Tessie D

I started work on the first of the month at a dairy outside of town. I’m the office manager. I work in a converted old house next to the dairy sheds. When you walk into the house at the front, the dairy owners converted the living room at the front of the house into a conference room of some sort with a big table and a few chairs pushed in around it. Then, you come into my office, which must’ve been converted from a formal dining room. Someone took out all of the carpet in the house but the brown paneling is still everywhere, making all the rooms look small and dark. Then there’s a kitchen with an old sink, a refrigerator that looks like it’d been found at a dump, and a small, round dining table with mix-mash of chairs. Behind the table, next to the backdoor, is a window with a small air conditioning unit wedged in. Some of the dairy hands come in during the day and eat their lunches at the table so that they can get some relief from the heat and the smell. Neither attempts are entirely successful. 

In my dining room office, I have a l-shaped desk with a computer, monitor, keyboard, telephone, and a small, black AM/FM radio that someone must’ve brought in more than twenty years ago by the looks of it. It isn’t much use since Brownwood only has four radio channels and one is gospel and the other is country. I’m not really that interested in either. But, the work isn’t hard — I mostly make sure that everyone punches in and out every day, file receipts, and order supplies. Every Thursday, I will have to take the timesheets from the clock by the door and figure the dairy hands’ wages for the week. On Fridays, I write the checks and give them out in the afternoon. There’s a dairy manager who makes sure that all the feed and medicine is ordered to keep the cattle fed and healthy. He also coordinates the milk pick-up from the companies that buy and and distribute it. Sometimes, if he can’t get into town, he gives me a list of supplies and tools that they are running low on and I pick them up or order them from the tractor supply store. The phone rings every once in a while, and when things get slow, I think I’ll be able to write. That’s how I wrote yesterday and how I’m able to write now. Writing, working, it all looks the same.

The dairy owner, Mr. Olsen, is a Norwegian man who immigrated to Texas about 20 years ago. Him and his wife built a house on the other side of the property. Mrs. Olsen was technically the one who hired me. She’s a nice, middle aged woman with a round face and light brown hair with grey streaks at the temples. She said she used to manage the books and keep up with the office but it was too hard when their kids were getting older and needed to be shuffled between football and band practices. Now, they’re grown and moved out but she still doesn’t want to come back to work in the office. She said it’s better to give the job to a young person who could use the money and experience. She didn’t need either. She’d rather be in her house baking and working on her quilts anyways. She told me she’d invite me up to the big house to show me her quilts sometime soon.

There are actually a lot of Dutch, Norwegian, Finish families in the area. I went to school with a few of them whose families either owned or managed the dairies. They typically hired my classmates’ Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan fathers to work in the barns. I suppose it’s because the hours are so demanding and it’s hard to find people who aren’t desperate for money to do the work. I don’t have to get into the office until 8 in the morning but the dairy hands have to get here at 4:30 to start the milking. They work until 10:30. Then, they can go home for a few hours to have lunch. or if there’s chores that need to be done, some of them come and sit in the kitchen for a little while and eat before going back out. The second milking in the evening starts at 4:30 and goes until 10:30. They work like this 6 days/week. That’s just how much time it takes to milk 400 holstein cows.

I think that people have this idea from children’s books that dairy farms are these idyllic places with brown cows lazily grazing in green fields with little bells around their necks. That’s not at all what it’s like. Dairy farming is dirty. The cattle are loud and mean. Everyone is always shouting. Cows can be aggressive. Describe parts of the industry that people don’t want to acknowledge. We enjoy the fruits of the labor — milk, cheese, yogurt — and need to pretend that dairy farming is idyllic. Happy cows in green pastures, sharing what is left of their milk with us after nursing their calves. The cattle are always pregnant, giving birth to calves that, if female, will serve similar functions, experience a similar fate and, if male, will be quickly loaded up and hauled to the cattle sale just up the road to be sold for… Holsteins aren’t bred for beef.  

The few cows on our farm weren’t mistreated — they grazed, they slept. They were the select, special few.

They weren’t these cattle. The dairy cattle here are — everywhere — are born into a system that is indifferent to their pain and suffering. That exploits their sex and reproduction. Then extracts from their bodies what it wants and disregards them when their usefulness is done.

I understand it. But, I can’t afford to object to it. Objections are too expensive and moral outrage is a luxury. The consequences of outrage are too expensive.

That’s not to say that I wish pain or suffering on any living creature. I don’t. But, I’m a just a person on a small dairy farm who goes to the supply store and buys the medicine, the tools, and the feed that keeps cattle healthy and fed, that keeps the good, kind dairy hands paid to that the exist with a little less suffering, pain, or anguish.