When I was a kid, our family kept cows. Well, never more than two or three at a time. Never enough to be called a herd.

Our cow was a holstein, a large, docile, relatively dull-witted black and white spotted thing. She looked exactly like what you pictured in your head when you read the word “cow.”

At one time or another we’d kept pretty much every animal on the farm See and Say – chickens, goats, sheep, a pony – so cows seemed a natural progression. We’d bought her fully grown for $150 from a dairy farm... More