Battery Farming Cows - I despair

[HayleyB]

I doubt that this will have any effect on the small dairy farmer, the UK already imports a billion litres of milk a day as well as 400,000 tonnes of cheese annually. In 2005 one dairy farmer a day was going out of business.

True, can't argue with that but still stick with the other arguments, in favour of welfare. I'm sure cows get bored too...

[SarzWix]

I'm pretty sure that the dairy cows round here are out for longer than 2 months...?! And the beef cattle definitely are! They don't cope well with the cold though, unless they're big hairy Angus types.

I'm not sure whether this is a good, or a bad thing, because I'm not knowledgeable enough to make an informed judgement. But it seems to me that there are reasonable arguments both for and against on this thread, and it seems that only time will tell...
Personally, I have felt for a long time that small scale mixed farming is the best for the land, and possibly for the farmer - the land is used in rotation, and, the farmer doesn't have all his eggs in one basket, so to speak... But our supply/consumption isn't set up to work like that any more. Although, if we run out of fossil fuels, it might become the norm again in the future

[beefy]

Comparing my anxiety of the risks of disease to animals being kept together in such staggeringly large numbers, for no other reason than to generate a PROFIT, to 10000s of people who BY CHOICE go to something as inane as a football match where they might contract some sort of disease, is ridiculous!

The difference is that animals kept for ANY reason, rely 100% on humans to meet their needs and to take whatever action necessary to protect them from illness and injury. 8000+ animals, of the same type (ie cloven footed in this case) in one location is, potentially, a time bomb, whatever way you look at it.

2 outbreaks of foot and mouth in under 10 years speaks volumes, I believe, of the changes to the way animals are moved and kept in this country these days. Smaller groups makes sense in that respect but obviously not in terms of profits. Smaller dairy farmers are going out of business and it is such a shame, for with them goes, in many cases, generations of knowledge - can you honestly say, hand on heart, that this is a good thing?

Well look at it this way - those 8000 cows will be kept on a farm with little or no (by their own admission ) contact with the "outside " world . There will be 80 staff to look after them and as they will be indoors most of the time there is little or no chance of them interacting with neighbouring animals . Therefore these 8000 cows have little or no chance of picking up diseases that are spread from animal to animal .
The football fan comparison is a valid comparison.2 teams meet with 2 sets of fans disease could spread from a home fan to an away fan who next week will be in a stadium half full of another clubs fans potentially infecting another set of fans and on it goes throughout the season until the end of the season where there then is the chance that one persons germs could have spread to every fan in every club that plays in that league.

It really dosen't matter what size the groups of animals are if biosecurity is up to scratch then the chances of infection are slim.

On the Foot and Mouth issue - 1 outbreak was caused BY the government not the farmers(the outbreak centered on Porton Down chemical weapon testing station). As for the first outbreak nobody ever really explained why the government started buying up railway sleepers 10 months before the outbreak was first publicised.
Ask anyone properly involved in farming and the lack of answers to those two questions speaks volumes about the incompetence of the government rather than how animals are moved round the country. After all the government forced the closure of many small slaughterhouses thereby making all animals that are ready for slaughter go through a handful of largescale slaughterhouses that are being supplied from all over the country by a handfull of livestock hauliers . Less lorries visiting more farms spread further and further around the country.
Small dairy farmers would not be forced out of work if there was a profit to be made but when you sell your milk to the dairy at 16-17p/litre and it costs 2-3 p/litre more to produce you wont be in buisness very long.
That 2 litre jug of milk you buy in the supermarket at £1 - the farmer gets about 32p and the dairy gets the rest. Unless you have the ability to expand to this size of a herd to maximise the economies of scale then to be brutaly honest your days in the dairy sector are numbered.

[Seahorse]

Plans for this are now shelved.

As both a local resident and someone who cares about animal welfare, I am delighted.

[Glutton4...]

That is very good news - thanks for passing it on!

[valmarg]

For years now we have been trying to buy locally produced, humanely reared meat products. We have very good butchers within easy reach. We are VERY fortunate in that we have milk delivered by a local dairy. It is just so creamy, the top of the milk is almost double cream.

I just find it so depressing that people are still prepared to treat animals so inhumanely. Apparently what the cows produce is known in the trade a 'white water', ?skimmed milk.

Derby County Council is being asked to give planning permission for a pig farm at Foston in Derbyshire that will produce 1,000 pigs per week. Its been a week or so since I looked it up, but if you Google foston pig farm you will get the details.

It is mentioned on the foston pig farm site, but nowhere does it seem to be mentioned in the proposed dairy farm. Whatever you feed the animals, when you have such large numbers, they are going to produce humungous amounts of 'manure'. We find it bad enough when the local farmers go spreading a relatively small amount. What it would be like to live near one of these sites doesn't bear thinking about.

valmarg

[northepaul]

Soil Association : Not in my banger

[Flummery]

I'm reading a book at the moment about someone travelling in Ethiopia. He was amazed that his driver stopped to allow 3 hens to cross the road. They say there that any animal that provides you with food should be shown respect. We dare to look down on countries we think of as 'backward' or 'uncilvilised' but in many ways they show us up.

[Hilary B]

As someone who once kept beef suckler cows, in an area where they HAD to be indoors over the winter, or there wouldn't have been any grass for them in the summer (cows damage wet ground in winter, killing off the grass) I would add the following. Both sides of the argument have made some less-than-relevant points.
1) "The modern Dairy cow can produce a lot more milk" was it ever a good idea to breed cattle so intensively for high production?
2) feeding, very few dairy cows, have been fed exclusively on grass for ages, but I do wonder how Mr Newmann-Turner would view this idea. He wrote about keeping Jersey cows with labour minimised (and this was before the days of the automated milking parlour) and he wasn't getting the highest yield per cow, but for his day, enormous yields per acre, with ALL the food the cows got grown on his farm. It was organic too!
3) if the cows are free to move in the sheds, odds are they will walk a short distance, from feeding area to laying-down area, several times a day, and of course they will get a little exercise walking to and from the milking parlour.
It's not the zero-grazing, or the housing (or even the numbers in one place, because I doubt they will all be in one shed) that bothers me, it's what the provisions are for calving, how long the calves will get with Mum before being removed and where to (which will vary from half-an-hour to a week, and the ones that get to live a while mostly becoming veal sooner or later), and how replacement hiefers are reared.
The idea that every milking-day of a cows life will be spent in such intensive conditions does bother me. Yes of course anyone spending that amount of money will (initially at least) set about giving the animals a good diet, the best medical care, and that sort of thing, but this is where the numbers start causing bother. Sooner or later someone will be too busy to spot the problem as soon as he should. In the sheds it won't be as easy to notice a cow that is slightly off colour as if they were allowed more natural behaviour patterns.
There is also the snag that if you give animals limited freedom in large groups, there will always be bullies and bullied, and how do the bullied ones get out of the way? Intensively kept chickens have their beaks trimmed to stop them harming each other. Intensively reared pigs often have tails docked so the bullies can't bite them, and sometimes teeth trimmed for similar reasons. How do they plan to stop cows bullying each other when there isn't running space?

[buzzingtalk]

Disguising. It reinforces why I am vegan and have no part in consuming such disguising stuff as milk produced in such farms. If I had land, I would happily keep cows and milk them, but no way in hell do I trust anything that comes from a supermarket nor do I support the abuse of cows and the farmers who work hard to produce milk ethically who make no money whatsoever thanks to Mr.Tesco driving the price down so much.

[green thing]

I've seen it on Quest a few weeks ago
the automated dairy farm in huge industrial buildings
I was impressed with the way the cattle are milked they just go as and when they feel like it anytime 24 hour a day
Every time the milk was taken it was tested and if it was didn't meet the required standard it was discarded a lot better then the current homogenised milk
the system also picked up health problems sooner and
the cattle welfare look far better then the current system
but this was a showcase for quest
I could see how easy it would be to exploit the system to maximise profits for some food producers.

[Hilary B]

I've seen it on Quest a few weeks ago
the automated dairy farm in huge industrial buildings
I was impressed with the way the cattle are milked they just go as and when they feel like it anytime 24 hour a day
Every time the milk was taken it was tested and if it was didn't meet the required standard it was discarded a lot better then the current homogenised milk
the system also picked up health problems sooner and
the cattle welfare look far better then the current system
but this was a showcase for quest
I could see how easy it would be to exploit the system to maximise profits for some food producers.

That's it exactly. The planned version is probably no worse than people living in cities and doing a job they don't like just to pay the bills, but will it actually work that way in practice, or will shortcuts creep in that lead to problems?
On the subject of production costs, the answer is not to cut costs by introducing systems that can only work on a massive scale, but to pass on a respectable share of the sale price to the farmer!