Family Farms

After reading the assigned chapters of Deeply Rooted, by Lisa Hamilton, I realized how underappreciated organic dairy farmers are for their hard work. In the chapters, the author visits the farm of a talkative dairy farmer, named Harry, in east Texas. Harry raises 42 cows on a pasture, where the cows are free to graze and free to raise their own young. Most of the work done on Harry’s farm is completely manual and is carried out by family members. Small family farms do not yield as much milk as a large corporate farm, but the cows are in much better conditions and the milk is fresher. It is very hard for local family farms to compete with the large dairy corporations that have hundreds of cows, and as a result many family owned farms have gone out of business and continue to go out of business. I believe that there should be more government support for farms that do the extra work in order to stay organic. This would help these farmers to stay in business and also encourage more farms to convert to being organic. I also think that milk that is sold in stores should have to include whether the cows that it came from where allowed to graze on a pasture.