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I work in Lancaster County PA and my drive to work is mostly on back roads and I drive past a lot of farms – big farms, small farms, Amish, Mennonite and “conventional” big commercial farms. One of the small family farms I drive past has a dairy barn that is only a few feet from the road (not an Amish or Mennonite farm nor a “factory” farm, BTW, just an old fashion family farm with a dairy barn that appears to have been there and operating for a very long time) OMG the stench is awful! It’s not that I’m not used to the smell of cow dung, they use it a lot around here to fertilize the fields and I’ve gotten used to it (but hey, cow crap is “natural after all), but this smells like an open sewer of the worst kind and I lived on a farm for a time as a kid so I’m not unaccustomed to the smell of cow or even pig or chicken crap; this particular farm has a smell that is something different IMO.

But my real question/concern to those of you who might be farmers, is that these dairy cows have no pasture, they are confined in a very small barn, open on one end facing the road. Some things I’ve observed aside from the stench is that the cows look dirty, that while the barn has straw on its floor it often looks wet and “muddy” (I don’t think that’s mud they are walking around in), and the cows act odd IMO; I’ve seen some chewing on the wooden fence, trying to bite each other and the other day I saw a few eating straw embedded in a huge pile of manure shoveled off to one side of the pen. There is another much bigger and commercial modern dairy operation just up the road a bit with a huge pasture and the cows look healthier and happier, if cow happiness matters in terms of milk quality and safety. But unlike this small family farmer, they don’t spread cow manure on their fields; they use commercial fertilizer and commercial seeds evident from the seed signs posted along their fields.

I can’t see nor have I observed the milking operation and so I don’t know how this small farmer with his cows cramped in a small barn sanitizes the udders when milking. I don’t know if he gives his cow’s antibiotics but I certainly hope he does BTW, given the toxic stew of crap these cows live in. Personally I wouldn’t want to drink the milk that came from these cows on this farm even if it is “natural” farming.

So my question to you regarding “traditional ways” of farming is; would you buy milk from this farmer even if he is farming in an “old fashioned” and “natural” way – just because he doesn’t use “artificial” fertilizers and or doesn’t give his cows antibiotics assuming he doesn’t?

Yes people used to die from food borne illness. Many thousands also thrived on foods they produced and prepared in clean healthy kitchens…. People also die from cancers, allergies and diseases which are triggered by their foods

Yes, many thousand thrived back in the “good ole days”. Yet walk through and old graveyard sometime. Take a look at the headstones and observe how many kids didn’t live past infancy (people tended to have big families because on average, half of their kids wouldn’t live to adulthood), how many people died at an early age, how many young women died in child birth. Many people simply didn’t live long enough to die from cancer and if they had allergies, they died from them and the cause of death was often not even known; they instead died at an early age from what are now are preventable diseases thanks to antibiotics, modern medicine and improvements in nutrition and thanks much to modern farming techniques that = bigger yields at a less cost = a wider variety of more affordable and nutritious foods.

The truth is that back in the “good ole days” unless you were very wealthy, most people ate a diet of meat and potatoes and cheap grains. The meat they ate was often “salt cured” or canned, canned vegetables being loaded with salt and canned fruits being loaded with sugar BTW, and before the days of modern refrigeration and freezers and preservatives, while people who were farmers or those who had small gardens could eat fresh vegetables and fruits, they only did so only a few months out of the year, most of what the average person ate during the year was not all that fresh or even “healthy”. Were as today, I can go to my local grocery store and buy all sorts of and a wide variety of healthy fresh vegetables and fruits.

People who constantly eat at places like McDonalds and get fat and sickly off of that lousy diet, do so, not because it’s cheaper, because it isn’t, or that healthy and affordable foods aren’t available, because they are at any grocery store, but they do so because they are just plain lazy.

All that being said; I love going to the local farmers markets in my area and go often during the summer months, buying and supporting locally grown and farm fresh fruits and vegetables, and I’ve even bought meats and cheeses and baked goods from the Amish farmers markets – great stuff BTW. But I also like that I can go to my local grocery store at any time of the year and buy nutritious bananas¸ oranges, fresh greens and fresh meats 24-7. And if I want to buy “organic” and spend the extra money to do so, I can but, personally don’t think it’s worth the extra money.

Sorry for the long rambling rant but I find the whole, “we lived better back before the modern age” pretty much a fallacy and an ignorance of historical facts in many cases.