Moo-ving Experience : Castaic: The budget crunch has forced the closure of the county jail system’s dairy. The staff herded 380 cows onto trailers headed for the auction block.

They had no names like Elsie or Bossie. Just like their fellow residents at the county jail in Castaic, they went by numbers--from 1 to 380.

But unlike the inmates at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho, these jail residents were making a big break--as soon as they were finished being milked.

On a moonlit and muggy night, the last 380 cows of a herd that had once produced milk for 22,000 inmates throughout the county jail system were herded relentlessly onto 18-wheelers waiting to take them to the auction block.

The operation began Thursday night and wrapped up early Friday morning, the last day of the Honor Rancho’s dairy, a victim of the county’s budget crunch. The shutdown came 63 years after the dairy opened as a private farm, and five decades after it came under the county’s control.

Sheriff’s Department officials say it’s cheaper to buy milk wholesale than to spend $1.5 million to replace aging equipment and to upgrade facilities to comply with new federal pollution regulations requiring dairies to treat retention ponds and runoff.

On this night, there was no pomp or ceremony as these last 380 head of the dairy’s stock of nearly 1,000 rumbled onto huge truck-and-trailers through a narrow, chute-like ramp, about 150 yards down the hill from the barn where they had just given their last milk in a high-tech tangle of tubes and pipes.

Amid swirls of dust and bugs and stench, tinges of sentiment lingered among the handful who watched it all far into the night.

“I wish I had a dollar for every single calf I pulled when they were born here,” said Phil Parkes, 51, a dairy supervisor who along with his boss, Dick Hofstra, 55, has shared a kinship with farming that began during their boyhood when they milked cows by hand.

Both had pleaded unsuccessfully with officials to keep the facility open, insisting that it would save money in the long run.

One of those officials, Roger Mohan, who is the Honor Rancho’s assistant director of jail industries, watched the milking-in-progress--at least 80 cows per hour--at the 2,850-acre farm, which staffers still call Wayside, its name when it opened in 1938.

“It’s kind of sad--a piece of history is going,” Mohan said, although he added that operating the dairy “isn’t cost-effective. Even small dairies in the private sector--about the size of this one--are closing. They can’t compete with the big dairies.”

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As this hot August night dragged on, most of these 2- to 6-year-old Holsteins--many weighing 1,500 pounds--literally jumped under the moon, their hindquarters poked again and again by men wielding low-voltage electric prods called by their brand name, Hot Shots.

“C’mon! Git up there!” the men screamed, their voices all but drowned out by mooing and the roar of a generator powering two floodlights aimed at the chute.

“We’ve got to move the lights!” shouted Curtis Graham, another dairy supervisor. “It’s blinding them so they can’t see the chute until the last second!”

After the lights were rearranged, the tempo picked up. But at least two cows frantically leaped over a makeshift fence into the feeding pasture, stirring chaos among scores of others still waiting.

“They’re confused,” whispers Bill Kimble, a custody assistant who helped supervise the loading. “It’s the first time they’ve ever been on a truck.”

By late Friday morning, the Honor Rancho’s milk-producing livestock would go on the auction block in Corona, 75 miles away in Riverside County, there to be purchased by operators of dairy farms at prices ranging from $675 to $1,900. A few other head of livestock might be destined for the dinner table.

For supervisors Hofstra and Parkes, along with their four staffers, the Honor Rancho dairy’s ending isn’t a happy one. Besides being reassigned to what they consider mundane maintenance jobs elsewhere at the facility, Hofstra and Parkes said their efforts to save the dairy were not given a proper hearing.

“I came up with figures showing how the dairy could be profitable,” Hofstra said, adding that he and his group could produce milk at $1.71 per gallon, cheaper than buying it at what he called wholesale prices of $2 or more.

“We even went to see someone at the Board of Supervisors about it,” Hofstra said. “I’m waiting for someone there to show me figures that prove me wrong.”

He shrugged and added, “Oh, well, it’s a done deal now. There’s nothing we can do.”

Cmdr. Mike Nelson, who is in charge of the Honor Rancho, described the shutdown as “a necessary fiscal decision” last March when officials formally announced it. “The dairy has been a showpiece for us, and we’re really going to miss it,” he said.

The closure isn’t without precedent. A year ago, officials at a Kern County jail similarly closed a dairy and other farm operations, citing annual losses of $1 million.

Meanwhile, at the Honor Rancho dairy two nights ago, some dairymen swapped reminiscences while they watched the cows kick up dust and lumber clumsily up the chute and into aluminum-sided trailers, about 36 per load.

“We had fun giving tours to kids here,” Kimble said. “We told them, ‘You’ll notice that the cows are black and white--like our patrol cars!’ ”

At first, Kimble had described this event as “just another day.” But later, he conceded, “I hate to see ‘em go.”