My friend tried to do the “ideal farmer” route, rather unintentionally. He bought a cow, who escaped and mated with a bull down the road.

She had a calf, so he thought he’d share the milk the mother was producing with the calf. So he woke up at 6am to milk the cow.

The calf started waking up at 5:30.

So he woke up at 5am.

So the calf started waking up at 4:30am.

You see the pattern here. Turns out, calfs aren’t a big fan of having their milk taken, and there’s a reason they’re separated from their mother if you want to milk the cow.

Edit: some people are saying that dairy cows produce more than the calf can drink. I don’t know if this was a dairy cow.

I worked on a small dairy farm (~100 cows) when I was in high school in the 90s. That's pretty much how it works. The cows start lining up at the barn door when the time comes.

This family treated their cows very well -- they were their livlihood, almost like family. Unfortunately, policy has impacted the small farm to everyone's detriment. I'm sure corporate farms treat cows as well as they treat their people.

> Unfortunately, policy has impacted the small farm to everyone's detriment. I'm sure corporate farms treat cows as well as they treat their people.

Pretty sure we know who the policy benefits.

> I'm sure corporate farms treat cows as well as they treat their people.

They eat their employees upon retirement from milking too?

Isn't the same true for almost everything? Clothing, electronics, disposal of electronics, plastics, etcetc. Which isn't an excuse, it's just that - i don't know if i can throw a stick and not hit something humanity is actively and aggressively exploiting.

The only way out of this that i see is to make "other things" our slaves. Eg, i don't think we can convince people to always pay for their shirts/phones/etc from ethical sources - even if they had the info to base those decisions off of. However once we get to the point where machines can outcompete slave wages that problem will start to realistically be mitigated.. i hope.

Same is true for everything we're destroying i imagine. Humanity has no moral compass when beyond arms reach.. it seems.

I'm not sure that's entirely accurate. I grew up in small-town America and 30 years ago that was (almost) the image. While the farmers definitely didn't milk the cows by hand, they did attach the apparatus to each cow by hand and check on them. Also had plenty of green pasture for the cows to graze every day.

Source: my best friend in elementary school was a "farm kid" and I thought it was fun to help do chores as a "city kid".

I'm not going to sit here and claim that was EVERY farm 30 years ago, but from what I've seen of the mega-farms it was a HECK of a lot better than what's going on today.

There are still plenty of countries where a dairy farmer milks a handful of cows that are pretty free-range, and then a truck does a run each morning to pick up that farmer's milk along with other farmers.

People here are proud of the "small scale agriculture" that is still somewhat common here but truth be told most farmers don't treat their cows any better just because they only have 5 of them.

I rarely see cows on pastures any more.

I live in Texas. I see tons of cows in pastures. However, they're not always there for dairy.