Every farming household with cattle keeps land under fodder, and that land does not appear in any discussion of Punjab's cropping pattern because nothing is sold off it.
Berseem, Egyptian clover, is the winter fodder: cut repeatedly through the season, high in protein, and the reason Punjab's milk yields are what they are. Jowar, bajra and maize are the summer fodders. Chari is sorghum grown for green fodder.
The chaff cutter, the toka, is in every haveli, hand-turned and then electric, and cutting fodder twice a day is one of the fixed rhythms of a farming household.
Wheat straw, toori, is the dry fodder, stored in a stack after the harvest, and its price is a real market that nobody outside farming ever hears about. In a year when the straw is burnt or rained on, toori becomes expensive and small dairy households suffer.
Roughly ten per cent of Punjab's cropped area is under fodder and it supports the state's entire dairy economy.
Berseem is not from here. It came out of Egypt through the agricultural departments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it fixes nitrogen in the rotation as well as feeding the animal. A crop introduced by a department is now so ordinary in Punjab that nobody thinks of it as introduced at all.
Every holding keeps a corner for fodder, and on a small holding that plot competes directly with the cash crop for land and for water.
Green fodder cannot be stored and cannot be carried far, so it has to be grown where the animal stands. That one constraint is why a dairy household has to hold land, why the landless keep goats rather than buffalo, and why the milk cooperative never changed who owns the animals.