On the death of my family's dairy farm (2019)

previous discussion about this : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19368542

It's difficult but I'm not sure what the alternatives might be. The largest dairy farms can cut costs in ways which would not be practical for small farms because the capital expenditure (robotised milking parlours for example) or the market power (being able to negotiate on feed prices). The mega lots with thousands of cows can sell milk for less than it costs a small farm to produce it.

The only available option is specialisation. Build a brand around products manufactured on site, cheeses and butters for example. Diversification, I've been on two ex-dairy farms, one now produces mostly beer and the other is an ice cream based tourist attraction.

There were a news article this fall about how demand for more ecological produced dairy and meat has gone down while public opinion about ecological produced dairy and meat has gone up. The explanation provided there is that while people increasingly care more about how the dairy and meat is produced, those same people are also reducing their consumption.

This seems to be an area where pollution control and stricter regulation in regard to animal health is required in order to see improvements. In addition, human trafficking has become common practice in many cheap labor industries, to the point where the police has stopped investigating because otherwise they would have no resources to spend on areas which are more politically valuable. Many workers are forced to work or end up not getting paid, and then scared into avoiding the police in fear of violence. Work safety and health care rarely exist, and in the case of farm workers and construction there is few if any support system to help victims.

> The manure problem is a problem at any size of farm, the amount of manure per cow is somewhat constant. So concentrating all the cows in some factory farm doesn't really make anything worse as long as the total number of cows is somewhat constant.

I wonder if this is true. Perhaps the real problem is the concentration of such a large amount of waste in those manure lakes.

I don't have any fixed evidence or numbers, but recalling my youth working on a 200 - 250 cow dairy, the animals were strip grazed in paddocks during the day and night. They would therefore mostly defecate in the paddock, on the grass, spread across a wider area and acting as a natural fertiliser.

There was a small manure pond with wastewater from the dairy itself, but this was not large.

Problems with large manure lakes intuitively seem more likely as the nitrates and other nasties are concentrated, something which doesn't seem as bad with the same amount of manure spread across a grassy paddock.

This is indeed the case. On the other side of the same issue, the loss of large mammals in the wild slows down the natural cycling of nitrogen and this has a knock-on effect that leads to further loss of biomass. This has been an issue since the start of human civilization but intensive herding of animals certainly did not help.