Cow Share Shut Down

by Spec MacQuayde
(Vallonia, Indiana)

This is the short version. My ex and I started a cow share program in Boonville, California the winter of 2006 because she was worried about our young sons' teeth and had read Weston Price's research. We split up in the spring of 2008 but I kept the cow share going, with members picking up milk at the farm and also a drop-off point in Ukiah.
Our cow share was high-profile because I write a weekly column for the Anderson Valley Advertiser, "Farm to Farm," in which I nonchalantly described anecdotes relating to the cows I was milking. Unfortunately I was renting ground from a vegetarian guy who ran a health-foods store and he got paranoid about the legality of the cow share, and evicted me just at the same time the California Department of Food and Ag was coming down on me with the Cease and Desist orders.
I wasn't only evicted because of the raw milk, but more because after my wife had left me all the housewives who came to pick up milk had turned me into "the milkman."
The plot thickened like cream into butter, and I kept most of it out of the newspaper articles. I moved back to my home in the hills of southern Indiana where my family purchased an old farmstead with the two-stall milking room on the side of the picturesque old barn. Rather than starting up the cow share right away, am taking a break from the stress, and this summer wrote a book describing how our cow share in California got started, how the romance and jealousy and good old-fashioned American greed squashed a beautiful, nourishing program. I'm calling the book, 101 Ways to Strike Out.
My pen name is "Spec MacQuayde," and you can read all about the cow share days if you go to theava.com and look under "VALLEY," then "Farm to Farm", and trace the articles back to winter of '09-'10. Or you can contact me on Facebook--Spec MacQuayde. Also, you can see our milk-filtering room, some of the cows, and me in a video friends helped make before I left California, "Boonville Milkman." Peace. Spec MacQuayde