Hundreds of Florida Dairy Cows Perish in Ian’s Savage Wake

Holsteins lumber by a battered barn Oct. 2 at Dakin Dairy, where 250 cows have died since Hurricane Ian hammered the 1,200-acre farm in Myakka City, Fla., less than 50 miles south of Tampa, on Sept. 28.John Haughey/The Epoch Times

MYAKKA CITY, Fla.—They hustled the herd from their stalls and into the open fields, where the cows would be safer from the storm, a practice honed during a half-century of dairy farming in Florida and Maine for a century before.

The massive steel-frame, metal-roof barns that housed Dakin Dairy Farms’s nearly 5,000 Holsteins could withstand winds of up to 70 miles per hour, Jerry Dakin said, but at “80 to 100, things start to come apart.”