-——The California dairy model is probably doomed——
Strangely believe it, I first saw such dairies in Saudi Arabia. I was astounded to see them in California. The technique was exported. In Saudi Arabia, they have no pastures but can raise irrigated hay
They don’t drink milk like we do but they do produce it and they are specially fond of ice cream
Here’s another little factoid or two to impress people if you’re out and about:
Alfalfa comes from the region we now call Iran, at higher elevations.
Alfalfa was the only crop introduced into the US that spread from west to east. Alfalfa doesn’t like having “wet feet” - it is a plant truly adapted for deserts, and can send down roots quite far into the soil.
Somewhere I have a paper written by the early researchers in Nevada at Elko, showing an alfalfa stand that punched roots down 87+ feet into the soil, where the roots then came out in the roof of a gold mine.
it’s an amazing plant, but it is the only plant that allows such highly forced production of milk from a cow. Because it’s a legume (like peas, beans, etc) it can cause bloat, but because it’s a legume, it also fixed nitrogen into the soil.
The other thing the California dairy model depends on is the production of wickedly “hot” alfalfa hay. When you see alfalfa back east, you see fairly typical alfalfa. But in high desert situations, with chemigation through the pivot irrigation rigs (ie, injecting fertilizer into the irrigation water), you can grow alfalfa with lower fiber in the stem (which is what fills a cow up) and higher crude protein (which comes from having leaves the size of a quarter dollar). It’s not easy to grow that kind of alfalfa outside a high desert environment, where the nights are cold and the days warm.
As much as miss farming, I have to admit that as diesel costs rocket upwards (which takes all other inputs with them - fertilizer, parts, seed, etc) profits for a lot of farmers are going to become highly uncertain.