Jill mothered Jolly, and Jolly mothered Jodie, and five generations later Jetta gave birth to Super Cow. Her name is Jetlag. Find her grazing in her Howard County dell, and you could say: What a splendid cow.
Or . . .
"You could say: 'Tony, it's got four legs and a tail, but that's no cow; that's a milking machine,' " says Tony Evans, a spokesman for the state Department of Agriculture. "And I'd have to say: 'Yeah, you're right.' "
Jetlag, a 4-year-old Ayrshire, produces three times more milk at Maple Dell Farm near Lisbon than her great-great-great-great-great- grandmother Jill produced a mere 18 years ago. That qualifies Jetlag as Super Cow, but it hardly distinguishes her.
Super Cow is everywhere.
In the quest for fulfillment and profit, scientists and dairy farmers have transformed the placid cow into a tightly tuned machine. The transformation is so complete that today in the United States the fewest cows produce the most milk ever.
"These cows are working harder than ever for the people of the world," says Charles Iager, a dairy farmer near Laurel and vice president of Maryland Holstein Association.
"They've been forced to," responds his wife, Judy.
David Patrick, the understated farmer who oversaw the breeding of Jetlag, puts it this way: "We try to keep our cows at peak performance."
The modern dairy farm clings by a thread to its idyllic image of pastoral grace. Behind the scenes, the dairy farm is a pulsing example of technology at work.
The controversial bovine somatotropin (BST), or bovine growth hormone, which went on sale Feb. 3, is but the most recent development. The synthetic hormone, which replicates a naturally occurring hormone in cows, can boost milk production by as much as 20 percent.
As early as the 1950s farmers began condemning their snorting, unpredictable bulls to a forlorn life -- or a slaughterhouse death -- and began impregnating their cows by artificial insemination with semen from choice bulls across North America.
Then in the 1980s farmers embraced surrogate motherhood by transferring embryos from their best cows into their laggards, resulting in better calves and more milk by the herd.
All this took place as the docile creatures munched high-powered feed prescribed by nutrition specialists and parceled out by computers.
"Agriculture has gone from a way of life to a business," says Tom Moreland, research manager at the Central Maryland Research and Education Center in Howard County. "And it's run like a business."
