked normally twice a day or three times a day or they milk themselves in automated systems, so-called robot milking. They choose to milk themselves about three times a day and that milk all gets collected in a great big tank, a refrigerated tank on the farm. And typically every two days a large truck comes and collects milk from multiple farms, pools it together and delivers that refrigerated milk to a processing plant.

There's a lot of quality control along the way, everything from an inspector looking at the temperature of the milk, the sight and smell of the milk on the farm before it even leaves. There's a bunch of quality control checks that happen at the milk processing plant before the milk is even begun, begins to be processed. We do farm tours every week and they sell out. We keep the group small. I'm the general manager of our new dairy summit station. I introduced myself as a farmer's wife and for 20 years that was my only role on the farm was that I was married to a farmer. I did not work on the farm. I worked in the media industry. So I would hear from downtown Toronto people

who'd never been, you know, past the boundaries of Etobicoke perhaps, their thoughts on farming, their thoughts on food, their fears, their anxieties. And now that I'm more on the agricultural side, we really want it to be an educational opportunity. So I'm really glad that I had that time away from the farm to just hear what other people are saying because it's serving me really, really well now as I talk to people about

what we do here on the farm. The quality of the milk and the safety of the milk is better now than it was when my father and uncle were milking the cows and certainly better than when my grandfather was milking the cows. My name is Ben Loeth, I'm one of the family members here at Joe Loeth and Sons Dairy and co-owner with my father and my uncle. So we're milking about 480 cows, 490 cows, three times a day. We're about five times the size

of the average Ontario farm. But if you go to the United States, there's, I think in California, the average size dairy farm would be about 1500 or 2000 cows. There's a few farms in the States that are milking 30,000 cows. If you go to the United Arab Emirates or China, there's farms that are milking 80,000 cows.

So we'd be a large farm for Ontario, but a small farm on international scales. There's a lot of choice out there. There's conventional milk, there's A2 milk, there's organic milk, there's grass-fed milk. But the standards with respect to the animal care and the quality of the milk is the same regardless of what choice you choose. Generally the difference between these types of milk that you might see in the grocery store have more to do with how the animals are housed, the type of feed the animals are getting, but the general care of the animals, it is the same

governing body that maintains regardless of how that milk is being produced. Milk is mankind's basic food. Milk is also the basis of a great variety of foods. From sister's ice cream cone, to brother's generous helping of butter. I like a lot of butter so that I see my teeth marks in it. That's not enough butter for me. I'm Bill Vianess, owner of St. Bridge's Dairy.

Our cows are organic and grass fed, and we use regenerative farm practices. We milk about 200 Jersey cows. In Canada, we have the Canadian Code of Practice for dairy animals and being organic certified and animal welfare approved. We go beyond those standards. There's nothing in there that the cows have to be outside. It does talk a little bit about calves but not in the context that we have here. Cows do form social connections or at least social familiarity. They're a herd animal. So it's just like kids in a

classroom that if you have 35 kids in a classroom and you move three more kids in halfway through the school year, none of those kids are learning anything because they're so focused on who these new kids are in the classroom. Well cows are the same, if you move new animals into a group it disrupts their patterns, they don't know who these cows are, is this a boss cow, is this a timid cow? In the latest round of the Code of Practice it's going to evolve that calves will need to be housed in social groups because in the past and sometimes still in the present, will house baby calves individually, within sight and sound of one another, but individually

because that's a biosecurity thing to prevent disease from spreading from one to the other if it happens. All dairy farmers in Ontario, as all dairy farmers across Canada, are part of a mandatory quality assurance program called ProAction. So there are mandatory inspections and self assessments and third-party checks of various measures of cow welfare. So for example, if cows are lame, if cows are too thin, if cows had injuries like lumps and bumps on their legs. All of these things are measured, monitored.

If they ever deviated outside of norms, then farmers are required to have a corrective action plan to make those things better. Building a top producing dairy herd is a lifetime job. Fred is one of the best because he has good cow sense. To him a cow is not just a piece of farm equipment. We have our mission statement that's up at the front of the parlor and one of the points on that mission statement is that we will meet the needs of every cow every day. Animal welfare will be of paramount importance.

And what that means to me, and I hope it means to everybody else that's working on the farm, is that if there's something going on with a cow in her life, that might not be a very important day in my life. But for that cow, that's the most important day of the year in her life. So the care that she gets or doesn't get

within the next hour is going to impact the rest of the year in her life. So the care that she gets or doesn't get within the next hour is going to impact the rest of her year, the rest of her life potentially. And so what that means on our farm is that when we see an animal that needs attention, that she gets the attention that she needs on her timeline, not on our timeline. The wonder of cows is that they can turn plant material that's not edible by people, not digestible by people, into really high quality food for humans.

They do that by fermenting plants in their rumen. One of the byproducts of that is methane. Methane is one of the potent, although short-lived, greenhouse gases that contributes to climate change. About 8% of a cow's energy may come out as methane. And fun fact, it comes out their front end, not their back end. It's burps, not anything else. The Canadian dairy industry has collectively got together and said that they are going to achieve net carbon neutrality

for the industry as a whole by 2050. There's a lot of science being done. There are some feed additives, everything from essential oils. One of them is based on seaweed. There's another one that's just come onto the market that can reduce cows' methane burps by up to 30%. Canada is one of the first countries in the world that can do genetic selection of the cows for less methane emissions. It's a nice win-win. They more efficiently convert the plants they eat into milk with a bit less methane.

And so as we start stacking up some of these nutritional tweaks and genetic selection and manure management, all of those things are going to hopefully help get us to that net zero in the next 25 years. Birk ground releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We keep it covered by a variety of ways with cover crops and perennial grasslands. About two thirds of our acres are covered with perennial grasses, either pasture or hay ground. We use cover cropping. We keep as much cover on the soil as we can. We basically are incorporating that litter, that

grass material into the earth again. That's how the prairies were made. That's how topsoil was created. We are recreating topsoil here at St. Bridges Dairy. I view the herd as an entity for land rejuvenation. The larger the herd the more impact. Like if we think of the buffalo herd and the millions of animals in a herd that's how the prairies were created. A herd of 10 cows grazes totally different than a herd of 50 cows, than a herd of 200 cows. We can get much more herd effect by having enough cows to create a tramp effect to incorporate that litter into the soil and create new topsoil.

We certainly get a lot of people asking about organic. Our farm is not organic. And my follow-up question when they ask, is your milk organic, is what are you looking for? I often hear that they think that organic means that the cows are treated better. So we're in the barn right now and you don't really hear any mooing. That means the cows are happy.

All of their needs are met. It's kind of like kids right? You know if their babies are crying it's because they're hungry or they're uncomfortable or they need attention and all of the cows are kind of the same and it's quiet in here. We want to make sure that people know that that it's all about the cows and their welfare. people know that, that it's all about the cows and their welfare. So I think sometimes the marketing buzzwords get thrown at people. And so they're just asking for those words without really knowing what it is that they're asking for. Are your cows grass fed? Well, they are,

but you know, they don't necessarily go out on pasture, but they eat grass. So what are you looking for? You know, do they, can they roam free? Well, they are, but you know, they don't necessarily go out on pasture, but they eat grass. So what are you looking for? You know, do they can they roam free? Well, it was a, you know, a downpour last week, the cows wouldn't want to be out in that. And in Canada, we have such extremes between heat and cold that our goal is to keep them comfortable, which is almost better for them than just being able to go out and free. We feel our cows need to experience snow, rain. It's okay. We don't need to baby our cows inside.

We feel that cows need to be outside to express their natural behavior. Having the cows on pasture is a big part of the animal welfare certification. If you gave a cow the choice to be inside outside or wherever she wanted to be, some researchers in Western Canada have done that and what they found is that in warm weather cows will actually choose to be indoors during the day. They don't like the heat. Comfy for a cow is anywhere from a little below freezing up to about 20 degrees Celsius. After that they start to feel the heat. They don't

particularly like to be out in the blazing sun. Most modern dairy cows now are housed indoors where they can have a climate controlled environment, comfy beds, and that nutrition that we want them to get. So paradoxically, in some ways, cows have almost outgrown living on pasture alone. Most cows are on a much more intensive health and nutrition program than most people. The best analogy would be an Olympic or a professional athlete. The amount of science and monitoring that goes into cows' health programs and nutritional programs is literally at that professional athlete level. level. Each call gets her ration of grain while she's waiting to be milked. Crab service is something they appreciate. The nutrition has to be really finely tuned and so for that

reason we mostly deliver their feed to them. It's feeds they would naturally eat, grass, corn, alfalfa, soybean meal, etc. but it's put together in cow casserole, total mixed ration, so that, at least in principle, every bite that they eat is really well formulated to meet their requirements for energy and amino acids and vitamins and minerals and so on and so forth. The question is, what does quality milk mean? Is it just a Bacto scan or somatic cells, how many

white blood cells are in the milk or free fatty acids, how well it froths or is it more how is that milk produced? How often is that cow outside? Can that cow participate in nature? Can that cow function as a herd? When a customer buys St. Bruce Creamery butter, what they're getting is that direct connection right to the farm. The driver of each tank truck is also a trained grader. He must test the milk at each pickup point before he pumps it aboard. All milk is safe and nutritious whether it's produced conventionally or in the organic system. In Ontario around 3% of the total milk supply is organic and not using pesticides on the crops that cows may

eventually eat. But it's important that there's rules in all systems, in the conventional system as well. If two cows ate the same diet, the same grass, corn, soy, etc., one of which was produced conventionally, one of which was produced organically, the nutritional profile of that milk, the energy, the protein, the fat, would be basically identical. There's a little bit of a twist in that some organic standards require so many days of pasture of eating grass and when cows eat grass, whether it's organic or conventional,

that does change the fatty acid composition of the milk. If you were buying organic milk in the grocery store it it would still be pooled milk, but from multiple organic farms. Same with grass-fed or other varieties of milk. It is generally speaking still a pooled milk supply, unless you're buying directly from an on-farm processor where it is labeled that this is from this family. It is from their cows, their feed protocols,

their genetics of their cows. So that is a slightly different type of milk than the rest of the milk that's in the grocery store. The milk that you would typically buy in the bags that you get three bags in a larger bag, that would be a mix of milk from different farms. All of those farms have to meet the same quality standards as any other farm in Canada.

So these days, the milk that you would buy in the grocery store, and quite frankly, the food that you would buy in a grocery store, period, the food quality and safety is better now than it has ever been. Where the difference is going to come in is on the milk side, is different farms are going to have different genetics, they're going to be selecting the cows differently, we're not skimming the cream off. So the milk that we're selling would be full fat milk as whatever is coming from the cows, right now our cows are averaging about 4.2% fat, whereas in the grocery store the highest you

can buy is about 3.25. And so there's going to be definitely a different flavour profile because of that. So it's that single sourced milk when you're buying it from a known farm there's going to be differences in the flavour of the milk because now it's not a pooled milk supply. The milk produced by St. Brigid's Dairy is not mixed with other organic farms. We definitely have a strong element of Tuvar here. For example, we don't grow alfalfa, we only use red clover hay and grass hay. Red clover is much sweeter than alfalfa. I don't know if you've ever done this as a child, but if you suck that, you get that

real sweetness you can just taste it. We feed fresh feed direct cut every day when we're short of pasture like now so we can retain that rich yellow color of the butter through the beta-carotene. At Summit Station we process meaning pasteurize, separate, bottle our own milk, and then we sell directly to customers. A big part of what we are trying to do with this place is create a community hub. We're meeting neighbors that we wouldn't have met otherwise. When we opened the doors to the store, obviously there was a lot of

customer interaction and the thing I noticed the most was how much people actually didn't know about some of the words that we associate with milk. Pasteurization, homogenization, they just know homo milk from the grocery store. A lot of people want raw milk and they actually don't know what that means and we'll ask what will you do with your raw milk if you had it and they'll say well we'll boil it on the on the stove and then we'll make cheese or whatever. They say well we've done the boiling for you and now you can take this milk and go make your cheese. And then the homogenization, that's been a really, that's been a tricky one

for people to learn because in the store, the 3.25% milk is called homo milk. But really all the milk in the grocery store is homogenized. It's all homo milk. A lot of on-farm dairies in the province are not homogenizing so they'll call it cream line or non-homogenized or un-homogenized and that just means that that cream rises to the top. There's a bunch of quality checks from both sort of nutritional standpoint and food safety standpoint. There's a big focus in veterinary medicine and dairy farming on preventive healthcare for cows,

but cows sometimes get sick, and sometimes that illness needs antibiotic treatment, which is typically only a few days long. That animal would receive those antibiotics for a period of time as prescribed by the doctor. During that time, that milk has to be discarded. In Ontario, every single load of milk from every single farm in Ontario is tested for antibiotic residue and the fines are absolutely huge if that were to ever happen.

There basically is 0% chance of an animal that is on an antibiotic of that milk getting into the food system and the farmers themselves, I've been going to industry meetings for for 25 years and There is no pushback on this type of system Everybody knows how important it is that the consumers have confidence in the product that we're that we're putting on the shelves So important piece of biology cows are mammals, right? They only make milk after they give birth. No different than any other mammal, including people,

which some people sort of forget. So, fertility and reproductive management is a big part of dairy farming and veterinary medicine. All milk has some hormones in it. It's a biological fluid. So, there's no such thing as hormone-free milk. But what we're talking about is physiologic level. So for example, cows are often pregnant while they're lactating.

And so there's going to be progesterone, which is the pregnancy hormone. Some of that is in the milk. It always has been, always will be. That's just how it is. But the key thing is that, number one, that's all with approved products that have jumped through a lot of scientific and regulatory hoops, and it's all within physiologic limits. So in other words, whether a cow had that intervention

or not, the composition of her milk, the hormone level in her milk is no different than it would be if she was just living her life completely naturally. I would say that a misconception out there is that milk is milk. Like it doesn't really matter what cow or how it's raised or what environment it's in, but it does matter. It does matter what it's fed. It matters how they're handled.

It matters what breed they are. Like, each breed has its own special attributes. What commonly heard misconception is a factory farm. I'm not sure what a factory farm is. It sounds bad. I think a lot of people mean it's a large farm, but in fact in Ontario all farms are family farms. I don't know of any farms in Ontario that are corporations in the sense that they are

owned by non-working shareholders. Even the largest ones are still family farms with the family members contributing to the day-to-day labour of the farm. And in fact, as farms get bigger, they in some ways have to get better, more organized, more sophisticated. So cow care, cow welfare, cow health is as good on big farms as it is on small farms. There's really no differentiation there. And so that I think is a misconception sometimes that smaller equals family or smaller equals

better. Not necessarily. There's two categories of people who enjoy our butter. People who can afford it, use it for everyday use. They've come to get that connection that the butter is like a good cheese, why not buy a good butter? And also we have the demographic that buys the butter for special occasions.

And similar way you buy a good cheese for if you have friends over. My favorite thing about basically, it's not just my job, it's my vocation, my life, is experiencing the senses. I love the way the cows smell. The sound of a cow is just so calming, and the sound of grazing.

The highlight is being able to taste the fruit of our labor with the butter that we produce from our own cows. There's so much research that's still going into dairy farming. When my grandfather was milking cows, the idea of animal welfare was that if the cows have feed and water, you are doing a good job of taking care of those animals. That all they needed was feed and water. And then when my father and my uncle took over the farm, you know, the idea grew that that's not enough. And now we've taken that one step further, that cows are

social animals, that not only from their health, their environment, the light, the quality of the feed, the quality of the water, cows like stable social groups. So that's changed how we house the cows, how we group them. So it's fascinating how we've gone from they need feed and water to we're taking care of their social dynamics and the strangers that they meet or who their friends are. And what's fascinating to me is there's no doubt that 20 years from now we'll be doing things different and looking back at what we did today and saying, you know, we could have done a better job, but we didn't know that.

The number of dairy farms in Ontario is slowly decreasing as it is in most of the developed dairy world. And the farms that remain in the industry are slowly getting a little bit larger and they're certainly getting much more sophisticated and technological. Some operate with the latest in equipment and techniques. Canada is one of the leaders in adoption of so-called robotic milking or automated milking systems where the cows can go and choose when they wish to be milked during the day. Probably the majority of cows in Ontario now wear Fitbits activity monitors and

there's some really cool high-tech in there that monitors their level of activity, can monitor their level of rumination, so chewing their cud, which is a health indicator. So it's, you know, there's a bit of an old-fashioned view of farming as being kind of parochial and old-fashioned and maybe a bit stuck in its ways and nothing could be further from the truth. It's actually a high-tech industry. There's a nice level of generational renewal with younger people getting into the industry because it's not so much back breaking work, it's still a lot of hard work, but it's not, you know, less manual labor, more data, more technology, more sophistication, and again that's all in support of giving cows a good quality of life

and making a more efficient and lower carbon output system. So we're on a good track here, on a good trajectory. Transparency is really important. So that's why we have a big window in the store so you can look into the processing area and see what we're doing, see how the milk is being used and it's the same with doing the tours that we want people to come and see the cows and ask their questions. The people who are making the food today they genuinely care about the quality of food that they're making, that it is

important to them. It's really quite hard to make a bad decision with respect to the food that you're buying these days.