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Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? The setup in the video looks far more expensive than what most dairies actually do, w
by decimalenough 2y ago
Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? The setup in the video looks far more expensive than what most dairies actually do, which is keeping cows tightly confined in stalls where they can't move at all.
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- DonHopkins 2y agoThe article claims that when the cows are free to roam around and get milked when they like, the produce more milk. And maybe there are human beings who care about working around happy cows, who knows? They're certainly a lot cleaner and healthier, and they all may enjoy that too. It's the poor overworked abused Poopoomba robot with the worst job in the world whose happiness I worry about, though. They could do a lot of damage if they revolted. Maybe they could let them out to drive around in the fields vacuuming up cow plops at their own pace, free-range style.
- astariul 2y agoMy uncle has a farm, and at some point he installed a machine to hot-air dry the hay. Seemed like a huge investment to me, but turn out the cows love this hay way more than before, and therefore are producing significantly more milk, of higher quality. Higher quality milk means you can sell it more expensive. So cow's quality of life increase the quality and the quantity of milk. Moreover most farmers I know would rather have happy animals, their living depends on them !
- pests 2y agoNo practical experience here but from my YouTube adventures I've seen cows loving the warm fermented silage.
- torlok 2y agoThe robots that push the feed increase feed consumption thus yield. The cleaning robots prevent illnesses like hoof issues and mastitis, thus increasing yield. Milking the cow when it wants increases yield, as a cow can milk itself more than the regular 2 times per day. RFID tags on the cows allow the system to give extra feed to cows that produce more milk, which saved money and increases yield. The list goes on. A stressed out ill cow isn't profitable. Systems like these are widely used across Europe. They're not only profitable, but also incredibly convenient for the farmer.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago> why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? Believe it or not, most people who go into animal husbandry do so because they enjoy working with animals and care deeply about their welfare.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoIt's not so much about animal welfare. If there's a trade-off to be made between economics and animal welfare, the economics usually win out. Cattle would prefer to graze low density pastures, for example, but that's not compatible with the economic realities of modern dairy and it ends up limited to an insignificant portion of the market. Robots and automation solve problems for both the livestock and the dairy, so they're common.
- nick3443 2y agoIntensive grazing (with rotation) is also better for the soil and plants.
- bluGill 2y agosaying that cow like pasture is you projecting you values on them. People study cows and near as they can tell cows don't care about wide open. Cows are herd animals and if they get plenty of feed in a barn with a few hundred other cows in their herd they are happy. cows only moo when they are unhappy. I've been in barns with over 1000 cows and they are nearly silent. Cows in the wide open pasture moo all the time because of things they don't like.
- popol12 2y agoPlease watch the documentary “Cow”, by the author of movies “Fish tank” and “American Honey” (both are unrelated to animals btw) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_(2021_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_(2021_film) There’s a scene where cows finally run out of the barn at the beginning of spring. Their joy is obvious.
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- barbazoo 2y ago> why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? There is no such "thing" as "a dairy" that would or wouldn't care about something. It's all people making decisions and why wouldn't we strive to reduce suffering of other animals?!
- decimalenough 2y agoBecause reducing suffering would impact the bottom line? There's a whole slew of existing technology/practices (battery hens, debeaking, sow stalls, etc) that already prioritize profit over animal welfare. Vegans also argue that the entire dairy industry, which necessarily requires keeping cows continually pregnant and separating them from their calves soon after birth, in itself creates immense suffering.
- jader201 2y agoMaybe fewer vegans would be vegans if they knew that the farmers were prioritizing the wellbeing of the animals over their bottom line. And as long as you still have a bottom line while reducing animal suffering, many farmers may be perfectly happy with that tradeoff. They may see it as a win/win — they get to still run a business doing what they love, while caring for the animals they love. And if they ultimately are more successful, maybe they reduce and/or “convert” the number of farmers that care less for their animals’ wellbeing.
- adrianN 2y agoSince farmers act in a fairly efficient market, unless animal wellfare somehow improves the bottom line, they will be outcompeted by people who do not care about the animals. That's why we need laws that enforce minimum standards.
- 9rx 2y agoBut, assuming a democracy, the law is to the will of the people. The very people who you say don't care about animals. After all, if they did care about animals that efficient market that you speak of would force the farmer to comply to animal welfare by market force. Minimum standards remain useful to weed out scammers and whatnot who still try go against the grain after the market has shifted, but the general consensus has to be on board first, and when that is the case most farmers will have no choice but to comply. Agricultural markets are, as you say, mostly efficient. Far more efficient than most realize. Of course, the world isn't limited to democracies, so perhaps you are imagining China or something?
- plantain 2y agoWhat countries keep cows in stalls? In Australia/NZ they free range...
- decimalenough 2y agoPer Wikipedia, 74% of Canadian and 39% of American dairy cows are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie_stall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tie_stall
- 9rx 2y ago> Per Wikipedia, 74% of Canadian [...] dairy cows are. 1. Your link actually shows that 74% (now 73% as of the latest data) of Canadian diary barns (without robots) are tie-stall. That does not necessarily imply that the cows are kept in tie-stalls. When we still had cows in a tie-stall barn they were only tied during milking. 2. Nobody is realistically building new tie-stall barns. Especially in Canada where the law now makes that impractical (not completely impossible, but for all intents and purposes). Those that still exist are overwhelmingly old and therefore small. Despite tie-stall barns being most prevalent by a tidy margin, the same dataset again indicates that only 35% of the cows are in tie-stall barns. How many of them are kept in tie-stalls is, unfortunately, not enumerated in the data.
- emmelaich 2y agoClimate has something to do with that.
- DonHopkins 2y agoCanadian cows hate snow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9iiPOaJczE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9iiPOaJczE
- prawn 2y agoThe smaller dairies at least would absolutely care about their animals. And helpfully, their priorities are often aligned: healthier animals would be producing more milk. The autonomy for cows also suits the farmers who'd otherwise be up early running the rotary mechanism, etc. Couple of years ago, I filmed for dairy tech companies and found it fascinating seeing how robot milkers, collars and so on all worked together.
- protocolture 2y ago>Serious question: why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life? Honestly a dairy I visited only had stalls for milking time. Their issue was that the cows wouldnt eat the shit they fed them. But they had a lot of room to run around in while being malnourished. They went bankrupt a few years later, mainly because malnourished cows dont tend to provide milk.
- globular-toast 2y agoBecause they are not terrible people? Or is that not "serious" enough?
- tomhow 2y agoWe detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699358 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699358.
- krisoft 2y agoWhy is this comment offtopic? It literally asks why would a business want to invest in the system described by the article. That is as on-topic as it gets. Plus it got really good responses which taught me interesting facts about diary management, and cattle welfare.
- tomhow 2y agoI hear you, but the reason it seemed offtopic is that it spawned a large subthread about animal welfare/ethics vs economics/profit, which, whilst important, is separate from the topic of the main article. So then this tangential subthread took up a lot of space near the top of the main comment thread. And the way the root comment began: "why would a dairy care about the cow's quality of life?" seemed cynical and inflammatory; I'd hope HN readers would be mature enough to already understand that dairy cows’ quality of life matters both for ethical and economic reasons. Anyway, I’ve left the subthread detached and downweighted but un-collapsed it. That way it's easy to find for people interested in that aspect of the topic, but doesn’t dominate the top of the thread.
- shawn-butler 2y agoIt’s well-known/textbook that there is an indirect correlation between animal stress levels and both milk quality and yield. https://extension.umn.edu/dairy-handling-and-best-practices/why-cow-comfort-matters https://extension.umn.edu/dairy-handling-and-best-practices/...