The Ideology of the Dairy Farm

I am a mother. I am of the firm belief that the best I can do for my children is try, and try really hard, to feed them actual food. This seems like a crazy idea as food is food, right? That is the question I have been asking for years.

I buy Simple Truth foods from Smith's. They have a Natural and an Organic line. The most amazing thing I found when researching Smith's, a Kroeger Co. Family of Stores, was the 101 Free list. It is truly remarkable how unrecognizable most of the ingredients on this list are as food, at all. It makes no sense to me, see for yourself.

According to the Mayo Clinic, there are definite pros to buying organic. They share some enlightening points on a post titled "Organic Foods: Are they safer or not?" The facts about the situation laid out simply for the reader. There are some fundamental differences between organic and conventional farming that impact human health and should impact choices. Conventional farmers, in today's world, use synthetic substances for fertilizer, while the organic farmer applies "natural fertilizers, such as manure or compost, to feed soil and plants" more like our humble farmers of our readings thus far. Organic farmers rotate their crops and practice more traditional methods of leaving fields fallow, employing livestock in the clearing of fields and maybe even use their hands to eradicate weeds while our "conventional" farmers are doling out hormones, synthetic everything and unnatural pesticides at the drop of a hat.


The absolutely consistent item I buy organic every time is milk. So where does the milk from Simple Truth come from? It is easier than you'd think to find out which dairy your milk comes from. There is a handy little website called Where is my milk from? which guides you through the process of locating the dairy from which your particular carton of milk is from. The milk I purchase is from the Jackson Milk Plant, Inc in Hutchinson, Kansas. The dairy number is 20-283, which is found on the top of the carton near the expiration date. The actual vision of the factory is not as rosy as I had imagined, unfortunately. It looks much more like a factory than the organic farm I was hoping for. This is the actuality of my hopeful organic buying process.



I will continue to buy organic milk because I feel better about the product in its entirety, even though the process is not as sunshine and rainbows as I had hoped. My ideology of the dairy farm does not prove to show happy cows gladly submitting to the milking process, it show the practicality and actuality of feeding so many human beings. There are none of these utopian practices that the word "organic" makes me feel like there are. And that is okay because at least I am sparing my children the chemicals and I can live with that. I do feel like a much more informed consumer with more knowledge of how to find the answers to my questions.