When Your Dairy Farmer Sits at Your Breakfast Table

My dad, as a boy in Kansas, used to get terrible hives every spring.  For a few weeks, he would be covered in huge itchy welts. Then they would disappear. The family could never figure out a cause.

Then one morning one of his uncles -- the one who owned the dairy farm that my dad worked on as a teenager -- was sitting at the breakfast table. I'm not clear if he had just dropped in, or if for some reason my dad was having breakfast at his place -- at any rate, this uncle was sitting and watching my dad itch and squirm and eat breakfast, all covered in pink calamine lotion (my dad, not the breakfast, was covered in pink lotion.)

And he reached over and took the glass of milk right out of my dad's hand. "You know," he said, "we just put the cows out on the wheat. Maybe that's it."

In farms that combine wheat and dairy operations, there is a certain point in growing wheat -- I think it's the winter wheat, which is planted in fall and harvested in spring -- when it is good for both the cows and the wheat to let them graze on the green shoots.

My dad quit drinking milk, and his hives cleared up miraculously.

As soon as the cows were turned out of the wheat fields into their regular pastures, he was able to go back to drinking milk again.

This is one of the many benefits of having a very short food supply chain!

Since this blog is set up to post into my Facebook notes, one of my sisters is sure to drop me a comment to tell me that I have it all wrong!  But that's my story, and I'm sticking to it like cows on grass.

This post is entered in GNOWFLINS "Simple Lives Thursday."  And in Food Renegade's "Fight Back Friday."