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> You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows bus

by wott 5y ago

> You can see that if you take a slow train ride through the French countryside, for example. You'll see houses, barns, trees, grass and small herds of cows busking in the sun, peacefully chewing cud, just like large beef and dairy industries want you to think their animals are kept (which obviously they're not). Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff. My place is a mountain "hay" area, meaning it's wet and ideal for cows, and yet most pastures are abandoned and we can see articulated lorries coming from Spain, loaded with straw. They don't bother cutting the hay on slopes, like they still do in Austria/Switzerland/Germany. A few farmers like my neighbour are even reluctant to cut the hay on a good, easy area; he usually waits 2 months after it's "ripe" for a first cut and lets it go bad, and then also misses the second cut. Yes, you can still see cows in the remaining meadows, but they represent a vanishing part. Also, when you had 10 or 20 cows, it was easy to take them out, or leave them out and move them from meadow to meadow; but doing the same with 100 of them? There isn't enough open meadow land around to sustain a proper rotation (this is not at all a country of huge ranches like a few other countries like the USA), and even if there were, it would require manual (foot) work, while farmers are less and less inclined to leave their tractor seat. Oh, on the paper, they have the needed surface to feed the cows, because it is mandatory to present a good ratio to get subsidies. But that's because they "took" (bought, rented or just declared as used) fields/meadows/woods here and there: 10 miles away one way, 20 or 30 miles away another way. It's not practical at all. I let you imagine how well they take care of some of them. Icing on the cake, there are quite many cheese dairies around. The good cheese for the good cows for the good pastures of our good mountain. Well, truth is 75% of the milk doesn't come from here, it is imported from other regions. How comes, in such a "cow area"? Simple: because dairy farming is more work and yet brings much less subsidies than livestock farming for meat which is a true jackpot when you live in a area like mine, classified as "difficult": most cow farmers (1-2 persons) here will get around 40,000-60,000€ subsidies a year for their 99 cows (the 100th and following do not bring more subsidies so they all have about 99 cows) and 75-90 ha declared surfaces (subsidised until the 75th, but a bit more can be needed to have the right head/ha ratio to maximize head subsidies). There can of course be a few pathological cases too in that domain: one former neighbour was a cheese maker. First they moved to a bigger village in the valley, while keeping the name of the higher altitude, smaller village for their cheese, which was already a bit of a dubious commercial practice, but well, let's say it wasn't a big deal. But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print). > I know one particular dairy farm on a Mediterranean island, with a fully modern barn and automatic milking machine, where, if you visit during the day, you'll see maybe a dozen goats in the barn that can house a couple hundred. Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. This small area represents the majority of such frauds in the whole country.

cheese_goddess 5y ago
Invaluable perspective. Thank you for your comment! > Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. I meant this dairy farm, on the Aegean island of Ios: https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831 https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831 The bald guy is the farmer. What island did you mean? Corsique? > Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff. This and the various shennanigans you report on is getting more and more common in the place I live, also, and it's only going to intensify unless a serious effort is made on the part of the EU to put the breaks on the intensification of farming - and also agriculture. Maybe that's a futile hope, because after all it's probably EU subsidies that have motivated the farmers to industrialise their production in the first place. If it's not subsidies, then it's the incentives created by the market that force smaller farms to conglomerate into giants, constantly. Perhaps it doesn't come through in my comments but I'm desperate to see this direction changed, turned around. Otherwise, we're just killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and soon we'll have neither goose, nor golden eggs. I made the point in a few comments yesterday that farming (as well as agriculture) in most of the world is not like factory farming in American feedlots. That is still the case. Even the hillarious 99-cow farms you report are not that big, compared to American feedlots with thousands of animals. It would be a disaster if everywhere ends up like in the Americas. > But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print). Wonderful. And so very typical. This lady is basically doing at a smaller scale what Lactalis is doing on a much grander scale with its Camembert "fabriqué en Normandie". You probably know this but for the benefit of other readers, "Camembert de Normandie" is the (only) PDO camembert, that must be made in Normandy with the raw milk produced by cows of the Normandy race, actually raised in Normandy, and with a very specific technology (for example, the curd must be "moulé á la louche", placed in forms with scoops of a hemispheric laddle called "louche", though not necessarily manually these days. The moulage must be done by a fixed number of passes of the "louche" and with precisely defined intervals between them). These very stringent requirements meant to protect the "traditional" camembert are constantly challenged by the industry, with Lactalis, the owner of the Président brand, at the head. The industry primarily wants to be able to make camembert with pasteurised milk from cows of any race, as long as the cheese is made in Normandy (in a Lactalis factory). Because the industry is such a much bigger and more powerful entity, it is able to call its produce "Camembert fabriqué en Normandie", meaning "camembert made in Normandy" which is of course very misleading, at least to the people who even know anything about the relation of camembert and Normandie. For much of my life, I didn't and happily ate camembert whatever thinking there's only one kind. I only realised the distinction when I went looking for the PDO regulations because I was curious to see how camembert is actually made in France (as opposed to the recipes for "camembert" that one can find on hobby cheesemaking websites and books). I digress. There's a constant struggle between large industry that wants to eat up everything, farmers, products, land, animals, everything, and the smaller farmers who are for whatever reason still clinging on to their "old" ways, even if those are not that "old" (camembert was standardised to the brilliant white Penicilium candidum coat it has today only in the 1960's and it would have been a markedly different cheese with a gray-blue coat of P. album, in the past). In the middle are caught all those people who want the "authentic" in their life, and in their plates. Like myself, I confess. Unfortunately, most of us have completely lost the thread that once kept us connected to the treasures of the land, the "village", the farm, the sea even. It is a tragedy. But the extreme ideologies against consumption of meat are to me missing the point and only making matters worse: it's the industrialisation of farming and agriculture that's the true horror, not the raising of animals for their meat and milk.

by wott 5y ago

cheese_goddess 5y ago

Invaluable perspective. Thank you for your comment! > Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies. I meant this dairy farm, on the Aegean island of Ios: https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831 https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831 The bald guy is the farmer. What island did you mean? Corsique? > Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and "powdered" soja and stuff. This and the various shennanigans you report on is getting more and more common in the place I live, also, and it's only going to intensify unless a serious effort is made on the part of the EU to put the breaks on the intensification of farming - and also agriculture. Maybe that's a futile hope, because after all it's probably EU subsidies that have motivated the farmers to industrialise their production in the first place. If it's not subsidies, then it's the incentives created by the market that force smaller farms to conglomerate into giants, constantly. Perhaps it doesn't come through in my comments but I'm desperate to see this direction changed, turned around. Otherwise, we're just killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and soon we'll have neither goose, nor golden eggs. I made the point in a few comments yesterday that farming (as well as agriculture) in most of the world is not like factory farming in American feedlots. That is still the case. Even the hillarious 99-cow farms you report are not that big, compared to American feedlots with thousands of animals. It would be a disaster if everywhere ends up like in the Americas. > But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky), sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to tourists as a local product (except the fine print). Wonderful. And so very typical. This lady is basically doing at a smaller scale what Lactalis is doing on a much grander scale with its Camembert "fabriqué en Normandie". You probably know this but for the benefit of other readers, "Camembert de Normandie" is the (only) PDO camembert, that must be made in Normandy with the raw milk produced by cows of the Normandy race, actually raised in Normandy, and with a very specific technology (for example, the curd must be "moulé á la louche", placed in forms with scoops of a hemispheric laddle called "louche", though not necessarily manually these days. The moulage must be done by a fixed number of passes of the "louche" and with precisely defined intervals between them). These very stringent requirements meant to protect the "traditional" camembert are constantly challenged by the industry, with Lactalis, the owner of the Président brand, at the head. The industry primarily wants to be able to make camembert with pasteurised milk from cows of any race, as long as the cheese is made in Normandy (in a Lactalis factory). Because the industry is such a much bigger and more powerful entity, it is able to call its produce "Camembert fabriqué en Normandie", meaning "camembert made in Normandy" which is of course very misleading, at least to the people who even know anything about the relation of camembert and Normandie. For much of my life, I didn't and happily ate camembert whatever thinking there's only one kind. I only realised the distinction when I went looking for the PDO regulations because I was curious to see how camembert is actually made in France (as opposed to the recipes for "camembert" that one can find on hobby cheesemaking websites and books). I digress. There's a constant struggle between large industry that wants to eat up everything, farmers, products, land, animals, everything, and the smaller farmers who are for whatever reason still clinging on to their "old" ways, even if those are not that "old" (camembert was standardised to the brilliant white Penicilium candidum coat it has today only in the 1960's and it would have been a markedly different cheese with a gray-blue coat of P. album, in the past). In the middle are caught all those people who want the "authentic" in their life, and in their plates. Like myself, I confess. Unfortunately, most of us have completely lost the thread that once kept us connected to the treasures of the land, the "village", the farm, the sea even. It is a tragedy. But the extreme ideologies against consumption of meat are to me missing the point and only making matters worse: it's the industrialisation of farming and agriculture that's the true horror, not the raising of animals for their meat and milk.