With their pre-dawn milking done, about 80 cows ramble into the dewy pastures of the Paris Family Farm in Belleville, Wisconsin, to graze.
“This is a much better sound than turning on a tractor,” says Megan Paris as the herd chows down on grass. “I love when they are all so comfortable, they lay down and rest for a little while.”
Cows that get their nutrition by grazing pasture — instead of eating feed — produce milk that is higher in heart-healthy fatty acids like omega-3s. That’s a major reason more consumers are seeking it out.
Megan Paris says the milk is healthier because the cows are, too. Their lifestyle is also easier on the farmers.
“My quality of life as a grazer versus conventional farming is so good,” she says. “To not worry about starting big machinery every day and hauling things, it’s just simple and efficient. I wouldn’t have come back to the farm if we weren’t grazing here.”
Megan Paris runs the dairy with her father, Bert Paris. He once did things the typical way, raising his cows mostly indoors on grain-based feed that he had to spend time grinding or spend money buying.
Bert Paris recalls a rainy stretch one summer when his neighbors struggled to make hay to feed their cows, while his grazing herd essentially did that harvest on their own.
“That was kind of a lightbulb moment where I thought, ‘For six months of the year, I don’t have to worry about putting up dry hay, plus I don’t have to store all that feed,’” he says. “The second part of that equation is they’re hauling the manure that I don’t have to haul. That takes a lot of tasks out of the roles of farming.”
Since then, he has expanded, renting 85 acres that a neighbor used for planting corn and soybeans. Bert Paris converted it to pasture, giving his growing herd more room to graze.
Bert Paris was an early adopter in a resurgence of farmers raising cows that spend most of their lives outside, grazing pasture. Since then, the Paris family has built a profitable business selling organic, grass-fed milk at a premium.
That market is growing, with sales of grass-fed dairy products expected to top $25 billion by 2032. That is a small fraction of the industry, but a share that is growing faster than dairy as a whole.
Grazing economics
A lot goes into raising a healthy pasture. Bert Paris says he’s a grass farmer as much as a dairy farmer.
“There’s a number of different grasses. Orchard, a little bit of reed canary that we planted. Bromes, quackgrass. There’s red clover. There’s white clover. You’ll see some broadleaves like dandelions, they’ll eat the dandelions,” he says, bending over to muss up a tuft of grass beneath his feet. “This is what I love, when you have it this dense, you can’t see the soil — it’s all covered, with growing roots underneath it.”
Bert Paris says he can see the health benefits for his cows by looking at his veterinary bills, which have plummeted from more than $3,000 a year to about $500, even as the size of his herd has more than doubled.
Costs for feed, labor and vet bills may be lower, but switching to grass-fed comes with its own economic challenges. Grass-fed cows make less milk. While that drop in production is offset by a higher milk price, there are not enough farmers making the switch to meet a growing demand from consumers.
“It comes down to what the farmer is being paid and whether that’s enough for them to go grass-fed or not,” says Brad Heins, a farmer in Morris, Minnesota, and a dairy scientist at the University of Minnesota Extension. Organic farmers fetch a higher, more stable price for their milk, but getting certified comes with its own costs.
The market for grass-fed milk, whether or not it’s organic, is on the rise.
“It’s been steadily growing for the last five to seven years, but really in the last few it’s exploded quite a bit,” Heins says.
Sales of grass-fed and organic milk are growing faster than conventional milk, but still make up only a small percentage of the industry. That’s partly because of broad consolidation in agriculture.
But grazing is how things were done for a long time, says Mark Kastel, founder of the group OrganicEye.
“Before we industrialized agriculture, this was the norm. These ruminants — dairy cows and sheep and goats — they were created by God to eat grass, not soybeans and corn and expired Twinkies,” says Kastel. “As long as people continue to focus on the health benefits of their food, then we will see a shift.”
That shift depends on whether farmers can afford to change their operations.
Americans drank almost five billion gallons of milk in 2024 — the first increase in 15 years and only the second since the 1970s — so there’s good reason to ask whether this niche market can ever be enough.
It takes more land to raise cows on pasture, and they produce less milk. Even farmers attracted by the idea might find it hard to switch to grass-fed if they are already in debt doing things the conventional way. In the long term, however, Kastel says it’s better environmentally and financially to let cows graze.
“For years, farmers were fed this BS from the land grant universities that you need more chemicals, you need more fertilizers, and you get incredible yields,” he says. “That makes a lot of money for the equipment manufacturers, the chemical manufacturers, the bankers that you’re borrowing money from. But the bottom line is the farmers were always broke.”
Green pastures
There are environmental benefits to pasture-raised dairy, but the climate impacts are complicated. Some studies have found pasture-raised cows emit more planet-warming methane per unit of milk produced.
That is offset by the fact that they don’t need as much feed, which has its own carbon footprint, and by the carbon they help put in the soil. As long as they don’t over-graze the same patch of land, grazing cows can help build healthy soil in part by, as Bert Paris put it, “hauling their own manure.”
While some of that carbon ends up back in the atmosphere within a few years, healthy pastures have been shown to reduce another major environmental problem: freshwater pollution from fertilizer runoff.
Heins of the University of Minnesota says he saw the effects firsthand during recent heavy rains.
“We had 9 to 13 inches of rain. The rivers were flooding, and everything but our pasture-based dairy, the water was soaked up by the pasture, and we didn’t have any runoff,” he says. “That is an environmental benefit.”
Bert Paris has seen a similar effect. He recalls a waterlogged plot of land that used to be too soggy to grow anything. Eight years after converting the surrounding land from row crops to pasture, however, he says he’s stanched the runoff enough to start farming it again.
“I think that’s pretty neat,” he says.
Well-managed pastures can be a habitat for wildlife, too. A brood of eastern meadowlarks with five chicks nests not far from grazing cows on the Paris Family Farm in Wisconsin.
“Eastern meadowlarks, their populations are down about 75% range-wide,” says Ashly Steinke, who leads the Audubon Conservation Ranching program in Wisconsin. “So this dairy farm, they’re producing food for all of us, and they’re also producing a lot of meadowlarks.”
Grassland bird populations have declined by 43% since the 1970s, more than any other group of birds, according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative.
On the Paris Family Farm, Steinke says he also heard the song of an upland sandpiper.
“An upland sandpiper is a really big deal for us grasslands bird people. I was actually really shocked to hear it,” Steinke says. “It’s kind of a testament to this open landscape and their grass management on a farm.”
The Wisconsin legislature is considering a new grant program for farmers whose grazing practices benefit the environment and animal welfare.
Either way, the father-daughter team at the Paris Family Farm says they are committed to grazing.
Megan Paris is 36 years old, younger than most dairy farmers in Wisconsin. If her father hadn’t taken a chance to farm differently, she says, she would not have returned to the family business. She wouldn’t be here, watching the morning sun spill over her herd of cows as they graze the Wisconsin grassland.
“You get to just live and enjoy the animals being out here, being content, the sun on your face, the birds around you, the bees buzzing around you,” she says. “It’s like bliss, for me. I don’t know if everyone thinks so, but I think it’s bliss.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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