Zero-Grazing Farming

[Tmuk]

I'm no animal rights bore, but this is absolutely disgusting. I feel uneasy enough as it is eating meat and knowing it comes from a dead animal without the added guilt of knowing it never saw daylight.

[IronGiant]

Seems wrong to me too:

http://happyhealthycows.blogspot.com/20 ... geous.html

[xan]

I grew up on a small dairy farm run by just my parents and it makes me very uneasy too to think of cows in doors all day and not grazing in the fields. That's the way it's always been done and it seems right to me.

On the other hand, consider that dairy cows spend all winter in doors anyway when there is little grass and the weather is too bad for them to produce much milk. It's also hardy a cruel existence. They will have comfortable stalls to lie in, with fresh bedding several times a day and space to move about. The reason for this: dirty cramped cows simply don't milk well. A high yielding dairy cow these days is a complex and finely tuned system and you have to look after them to a very high standard in all respects to keep them healthy and well.

It's very easy as a lay person to equate something like this with the horror stories of battery hens and this is not helped by the press. I note with dismay for example, that the picture with that article shows the cows in stalls actually being milked (which will happen several times a day), but the implication is that that is how the cows will be kept 24/7.

The bottom line is that NO dairy farmer would rather farm this way. It's expensive, high pressured, intensive and big scale. It's industrial farming, no question. But farming as a whole is being forced to this to stay profitable. Even 5 years ago there were many smaller herds of ~40 cows which could make money (even if not much). My parents was one such, and they were lucky in that they didn't pay rent on the land etc.

Today, with the low price of milk and the high cost of processed inputs (fertiliser, feed etc.), it's thought that the margin is so small that you need at least 100 cows to make any money.

It's a sad fact that farming in this country has been marginalised over the last 20 years or longer, and this is one of the results of that neglect. Finally now it is becoming obvious that food security will be an increasingly important concern for the future as transport costs increase, and government is starting to make noises indicating they are at least thinking about farming again. But I suspect it may be too late and that things like this will become more common in the next decade, and that "traditional" smaller scale farming will become rather rare in a lot of the country.

[gilesgoat]

According to the experts in cows : The milk of a cow which has grown in good surroundings, is healthy and has been obtained after the calf of the cow has been fed well. In cases when the cow has been ill treated, it becomes sinful or evil to drink such milk.

[xan]

And some more context for you, quotes from the linked article above.

Animals

Animals would be farmed more intensively. At Nocton, cows would have been kept inside in a "zero grazing" system, and fed artificial feed rather than being allowed to graze pasture during the 10 months of the year when producing milk.

This has been quite common for years if not decades. Grass is cut for silage etc. and brought to the cows, supplemented with additional feeds such as processed cattle cake and other forage types like wholecrop (green cut wheat), maize etc. To give you an idea, the winter feed reigeme for us used to be:

Main feed (in the yard):
Clamp silage (grass cut in the summer, treated with enzymes to aid fermentation and stored airless under plastic sheeting)
Wholecrop (wheat cut when still green, chopped up and stored as the silage)
Brewers Grains (waste product of brewing - hops etc. after they've been boiled)
Additive powder on top of all these to aid digestion and usage of the nutrients in the stomachs. We had regular monthly meetings with a feed advisor to get the balance right, looking at monthly and year on year milk production figures, illness rates etc.

Main feed (in the milking parlour):
Cattle cake (processed complete food brought in by lorry) - also fed at timed intervals by an automatic feeding station several times a day that the cows walk into at will and they are given allotted amounts by computer.

Additionally:
Molasses (liquid from a ball feeder they they lick as they like)
Minerals (as a block that they cows lick as they like)

As I said, this happens in winter on most farms in any case when it is too wet for the cows to be on the fields (they churn up the ground) and when there is little or no nutrition in the grass.

They would be milked three times a day rather than twice, yielding 11,000 litres of milk a year, against a national average of 7,000.

Many herds around the country milk 3 times a day already. Taking milk more regularly increases how much the cows produce, at the cost of a lot more labour. We only milked twice a day, but with a smaller herd and very good management we averaged around 9000 litres.

The cows would be Holsteins selectively bred for their milk. Cows are social animals used to living in small groups. According to animal welfare charities, they experience more stress from living in larger groups of hundreds or thousands. At Foston pigs would be kept inside for their whole lives.

Selective breeding is the foundation of farming. I can't comment on the stress comment of very large groups. Wild bovines typically exist in very large groups however (think Buffalo etc.)...

Shoppers

Consumers have enjoyed low prices for pork and bacon and other "pigmeat", and for milk in the past decade because retailers have sliced margins. But the cheap prices have come at a cost, to the environment, the look of the countryside and animal welfare. More than half our pork is now transported to the UK from abroad, where animal welfare standards are lower. Increasingly foreign milk is being used in cheese and dairy products.

It's always seemed ridiculous to me that lots of food is imported when it can be produced here. Consumers (and that includes me) are greedy buggers and are not prepared to pay a premium for nationally produce however and UK farmers find it hard to compete. We have very high welfare standards here (as is right and proper), but this inevitably increases costs making it harder to be competitive on price. We live in a globalized world and this is one aspect of this, but it is the one area that tends to be overlooked when people argue that "UK farming should compete on a global market, it's only fair...". I agree (up to a point), except that standards are not anything like equal across that market.

Farmers

Both pig and dairy farmers have been struggling to cope with low prices demanded by retailers. Some 480 of Britain's 13,500 dairy farmers went out of business last year and another 400 are expected to quit this year, according to the NFU. Many dairy farmers cannot survive when receiving only 24p per litre. The pig industry has been devastated since tougher animal welfare standards were introduced in 1999. More intensive farms compete better because they produce cheaper products.

This is the driving force towards intensive farming. As with any industry, economies of scale yield larger profit for smaller margins. Foreign competition and retail power are driving farming in this country in this direction. It needs raising in the public sphere and people need to realise the causes for it. Ultimately, if people object to this type of thing they THEY have the power to change things by demanding more local produce and less imported goods. But ultimately they will have to pay more for this, and I suspect in the medium term this is something people are not prepared to do.

[gilesgoat]

After almost now 4 years of so of a certain "regime" I got to the following simple conclusions :

- we eat far too much than necessary
- we move far too less than necessary
- convenience food is convenient and practical and time saving but it's not the best
- we eat far too much meat than necessary
- we are sometime a much too "food centric" society
- if we are not careful we are all doomed into a slob-forming shape given time
- too much sugar is bad for you
- we made to think that lot of things are "just normal life" when a careful examination shows you "no they are not"
- there is not much 'general public awarness' about 'sustaineable regimes' and 'where/how things come from'
- nothing is so much devasting and destructive like the run for "everything cheaper and price competitive", this is the
biggest and more dangerous curse of our times

Is the last thing "the mothers of all evil", of course if you want to be "prices competitive" there are incredible drawabacks
into all this, there should be a rule saying "nobody should be too stupid or forced to or be in the position to have to sell
something for too cheap", this is very dangerous can lead to tremendous resources depletion / bad administration.

It leads exactly ( to begin with ) to the logic of "volume" where the only way to make decent profits is by tremendous
volumes cause the margin is really low.

And then all the shite that comes out from it like stuff "or you keep cows in a certain way or it's not economically convenient
to do so".

Anyway there's no simple solution to all this NOT involving drastic and heavvy changes to all the way we live, one thing
is certain, continuing this road is a road to hell.

Soilent green could not be so much science fiction after all, in fact it already exist/existed for cows ... and lot of other things ..

[venusian]

- nothing is so much devasting and destructive like the run for "everything cheaper and price competitive", this is the biggest and more dangerous curse of our times

<agrees>

There's a phrase for it: "the race to the bottom". It's visible not only in the food and retail industries but also in television, newspapers, consumer goods, in fact almost everywhere. It's the triumph of measurable targets (margin, profits, viewers) over intangible quality.

I think it's particularly bad with food because it's very hard to argue against plentiful cheap food. The politically left leaning don't argue against it because rising food prices would hit the poorest hardest and the politically right leaning don't argue against it because it's capitalism at work and the market will sort it all out (they say). And they're both right, to an extent.

<wrings hands>

[Spoongod]

I think that a happy existence an is important part of being healthy and surely that makes the food tastier and better for consumption.

I'd extend this to plants. We're amazed at how we can grow, say, 4 times as many tomatoes per square metre as we used to but people will pay extra to have fruit grown the old way simply for the taste and the nutrition.

If you nurture something, you have earned the right to use it as you will (in so much as the right to kill something can ever be earned* and trying to keep in mind that concepts like 'earning' something don't actually exist beyond the human mind).


*One could argue that even 'keeping' somthing is imprisonment, but let's save the epic deconstruction for my dark moments, shall we?

[Tmuk]

I couldn't really give a monkey's about the quality of the meat, I just think it's sick to treat animals as machines. Food pellets go in, out comes milk, beef and shit which can be used to generate electricity. I know this is already going on, but these intensive farms seem like a chasm too far.

[xan]

... Food pellets go in, out comes milk, beef and shit which can be used to generate electricity...

This is cattle farming. (Why couldn't I help thinking THIS IS SPAAARTA! while typing that? )

Obviously there is a debate to be had about the ethicality of using animals for our own ends in the first place. I should think that it's obvious where I stand on that (and if that was the debate you were trying to have, then sorry I may have missed your point). What I was getting at was:

Given that we do farm animals, have done for millennia, are likely to continue to do so and (in my opinion) there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that, then as long as the animals are well treated, well looked after and kept in humane, clean conditions, isn't that enough? I personally don't like the notion of animals kept indoors all year round but I don't see how that in itself can be said to be cruel.

I believe there is a great danger in the kind of exaggerated hyperbole which always accompanies stories like this. It clouds the real issues and people become indignant and often militant through pure reactionary emotion, without ever bothering to understand the subject.

[defsdoor]

Eventually they will just grow meat.

[xan]

Eventually they will just grow meat.

In a factory farm, never allowed to see the Sun. Shocking!

[gilesgoat]

Apart from the "practical", "economically convenient", "simpler" and "more productive" .. everything can be justified the
moment you make some choices in favour of certain results ( i.e. if a certain thing works for a certain purpose it works )
there is an "overall larger concept" that we could try to call maybe "ethical living" or "better way" or such.

Facts :

- 'the better' not always is 'the simplest/easiest/less painful'
- 'simplify everything at max' not always means 'improvement of all'
- not everyone can have access to everything and it's never meant to be like that
- 'everything has a cost' in one form or another, whatever you do, whatever solution you implement, whatever
you decide to implement 'never comes for free or too cheap' even if in the beginnin it MAY look so and be so for a little while
- 'maximisation' is also a 'dangerous path' as well
- the path that tries to obtain 'the middle way' and the 'best possible equilibrium' of things is the most difficult one and the
hardest to follow and the longest one
- humans live more of impulses and instant gratifications than long-term goals

In this case "the better solution" would be of course to have cows live as best as possible and this would mean to
understands well :

- why there is SO much demand of meat
- can we do anything to reduce it and/or use alternative meat sources so to spread the demand into different parts ?
- is it really convenient then to produce meat here or would it be better to leave it exclusively to who can do it really
for so cheap as we want it and move into something else we can make here for cheap ?
- do we really need all that meat or is some "twisted market thing" that needs it ?

Obiviously "if you want to eat burgers every day and pay them 1op each" this is blatantely and totally wrong, you should
never even DREAM of a thing like that, it would be wrong on so many levels first of all at a nutritional level.

Eat beans or other things, you can still get proteins that are much better for you, eat meat a bit less, pay more for it
but eat better meat.

If you are Mr. "Hustle burgers ready 1 min in the microwave" then you could go very well for totatlly artificial meat
substrate made of edible extruded silicon foam with artificial meat aroma you would never understand the difference, the
only reason they made it with meat is because you inisist you want to buy "meat"

Obiviously "well made meat" is costly, it does not cost you 10p and you won't be able to eat it every day but maybe
twice a week only.

Which is about what you need anyway.

Perhaps sir you could start enjoying pasta.
PASTA ! ARE YOU SICK ???!!

Ok just to be fair we could question about water/resources needed to grow corn/wheat vs cow and such but then again
70-80 gr pasta per meal is all you need, with 160gr of pasta a day you should be sorted for lunch and dinner, 1 Kg of
pasta is good for a week, if you eat pasta every day.

Then lot of meat is no good for your heart and gives you gout too and too many purines in the body are no good as well.

[llamaprotector]

nothing is so much devasting and destructive like the run for "everything cheaper and price competitive", this is the biggest and more dangerous curse of our times

The problem is a simple mathematical formula. There are simply too many people on this planet, and resources dwindle on a daily basis as the population goes unchecked.

Result = squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of everything to feed ourselves or start a worldwide eugenics program

[gilesgoat]

nothing is so much devasting and destructive like the run for "everything cheaper and price competitive", this is the biggest and more dangerous curse of our times

The problem is a simple mathematical formula. There are simply too many people on this planet, and resources dwindle on a daily basis as the population goes unchecked.

Result = squeeze every last bit of efficiency out of everything to feed ourselves or start a worldwide eugenics program

Whatever population of whatever race ( I mean human or not ) is NOT designed to grow indefinitely, it has to reach a
"balancing point" where "things work well", even if you could increase the resources there's still a limit, one limit could
be the capacity of people the planet can contain.

Eventually when things will go "too bad" birth control will be something no one will be able to ignore it will become a
"phisical necessity" not any more a moral issue or "crap" like that is simply could get something one can't live without.

There's always the "density factor" even if you'd have lot to feed everyone you don't want to live in a super-crowded
planet, not all the people wants to get used to that, "food" is not just everthing you need some "space" too.

War destruction and such ? .. probably at some point becomes unavoidable .. and probably "when things go so bad" you
can't even blame anyone for doing it .. "it just happens as it has to happen" ..

Social tension and trigger elements are consequences of various things .. when people becomes maybe "even too mad
about religions" or political issues or such .. those are signs of underlying "tensions" that could have much deeper and
larger roots than what we see.

The more "imbalance" is created .. the more "demand" of everything is created the more "pressure" is put on people and
things .. some tragic results are completely unavoidable .. and simply the natural unavoidable consequence and results
of things set in motion long ago and quite possibly in quite some cases with even a simple demonstration of "look, you
do that, in X years time ( X not even that big ) 'exponential shit is going to happen' ".

Quite some of the "most popular/attractive living sytem" are not designed or meant to work "for a lot of people", actually
they are meant to work ONLY if not many are into them you can only hope to manage to be "one of the few not many" but
you can never spread or increase the size of those systems, they are not expandable, they would need infinite resources
to be expanded generating an even increasing demand.

Bounds are always pushed and stretched .. but ultimately they collapse .. even if nobody is going to start an eugenics is
not necessary, it will happen by its own the only thing that is needed is time .. time will eventually level up things .. it's math
nobody can escape from it .. no matter how you look at it, math holds.

As long as resources meet demand "everyone is happy" .. when this does not happen any more .. shit happens .. and
when this can't be sorted out any more in any way no matter what .. 'super shit happens'.

Find other resources .. or destroy the demand.

One of the two things is easier to obtain than the other.