Howdy folks.

This is your Occasional Arizona Correspondent again. I know you have been waiting in eager anticipation for this article to learn more about dairy farming in the deserts of Arizona.

As I mentioned in the previous article, no cows are seen grazing in pastures around here, a scene common in the heartland. There are a couple of reasons for that. During the summer months, the brutal sun would vaporize the un-shaded cows. As you may know, there is little natural shade in the desert, and it is a sorry sight to see a herd of cows all lined up single-file in the shade of the occasional cactus as the sun scorches everything beyond its shadow.

What about the winter months when the sun mellows out a little, you ask? Well, there are really no grassy pastures then, either. Hay is the major source of feed. That, along with various grains, is used year around. Yuma is a major source of hay, although it is grown here in the Valley of the Sun as well.

Crops such as hay are irrigated by flooding channels carved in the fields. Sprinkler irrigation is not used here because of excessive evaporation. The channels are preserved from year to year if possible, and cows would damage them. In any event, keeping green pasturage here is an uphill proposition, and that’s the main reason.

Herds are kept under cover in the open in cow yards. There are no barns, so we can’t call them barnyards. Buildings are for milk collection and storage, machinery and people, not cows. During the hot months, mist generators and large fans are used to give the cows some relief through evaporative cooling. That keeps them about 20 degrees cooler than the surrounding atmosphere.

Another feature of dairy farming in the desert is that the cow yards are not cleansed regularly by rain as in the Midwest. As you might imagine, it gets pretty rich! I talked with the folks at Dugan’s Dairy Farm, and they said they scrape their cow yards daily and deposit the soil in a holding "pond" on the back forty.

Speaking of Dugan’s Dairy Farm, the family moved to Arizona from Manitowoc, Wisconsin in 1962. They still have connections there, and the owner said he would shortly be trucking twenty calves to a farm in Manitowoc for a few months, and then bringing them back to Arizona. I failed to ask why. I suspect that the heat is particularly hard on the young.

If you are interested in more information, you can find an article on Dugan’s Dairy Farm on the Internet.

The article provides some background. The farm is on 80 acres of land and there are about 350 cows at the dairy. There is one bull for every 20 to 25 cows (they do not use artificial insemination). Just about every cow is milked every day and each cow produces about 8-1/4 gallons of milk each day.

When I talked with the owner, he said that he also milks the herd on the adjacent farm belonging to his dad. His combined herd is 900 milking cows, which he said is actually a smaller than average herd in Arizona. Milk production is an around-the-clock process on Arizona dairies, where herds average 1000 head.

Despite that, Arizona produces less milk than it uses. Most of the deficit is imported from California. Because of that, milk is about a dollar a gallon higher here than in Wisconsin.

Dugan’s Dairy Farm serves a special purpose. Although it is a production dairy farm, the owner enjoys providing educational tours and other services to the public during the winter months.

Milk transportation - keeping milk fresh while transporting it across Arizona's deserts presents a special challenge. The United Dairymen’s Association (UDA) here in Arizona operates its own modern fleet of 6,500-gallon capacity, stainless steel super tankers. Each is heavily insulated to keep milk at 38 degrees F or less, even when temperatures outside climb over 100 degrees F (which is pretty much every day from late May to late September).  

What? You say you want to know about scorpions, black widows, Western Diamondback (most deadly) and sidewinder rattlesnakes, and other assorted varmints? Are they a threat to the cows? Not so we ever hear about it. The varmints are around, but they stay pretty much out of the way. That could be another argument for keeping the herds out of the fields, though.

When the crop field in the section next to us was cultivated and planted to red tile roofs, scorpion nests were unearthed and it became quite a problem in the adjacent residential areas. We let our dogs run in those fields pre-development, and we never encountered the varmints. But, they were there! You can bet that they are always there!

Well, there’s more to Dairy Farming in the Desert than that, but you get the idea. From a Midwest point of reference, it is dairy farming, but with a difference.

Tune in next time for a few interesting facts about the Wild West. Yes, Arizona defines the Wild West – not Texas, not Wyoming, not any other state so much as Arizona. It is a special magic defined by the coming together in time and place of the Apaches, the U.S. Cavalry and Arizona’s "lawlessness" as a territory following the Civil War.

'Til then, pardner.  Your Occasional Arizona Correspondent.