"Newborn females arrive from local dairies and spend their first 180 days at Calf Source — first in one of 4,896 hutches, like the ones seen here, and then in larger group pens. Trucks pass down each of 72 rows, dispensing water and milk. After a transfer to Heifer Source, another facility owned by the Milk Source company, the cows are inseminated and then returned — seven months pregnant, and just under 2 years old — to the dairies they came from."

They only spend a small part of their life there. And they're cows, so they're not used for meat.

They are, eventually. Once they stop producing enough milk, they're sold for meat. A dairy farm I once visited likened milk cows to star football players - once they stop producing, they're off the team to make room for new talent.

> They only spend a small part of their life there. And they're cows, so they're not used for meat.

Yeah right, being separated from your mom at birth, enslaved from your first day, raped and made pregnant once a year is not such a bad deal. At least you're not dead...

Given that cows cannot give consent, you can hardly call it rape any more than natural insemination from a bull is rape.

Additionally depressing is that all of these calves were separated from their mothers at birth, as will all of their offspring. When a calf get it's mothers milk, humans do not.

They're not actually separated at birth, because if you do that their immune system doesn't get seeded by their mother's milk, and they end up dying of horrible diseases.

Actually they are (within a matter of hours) and the bulk of colostrum a calf gets in its first days comes in frozen form, from other cows.

If a calf is allowed to suckle as nature intended it will learn to like the process (and the milk) and take longer to get onto a dry feed diet. In a commercial operation there's no time for that.

Source: 3 years on a dairy farm.

Oh that's nothing. You should see how we process horshoe crabs or chickens.

Mankind has basically hit eldritch horror in terms of how we use livings beings in our machines.

> without exposure ... to one another

They do have at least some exposure to one another - if you look closely at the photos you can see a bunch of them out of the pen and near each other.

And the text says they are in group pens when they get older.

They must have some reason for separating them though, it looks like a ton of work to implement and they wouldn't do that for nothing. Don't know what though. Maybe some of them get bullied otherwise?

the next logical step is a cow without a head (or without a brain, or a rudimentary brainstem only) that ingests nutrients from pipe coming from a nutrient-vat of soylent-like material.

Why not directly go to vat grown or 3d printed meat?

because an animal is a self-contained unit which manages disease and feed conversion that scales fairly predictably, while cultured meat has a pretty high entry barrier in terms of feedstock, sanitation etc

An animal is also terribly inefficient at converting water and feed into human-consumable nutrients, because it's optimized for survival and reproduction.

The vat based solution is more scalable in the long run, and not impossible (we do it with beer).

> An animal is also terribly inefficient at converting water and feed into human-consumable nutrients,

I have an old book somewhere that says the milk cow is the most efficient means of converting a rocky hillside covered with grass into human-usable protein.

>a rocky hillside covered with grass

Yeah, that's scalable.

the cynic in me says that the "manages diseases" part will become increasingly untenable in the future, as antibiotic-resistant everything proliferate in feedlot environments, and american regulatory agencies fail to put a check on antibiotics mixed into animal feed.

reference: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/power-steer.html

Or, you know, actual plants, that are healthy and probably always going to be environmentally better because you cut out a middle man in calories to mouth, one that is now sentient...

It's weird how much people try and peddle different solutions and proteins like "low methane cows" or crickets!" Instead of something much simpler and already tried and true, beans nuts, grains, etc...

> It's weird how much people try and peddle different solutions and proteins like "low methane cows" or crickets!" Instead of something much simpler and already tried and true, beans nuts, grains, etc...

Because very, very many people enjoy eating meat and meat-based products. Therefore, we're looking for alternative, better solutions.

Nothing weird about that.

I think discussions about alt-meat need to discussed in a way that acknowledges they are solutions to a solved problem.

Perhaps my original reply was a bit too down on them, because I do agree that research is good!

> I think discussions about alt-meat need to discussed in a way that acknowledges they are solutions to a solved problem.

No, alt-meat is a solution to a problem of how to influence behavior to create particular results that is rather emphatically not solved.

economics, i would assume

No, that's not logical at all; the next step will be meat grown directly in a petri dish. There have been successes the last two years, but it's going to take many more years to work well and scale up. The Gates foundation funded the first petri dish burger, btw.

Sociopathic country needs its "beef" at all costs. Most of the world doesn't use these techniques.