Dear Dairy | An exclusive look inside Megan Milks's MEGA MILK
We can't wait for you to read Megan Milks's latest, Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows, available January 13! Here's a sneak peek inside the book, an excerpt from "Dear Dairy III: Chaseholm Farm (Pine Plains, New York)."
If moo like what moo read, grab your very own cowpy!
August 2023
Two humans are leading twenty cattle into the barn when I walk up. “I’m looking for Sarah,” I shout. One of them waves from the back. “That’s me.” I wait. I was expecting a short-haired Sarah to match years-old photos I’ve seen of her in local online profiles about her and Chaseholm, the small farm she runs in Pine Plains, New York. This Sarah has long, thick hair in loose waves under a ball cap, and she’s latching the rope gate after her cows at the other end of the barn.
A third-generation farmer, Sarah Chase took over operations from her father in 2013, when she was twenty-four. Since then, she has transitioned the business to organic farming and 100 percent grass-fed cattle. She’s unusual in the dairy business for being young, a woman, and queer. She lives here with her wife, Jordan; her brother runs a creamery up the road.
It’s 8:30 a.m., and it’s milking time, which Sarah has invited me to observe. I wait behind a thin rope that gates off the barn entrance and take note of the small chalkboard signs above each stall. On the right side, I read Eleanor, Marge, Quick, T-Bird. On the left: BJK, Yolo, Viper, Queen, Lucy. The barn stretches out; I can’t see the rest from where I’m standing.
The cows know their stalls and step in. Except for Eleanor, who stops short.
“Come on, big girl,” Sarah coaxes. There’s a gutter in the concrete floor where the barn cleaner, a system of chain links and scraper blades, runs behind the stall, and Eleanor disapproves. With one foot, Sarah drags some hay from the stall to fill in the gap. Eleanor moves forward, stops short again. Sarah pulls more hay back until Eleanor is satisfied and steps in finally with a snort. This kind of affectionate attention is hard to imagine on the bigger feedlot farms I’ve visited. It’s also hard to imagine the cows there being known by name.
I see why Sarah calls her “big girl.” Eleanor is massive, magnificent, beautiful. Her coat is dark and glossy, ultra-black. Her legs are long and white, strong and veiny. High haunch, narrow tail.
Cow! That’s what my child mind is saying. Cows! Cows! Cow! I’m wowed to be finally so close. From this vantage point, I see mostly their backsides and udders: full and taut
and pale. There is something sweetly vulnerable about Eleanor’s shape and demeanor, as if she is embarrassed by her size, or the fact of her pokey teats. Is that me, imposing my dysphoria? In her stall she stands patiently, reaching for hay,
her neck long and remarkably flexible.
A cow near the end of the row turns out of her stanchion to snack on her neighbor’s hay. This gives some of the others ideas; one backs out as if she’s fixing to leave the barn. “Back in your stalls, please,” directs Amanda, the other human. She retrieves the wanderers and clips them to their stalls. Then she clips everyone else.
Sarah’s dairy cows are a mix of Holsteins, Jerseys, and Holstein-Jersey crosses. Compared to the farms I saw in LeMars, this one is tiny, with a herd of twenty-six, by my count. The barn’s full, or nearly. A dark cat, Bearcat, darts between stalls. Another cat, Clam, creamsicle orange, hops onto the wood pane of an open window. Two dogs, a terrier and a shepherd mix, roam around.
Today is special because the farm is hosting Dairy Drag this evening. The only sign of that now is a disco ball hung from the middle of the ceiling, but soon the barn will be
cleared out and cleaned up for the performance.
Amanda is milking today so that Sarah and I can chat. She rolls out a cart to set up her workstation in the center of the barn. The cart holds a bucket, a notepad, iodine solutions, a box of paper towels. She’s draped a few milking pumps over
her shoulder.
Amanda starts with the cows in the rear of the barn. First she brings over what Sarah tells me is a CMT paddle (short for California Mastitis Test)—a plastic tray with four shallow cups. Before milking each cow, Amanda squeezes a squirt of milk from each teat into the tray. She drops solution into all four cups, swishes it around, and makes notes.
She’s testing the white blood cell counts, Sarah explains, which give an indication of the cows’ immune responses to bacterial infection. The farm has been having issues with milk quality because of a recent heat wave. Cows are most comfortable when the temperature is in the seventies; they get stressed in hotter weather. Last week saw a long stretch in the nineties, and prior to that there was flooding, adding to the stress. “They’ve been having to tromp through water that’s like, up to their briskets and certainly touching their udders,” Sarah says. (Briskets, I learn later, are their pectoral
muscles.) “Basically we’re having an immune system spike in the herd.” As a result, some of the cows have developed mastitis, a bacterial infection in the udder.
A cow’s udder is divided into four discrete quarters. That means mastitis can be isolated in one quarter without spreading to the others. After testing the levels in the milk from each of the cows’ quarters, Amanda attaches the magnetic sleeves of the milking pump to each teat, siphoning off any poor-quality milk into a quarter-milker container. That milk gets collected in a bucket that goes to the pigs. The good milk gets sucked up and into the stainless steel piping system installed above the stalls, which drops it into a stainless steel tank housed in the milk room that adjoins the open barn.
Amanda has an LED headband wrapped around her snap-back, her ponytail popping out. She’s in dark jeans and heavy boots. At any given time, she has two to four milk pumps going. Her voice is chipper, pitched up when directed at the cows.
“My cows make, at maximum, thirteen thousand pounds per lactation,” Sarah says. Compared to the cows that make the most in America—about seventy-five thousand pounds per lactation—that’s pretty low. “They’re super chill.” They’re milked once a day and spend the majority of their time on the hilly pasture across the road.
Sarah tells me she’s only able to do this because she sells direct to consumer and can set the price higher than what she’d get for commodity milk. Most of her cows are A2A2, meaning their milk has a particular kind of casein that makes it more digestible for many people. (A1 and A2 represent certain amino acids in the chain.) Sarah also makes and sells yogurt in-house, and she sells milk direct-market to her brother for his cheese production.
Sarah has a beef herd, too, as well as hogs. All Chaseholm meat gets sold in-house. “It’s this full-circle thing,” she says. “Every animal I’ve culled in the last eight years has been through my farm store. There’s limited waste.”
When I ask her what she likes most about working with cows, she smiles at the question. She appreciates being invited to talk up the sweet side of dairy farming. Usually people go straight to the challenges.
Sarah loves cows. “The dairy cow is a funny creature because they’re rather dependent on people. We’ve created them to be particularly unwild. They are very personable, and they’ve been bred for that.” As we talk, BJK, the first cow on our left, lies down with a sigh. She’s last in line. She’ll be here a while. Some milk leaks from her udder, forming a small puddle on the concrete.
“We’re in intimate contact,” Sarah goes on. “I go to each cow to milk her instead of just running them through a parlor. I’m usually squeezing my body in between cows to hook up my machines, and I’ll have my face on her thigh while I’m hooking her up. I really know all of them, and we’re used to a lot of touch. That’s a really nice thing.”
This morning’s milking is taking longer than usual because of the careful testing. When Amanda brings the milking station closer, BJK stands, thinking it’s her turn. Archie, the
smaller dog, trots over and laps up the leaked milk.
Not time yet. BJK settles back down.
Someone rolls up in a truck. In the truck bed, a man crouches, his arms wrapped around a Jersey calf with wild eyes. Sarah waves. “Bye, Barry,” she shouts, a farewell to the calf. His mother rejected him, she tells me, and she’s had a hard time getting him to feed on a rubber nipple. But Pat, her neighbor in the truck, will work his magic.
I ask Sarah how it’s been, being one of the very few queer dairy farmers. “Bizarre,” she says, but mostly positive. “I came back to the community that I had grown up in, and I had a lot of nervousness about that return. I had left as a certain kind of daughter of this place and then returned like . . . a really gay version.” She laughs. “It stressed me out. But people were able to meet me where I was at. They were more happy to have someone take over the farm than they were worried that it was a homosexual.”
In 2016, the farm “got a lot gayer.” Sarah had been posting Black Lives Matter signs for a while, but when the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting happened, it pushed her to put up Pride flags, too. “My farm actually did suffer after that first year of having Pride flags and BLM signs up, but ultimately it was a very good thing for my business. It created a queer culture around the farm, and that has given it a lot more than it cost.”
I’m dismayed to learn that Sarah plans on reducing the herd from thirty cows to twelve. “The farm feels like it could forever take everything I have, at least the way I have it now,” she explains. “I need to be smart about going forward.” I’d been thinking of Chaseholm as a kind of success story—like, if anyone can save small dairy, it’s queers. But no one person or farm can do that, and downsizing can mean strategy, not failure. Still, the thought of Chaseholm shrinking is sad.
We wrap up our interview. “I’m getting my Bobcat out,” she says. “But you’re not in any danger.” She chuckles, and I don’t get the joke until a small forklift roars to life. She uses it to start moving picnic tables in preparation for Dairy Drag.
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From Mega Milk by Megan Milks. Run with the permission of the author, courtesy of Feminist Press. Copyright ©2026 by Megan Milks. No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
