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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

I would think cows eat more than one type of grass. I went to Mt. Mount Rainier and saw a mountain meadow for the first time, and was blown away how pretty and diverse it was in grasses.

So do Swiss cows in the Alps make the best milk?

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Most North American dairy cows eat corn, wheat, barley, and oat plants. Everything from just above the ground, chopped and pickled (silage). Stalk, ears, silk etc. Sometimes food or brewing waste(1). Plus some vitamins and minerals and salts(2). Plus some palm oil(3).

1. https://www.usdairy.com/news-articles/do-dairy-cows-eat-food...

2. http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/themes/documents/PUB6/P620.htm

3. https://www.thetelegram.com/business/local-business/sylvain-...

It's pretty darn good milk, but there are many more differences besides feed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24816367

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474129

(I do note that the various cheese producers enforce restrictions on what their dairy suppliers feed, so I'm pretty sure that meadow biome is tastable even in processed form)

I grew up around dairy farmers in the Midwest. Anecdotally, yes - different grasses/plants cause changes in milk production/flavor. However, most is homogenized anyway so the differences don’t really matter unless it’s a specialty product.

You can really tell when your milk cow has discovered a patch of wild onions. Yuck.

Not necessarily. Look for something like this https://www.tasteatlas.com/heumilch which is about not feeding them with other stuff during winter, bad weather or such.

Which is more expensive, complicated (because storage requirements of dry hay).

But tastes good! Also for Yoghurt made from that. I absolutely prefer it over any other type of milk.

My mom grew up on a dairy farm and said you could always tell when the cows got into the wild onions. Diversity is good, but flavors do come through in the milk, so there are some things that you want to avoid.

That's an event in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles": a cow at a dairy has eaten some wild garlic and the entire batch of milk is ruined. Everyone has to go out and walk the fields in a line to root out any garlic they come across.

Full disclosure: I never finished the book (my attention wandered elsewhere), but I did get as far as this scene.

ETA: Around this part of the book the words "hagrid" and "dumbledore" appear, suggesting J.K. Rowling was reading this around when she named the characters in Harry Potter.

Pfft. Should have made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayran from that and market it as a rare speciality :-)

It makes for a great marketing opportunity, yes.

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