By Jay Scherf

The chicken you ate last night most likely came from a feedlot in another state  and was fed genetically-modified corn subsidised by the government. It ate that corn through a beak cut short by farm workers to prevent the animal from pecking other chickens to death due to stress–the chicken never saw the light of day from the overstuffed battery cages it lived in.
Ouch.  I began to grow curious to know if the stuff I eat comes from the feedlot dungeons that PETA videos portray, or if I could trust that our local brands are running humane, environmentally-friendly operations.  I decided to track down where my dairy products come from, and began researching the familiar local brand Clover-Stornetta.
One of the two major dairy brands found in Maria Carrillo High School district’s supermarkets is Clover-Stornetta, which competes chiefly against Safeway’s Lucerne. Safeway is America’s third-largest supermarket chain and a Fortune 500 company with a value of $40 billion.  Clover-Stornetta, however, is from Petaluma and has a net worth one five-hundredth the size of Safeway’s and is supplied by 16 family dairies from Marin and Sonoma counties. One of these local farms is McClelland’s Dairy on Bodega Highway.
The dairy exceeded all expectations I had of humane standards and environmentally-friendly practices.  I met Jana McClelland, who runs the dairy along with her parents, George and Dora McClelland.  The dairy has been in her family for three generations, since Jana’s grandfather immigrated to California from Ireland.  The dairy, home of Dora and George, is in the pastureland between Bodega and Petaluma, surrounded by gentle hills painted green with young grass and dotted with barns, small houses, eucalyptus trees, cows, and sheep.  Except for the cars on the highway, the landscape is similar to how it looked a few generations ago. As we walked around the farm, Jana told me that her father called this part of California “God’s country for cows,” and this place sure seemed like cow heaven to me.
McClelland’s Dairy has 2,000 cows that graze on 500 acres of pasture.  The dairy sells artisan butter and milk to farmer’s markets and to Clover-Stornetta, which pick the goods up from the dairy every day, pasteurize it, and put it on the supermarket shelf as fast as the next morning. We started the tour by looking at the calves.  Jana told me that because the dairy is organic and does not give antibiotics or hormones to the cattle, it is especially important to keep the calves clean and healthy.  The youngest calves live individually in wooden stalls under an awning with ample room to turn and walk around. The stalls are bedded with fluffy rice husks and on the side of the stalls hang buckets of clean water and food, and the younger calves drink formula out of big baby bottles.  The stalls smell nice and are cleaned twice a day.
As we walked along past group pens of adolescent cows, Jana explained to me how everything on the farm is recycled: the rice husk bedding in the stalls is a byproduct of the food industry, the cow’s manure is used to fertilize the pastures, the water from reservoirs is used in ponds for the cattle to drink, the adult cows lay on “mattresses” made of recycled rubber, the farm’s wastewater is filtered and used to clean the barns,  and the compost pile breaks down organic waste naturally.
“We’re always ahead of the game environmentally,” Jana said. The dairy has always striven toward sustainability, doing above and beyond what state and national regulations require. Conventional factory-farm methods can use unnecessary amounts of natural resources and harm the environment, but here, everything is used and reused, which is “much more eco-friendly.”
The cows graze the hillsides every day the weather and grass permit.  When it rains or the grass dries out, the cows are fed hay grown on the farm in springtime and a minimal amount of grains, which are handed-down byproducts from food manufacturers.  This seems like it would be normal, but it sharply contrasts to what really goes on in our corporate food industry today, where almost all livestock is fattened up on government-subsidized unsustainably-farmed corn in large dirty feedlots. This practice is unhealthy to the closely-confined inhumanely-treated animals and yields unhealthier, high-fat products which end up on our plates and contribute to obesity and heart disease. Feedlot industrial farming also harms the environment through waste pollution and petroleum dependency.  However, all Clover-Stornetta cows, both non-organic and organic, live on the diet that nature intended: the pasture.  According to Don Blair, who works in Clover-Stornetta’s lab, Clover uses “no feedlot operations” but instead “all family owned farms [based] on pasture.  Jana is an advocate of pastoral methods because “cows aren’t designed to stand on cement all the time” eating corn.  Clover-Stornetta cows are healthier on their traditional grass diet, and live longer, happier lives than their overstressed feedlot big-business counterparts where most of our meat, eggs, and dairy products come from.
Jana led me over to some long concrete buildings; we were going to see the milking parlor.  I expected the worst: a long stinking windowless hall full of glassy-eyed, sorry-looking cows being sucked on by sinister machines. But instead, she showed me a room with clean floors, airy doorways, and large windows. The cows knew the chore well, and walked through an aisle to individual stalls, where a couple of employees cleaned their teats and attached a series of hoses to them.  When the group was done being milked five minutes later, a bar raised to open the aisles to the exit. The cows did not run in fear or crowd to get out; they didn’t seem to mind the process very much, and stared at us curiously as they wandered out of the parlor.
That’s the end of the tour.  I asked Jana if the dairy plans to expand; she told me no, that they just want to work on connecting with the customer.  The McClellands, like most local farmers in our county, are not part of corporate monopolies who sacrifice ethical farming practices for the sake of growth and profit.  They are our local farmers, and unlike the big-chain stores in our shopping centers, they don’t seem driven by the capitalistic agendas of big business.  Jana told me that buying local supports farmers in the area, assures quality food, and that local food is usually produced in a more humane, sustainable way.  I thanked Jana, and I left with new confidence in our local food market.
Clover-Stornetta is just one of many small, local food suppliers in our area.  These companies deserve merit and support from us, the consumer base.  Eating local is more sustainable, humane, and supports our community.  Don’t just take my word for it, though; go out and see where your food comes from for yourself.