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In the "Death of the Family Dairy Farm" article that was on HN the other day, the clear trend was toward CAFO's (Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations) - aka giant farms.

Along with these, there are really clear environmental impacts as the density of the herd/land is just overwhelming to the point where it's not "cows fertilizing the field" but being legally required to create massive manure lagoons, etc.

What's clever about the cow toilet is that it opens up new options for treatment of both manure and urine.

This is the article from the other day, find "manure lagoon" in it to see all the problems

https://blog.abevoelker.com/2019-03-06/on-the-death-of-my-fa...

There are places where animal manure is being used for the biogas production. The scale of the cesspool in the link is way above any small farm biogas tank, but then there must be better ways to speed up the biological decomposition of the manure. Mixing it with plant material, increasing surface and pumping air i.e.

Fascinating 2002 article that goes into a great deal of detail about CAFOs:

https://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/power-steer/

Yeah people need to let go of the idea of cute happy cows living free in grass planes. The drawing on your milk carton is far from the reality of these animals.

Small farms like your aren't commercially viable for much longer (they already aren't in Europe, I'm not very familiar with the US situation, but I have no reason to believe it's different in the medium term). The constraining factor on milk production in Europe isn't land or capital or stock, it's 'nitrate rights', essentially the amount of nitrates you can put into the soil (top soil is already nitrate saturated so any additional leaches into the ground water). Any measure that reduces the amount of nitrates are a net productivity gain.

I did nitrate leaching/ground water hydrology modeling for New Zealand some 10 years ago, and even then there too dairying was starting to become constrained by its nitrate leaching effects (of course, there needs to be the political will to enforce the boundaries when safe cumulative groundwater nitrate levels are reached at downstream points, but that's a different matter). My point is, it's not just Europe.

As to your other comments in this thread about using other breeds, sure that's fine for small biological/organic farms, but not for large scale commercial operations. Milk production is just too low, and any energy the cow has to put into keeping warm doesn't go into producing milk. On top of that, modern breeds (the only ones that can keep up, production wise) are too weak to be outside this much. Of course there are ethical concerns with this, similar to people breeding dogs for example, but that's a concern at a different abstraction level than that of the individual farmer.

>Small farms like your aren't commercially viable for much longer

I think we’re probably just a decade or so away from having lab grown or “impossible burger” style fake meats able to compete with factory farming on price. They won’t be good enough to replace actual butcher shop meat, but they’ll definitely be able to replace generic taco meat type stuff. When there is a viable alternative we might see animal welfare laws gain more traction.

Perhaps actual meat will increasingly become a luxury product for special occasions, improving margins and encouraging producers to compete on quality (and ethics) instead of racing to the bottom on price.

I’m less sure how that will apply to milk and dairy though.

"I think we’re probably just a decade or so away from having lab grown or “impossible burger” style fake meats able to compete with factory farming on price."

I hope so.

"I’m less sure how that will apply to milk and dairy though."

I hope someone, at some point, will be able to take an udder, hook it up to an artificial source of nutrients, and have the milk robot come by once a day without any further living creatures being involved. Pure science fiction right now, and if we can hook an udder up to an artificial nutrient source then why wouldn't we be able to do the same to a human brain at which point the whole need for dairy would be moot, but hey...

Meat is highly subsidised. If it wasn't cheap lab meat would be here in 2 or 3 years. It's crazy to think that I have to pay for meat, whether I eat it or not.

I live in a place where people think about things like food security. It's an island, where most people are on the next, larger island, which itself gets supplies from the mainland.

If you have the room, and time, there's a certain comfort in having your own goats from which you can get milk (and cheeeeeeese), and if you're so inclined, meat.

There are strong legal constraints against any form of commercial dairy that aren't integrated into the quota system, with crazy high fines. It's not even a food safety thing (e.g. pasteurization), but it means that quite a few people retain the means of production for at least personal use.

Farming in the Netherlands works under different constraints. Farmers don’t have cows in pasture, they often have long concluded that it is more efficient to mechanically inject manure into their land, mechanically mow the resulting grass and feed it to their cows. Grass production increases that way, and it makes it less labor intensive to move the cows from and to milking stations twice a day.

Also, once you have enough nitrogen in your land, cow piss doesn't make the grass grow faster, it seeps into the surface water, kills fish, and makes algae grow faster. The Netherlands mostly is way into that “once you have enough nitrogen” zone.

They are legally required to inject the manure rather than just spray it to prevent it all being washed off into surface water. It has its own problems, of course.

There is just far too much cow manure produced here.

I stayed for a week on a dairy farm in the Netherlands (Fluitenberg, outside Hoogeveen) last year and it was completely unlike your description. The 100ish cows lived on a grass pasture and came in only for milking.

It was operated very similarly to a dairy farm in Ireland 20 years ago, which is all I'm familiar with.

Sure, but what % of cows live on such farms? I'm guessing maybe ~10% at most.

Hello. I thought about what you wrote for a bit as I’m walking by some fields in the Netherlands.

Animal well being is of great importance to the Dutch middle class. Dairy consumption is high, and a high amount of the dairy sold, particularly milk, is advertised with animal well being. Just the milk cartons alone would tell you that cows do go to pasture a lot. That said it would be torture to have the cows stand outside the whole year. You can hardly get more domesticated than a Dutch cow. A golden retriever is more wild.

A lot of farm land, as a result, gets injected with fertiliser. In the summer the grass gets dried and stored to last through the winter.

I am assuming this is correct. I base this on what I see right in front of me.

There's big differences per farm. According to the CBS about 75% of farms let their cows graze outside. The dairy industry has published an intention to get this number up to 80% of cows being outside on the field for at least 6 hours. I haven't been on a farm in 20 years, I have no idea if farmers rotate so they can have 200 cows on a 100 cow field each day. I imagine they wouldn't bother with making cows graze at night.

At least in the Netherlands (where the inventor is from), all cows pass the winter in confinements. Some stay there all year round. In this situation urine separation is very advantageous.

I don't disagree that this is the case, the point I was trying to make is that keeping animals like this is not optimal.

It's necessary (or at least standard practice) in a lot of dairy farming regions. Consuming lots of dairy is typically a high-latitude thing.

You could only have dairy farms in places that don't have a winter, but that would be pushing things even further toward the whole "put all the cattle in Californian factory farms and then burn lots and lots of oil to ship it around in trucks" thing, which is arguably even less optimal.

Or we could just resurrect older breeds descended from Aurochs that had shaggy coats. Or we could encourage the consumption of traditional dairy products in those regions like reindeer or yak-based dairies.

Factory farming in NL versus California is probably pretty similar. California's not really a great place for ranching in the first place though, better to just do that in a place like Vermont with a lot more water.

I suspect that even if you could leave your herd out in the snow all winter, a detailed analysis would determine that bringing them into the barn to keep them warmer and feeding them hay for the winter yields more milk per acre. That would, in turn, imply things like a lower carbon footprint and less damage to already stressed ecosystems.

It's kind of like burning wood to heat your house: It may be traditional, but that doesn't necessarily make it better. Realistically, the only reason all sorts of traditional practices were sustainable way back when was that the human population used to be a fraction of what it is now.

Appeal to nature doesn’t imply that it’s the optimal thing to do.

> Appeal to nature doesn’t imply that it’s the optimal thing to do.

It doesn't, but it's not meaningless either. It can be a useful heuristic, for example when trying to judge what conditions are better for the animals involved. Nature sucks in various ways, but 'unnatural' conditions that the animal is not adapted to living in often do cause more mental and physical distress.

My great grandma used to have cows on her we-do-everything farm. I’m told they prefered staying in the barn when it was -10celsius and covered in half a meter of snow outside. The barn was nice and warm.

They’d also come home from pastures at night. That’s where the tastier nutrient dense food was.

Here in the Netherlands, cows only go into the fields half of the year, simply because during winter time it is too cold for them to be outside with no protection against wind and rain.

FWIW, for a climate like the Netherlands most breeds of cow would be just fine living outside in the winter.

It might no longer be true for the cows that have been breed for producing lots of milk. I guess most of them might still be able to survive outside during the winter, but I suspect that their milk production will be strongly affected.

It depends on the breed for sure, but as a rule of thumb when you're talking about the 40-55 latitude band, they're more comfortable/gain weight easier in the winter when it's cold outside than in the summer when it's hot outside.

California has a response to that... https://youtu.be/tItIRScGMuc

The cow piss ends up not just re-fertilising but also as run off in streams, rivers, and ground water. This is worse as there is more intensification. So in a well working society farmers would either do something like this or get regulated out of business. Methane emissions are the bigger problem.

>> Not sure how this makes a lot of sense commercially.

Some farms have to pay to dispose of manure. Removing any urine from the equation may decrease those costs. Farms are also about creating as many products as possible. There may actually be a market for urine. There certainly was historically.

> Some farms have to pay to dispose of manure.

Pig farms for sure. Cow farms, if they're removing it, they're probably composting and selling it, or selling it to someone who will compost it.

How’s is working remotely from a farm?

Pretty good! I think we're at an inflection point where working from home is really actually feasible for most white collar jobs and a lot more people will start doing it over the next few years. I'm biased, of course.

That's interesting. I've been working remotely from the farm (dairy when I started; switched to cash cropping later) for nearly 20 years now and I'm not sure I have seen much societal change with respect to remote work in that time. What are you noticing that suggests that a lot more are going to make the change soon?

Just the fact that it's normal now to join meetings via dial-in or Skype, and virtually all document generation in white-shoe services firms (law/banking/consulting/etc) is an email- and shared folder-based process.

I can think of several examples each of engineering leads, professional investors, very senior investment bankers, and biglaw partners with whom I've worked in the last 2-3 years who work remotely from a place too far to commute daily to NY/SV/etc. I don't have a holistic view of how new this is across industries, but it definitely feels different from how it used to be when I was an investment banking associate in NYC a decade ago.

My wife actually works in the dairy industry, and half her team of sales and HR are remote. Not remote as in working a sales territory but remote as in I’m not coming into the office more than six times a year.

I do agree that companies that can accommodate remote workers soon all will, in varying degrees based upon job and client/customer requirements.