Cows

Someone in Carroll County has lost two prime black heifers, and Ed Primoff wants to know who.The two bovines showed up uninvited this week on Primoff's 211-acre spread in Woodbine and have developed a taste for the family's azaleas and peaches. Attempts to catch them -- from using lassoes to chasing the cows in an all-terrain vehicle -- have proved futile. And all neighborhood cows are accounted for.Primoff figures he has lost bushels of peaches and most of the azaleas under his front windows.

MAMINAS, Albania -- As Simona moos in her wooden hut, a group of village women recall the defining moment in the fall of communism here: the day they got their first cows.`It was such a happy day, a wonderful day,` says Syme Koni, 47, a thin, quiet woman who speaks with sudden ardor at the memory. `Everyone was surprised that we had something of our own, something that would belong to us forever. And I was happy because I would finally have more milk for myself, and to sell.`For almost half a century, Albanians suffered the harshest communist rule in Europe.

Until last week, the pending closure of the Naval Academy's dairy farm forebode a 4-H'er nightmare: 140 cows, sold at auction, most likely to folks in the hamburger business.But an 11th-hour brainstorming session -- ironically, at a McDonald's -- has resulted in a tentative agreement to save up to half of the academy's herd. If it gains final approval from the academy, the agreement will keep alive an Anne Arundel County 4-H dairy program that's been run on the 865-acre Gambrills farm since 1992.

KIBBUTZ EIN HAROD, Israel - In the rosy light of a March dawn, the fields of the Jezreel Valley slope to the west, quilting the foothills of the Gilboa with an undulating spread of olive trees, sweet-smelling citrus and scarlet anemone.From the veranda outside the dining hall on Kibbutz Ein Harod, the air above the fields already swirls with tractor exhaust and tufts of raw cotton spewed from the combines.H. L. Mencken saw the same bucolic landscape when he visited this experiment in communal living in 1934 and came away most impressed by the early Zionists.

Al Gore should be pleased: After 87 years of drinking milk from their personal dairy farm, something the vice president flagged as an example of government waste, midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy will start drinking commercially produced milk next month, academy officials said yesterday.A cost survey earlier this year found it was cheaper to buy milk commercially, so the 865-acre Gambrills farm will cease using milk from the farm Aug. 10, when the academy will begin buying milk from DairyMaid of Frederick.

Until last week, the pending closure of the Naval Academy's dairy farm forebode a 4-H'er nightmare: 140 cows, sold at auction, most likely to folks in the hamburger business.But an 11th-hour brainstorming session -- ironically, at a McDonald's -- has resulted in a tentative agreement to save up to half of the academy's herd. If it gains final approval from the academy, the agreement will keep alive an Anne Arundel County 4-H dairy program that's been run on the 865-acre Gambrills farm since 1992.

RECENTLY, WHILE visiting New York City (civic motto: "I Got Yer Civic Motto Right Here"), I saw an alarming article in the New York Times, which is a newspaper up there, stating that large chunks of masonry were falling off some of the older buildings.As bad luck would have it in such a crowded city, several of these chunks, tragically, failed to land on George Steinbrenner.The Times article quoted experts as saying that the solution to the falling-chunks problem was to inspect old buildings.

The 856-acre dairy farm that has provided milk and ice cream to nearly half a million midshipmen at the Naval Academy could soon return to civilian duty now that Congress has given the Navy the option to unload the costly luxury.Tucked deep in the National Defense Authorization Act signed late Tuesday by President Clinton was a provision to allow the Naval Academy to stop operating the controversial farm, to begin buying its milk from wholesalers and to lease the land if it wants to.But developers need not apply.

All night the flies swarm. The 4-foot-tall fans hum. Cars roar down nearby Interstate 70. The stench of manure lingers in the humidity. And throughout the dark hours after midnight, cows moo, lambs baa, pigs snort and squeal and roosters crow.Yet Brooke Hartner, 8, waited all year, and begged her parents with dozens of pleases and pretty pleases, to spend a night like this alongside her calf, Mystery, in Barn 6 at the Howard County Fair in West Friendship."It's like a big sleepover but with cows," Brooke said, after rising before dawn yesterday from the blue-and-white lawn chair on which she slept, a few feet from the white-and-light-brown calf.

NEW MIDWAY -- Glenn Eaves stood gazing yesterday as snow fell through a hole the size of a football field in the roof of his new dairy barn -- a building designed to withstand heavy snow.Outside, workers with front-end loaders removed debris. Others dragged the remains of more than 200 Holstein cows killed early Monday morning when the roof of the 600-foot-long barn gave way under a record 40 inches of snow."We can contend with the storms, but I've never seen anything like" this, said Mr. Eaves, 60, who runs one of the largest dairy farms in Maryland.

Ron Holter likes to say he's farming as God intended, without pesticides on the grass fields or hormones or antibiotics in the cows. But visitors to his organic dairy farm west of Frederick on Tuesday also heard about how the Earth, animals, consumers - and his pocketbook - are also benefiting. Holter, a fifth-generation farmer at Holterholm Farm in Jefferson, was host to a field day for about 50 farmers to spread the gospel. He's had the tours before, but this year he added speakers on grazing management, farm income and marketing from the day's sponsors at the Maryland Grazer's Network.

This is a story of alleged cattle rustling and apparent cunning by neighbors. A tale from the Old West? No. Northern Harford County, 2008. The story began last Sunday, when Charlie Croft's two cows wandered off his property on Cedar Church Road in Darlington. The animals occasionally abscond (they ended up in a nearby trailer park last year), and in the past, Croft just drives around the neighborhood until he finds and corrals them. "They're very friendly," says Croft. "They don't bother anybody."

NEW DELHI - Brajveer Singh does not own a wide-brimmed hat, leather boots or a pair of jeans. He has never ridden a mechanical bull. But he can lay claim to being a real-life urban cowboy. Singh is among the dozens of men who spend their days roping cattle on the streets of this city as part of a long and frustrating battle to rid India's capital of stray cows. There is perhaps no more stereotypical image of India than that of a stray cow sauntering down the middle of a busy city street, seemingly oblivious to the traffic swerving around it. Hindus consider cows sacred animals, and their slaughter is banned throughout most of India.

WASHINGTON - The government plans to close a loophole in meat inspection rules that led to the record recall of 143 million pounds of ground beef this year, Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said yesterday. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will bar meat plants from slaughtering any cow that can't stand and walk on its own at any point after it arrives at a plant, said Schafer. The rule would eliminate existing provisions that allow meat plants to send sick, or "downer," cows to slaughter if they fall ill after passing an initial inspection and subsequently pass a second inspection.

MEROM GOLAN RANCH, Golan Heights -- Avshalom Ferstman certainly looks the part. Sporting an Australian-style bush hat, a gun in a holster, a big-buckled belt on his jeans and a plaid shirt, the man with the salt-and-pepper beard is a picture-perfect cowboy. Ferstman, 40, who herds cattle for a living, was featured in a recent Israeli advertising campaign in the United States inviting tourists to visit Israel on its 60th birthday this year. He was one of several Israelis from different walks of life profiled in the ads, intended to show that there is more to Israel than the Middle East conflict that often dominates news from this troubled region.

WASHINGTON -- The Agriculture Department suspended with pay yesterday an inspector and a supervisor who monitored the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co. plant responsible for 143 million pounds of beef being recalled, a union official said. Stan Painter, chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, said the department told him it "had obtained information warranting placing" the two employees on administrative leave. The suspensions are the USDA's latest response to rules violations at the Chino, Calif.

In an industry that is the essence of routine, David and Kate Dallam are undergoing a radical lifestyle change. After 16 years of adhering to a rigid milking schedule on their Harford County dairy farm, the Dallams no longer must rise at dawn with the cows. They can go out to dinner or catch one of their children's ballgames without rushing home. David Dallam can spend more time in the fields, and Kate can tend their ice cream store. After all, the robot minds the herd. The Dallams, who run Brooms Bloom Dairy, a 240-acre farm in Creswell, recently installed a $180,000 computerized system that milks the cows, tracks yield data -- even keeps the cows calm.

During my terrific education at Cal State-Fullerton (the Harvard of The OC), I took a course in something called Persuasive Communications, which sought to examine how human beings process information and accept persuasive messages. The foundational theory of this particular intellectual exercise was a seemingly basic truism of human nature: Change equals pain. Humans will not be motivated to change behavior unless the benefits of the change outweigh the discomfort of deviating from an established routine.

From high on a hill on Jolly Acres Road near Norrisville, 70-year-old C. Darrel Comer, a community activist and farmer who founded Comer View Construction can look down on his pond and, on the horizon in every direction, see the results of his lifetime of work in the county. Life was not always a paved road for Comer, youngest son of George and Lona Comer. His father, one of 11 children, believed in working hard on the farm instead of attending school. "Dad left an impression," Comer said.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Sprawling over 140 acres of hilly pastures outside this Eastern Shore crossroads, the Horizon Organic dairy farm looks for all the world like a postcard. But lately, it has become a flash point in a national debate about how to raise cows to supply a burgeoning market for organic products. At issue isn't the milk that comes from more than 500 Holsteins at the Kent County farm. It's about whether cows should be cows - or at least how much time they should get to spend outside the barn, grazing in green pastures of grass, clover or alfalfa.