Jersey milk cows — indeed, milk cows of any breed — are increasingly rare on Missouri pastures, supplanted by beef cattle, soybean fields, poultry barns and housing developments. That rural landscape of today begs the question, “If June is truly Dairy Month, where are the dairy cows?”

Gone to Texas or New Mexico? I dunno; but they’re not here. University of Missouri Extension data puts the state’s current milk cow count at about 78,000 — less than 17 percent of the 460,849 on Missouri farms my senior year of high school, 1964-65. Just 14 years earlier, in 1950, the count was 933,317. For more numbers, go to extension.missouri.edu/programs/dairy-extension/missouri-dairy-industry-snapshot.

Clearly, the farm landscape once familiar to both me and my dad has all but vanished. The small dairy farms that lay like checkerboard squares along country roads are long gone. Milk cans no longer wait at the ends of driveways, neither do small tank trucks back up to quaint, concrete block grade-A dairy barns one after another. Except for a few, struggling survivors, all that remains of the dairy industry of my youth are shuttered milking parlors, stanchion barns falling in on themselves and 10-gallon milk cans used as plant stands. If those images aren’t enough, take a drive south of Ozark and take a look at the old Blansit Dairy Cattle Auction — a haunting reminder of the heydays of dairy farming in the Ozarks.