[moby_click]

Inherent to dairy production is regular impregnation and separating the calves. Just like the egg industry, market pressure favors more "productive" genetics, which results in males basically being discarded early in life, and shorter productive life with higher output for the females.

Increasing animal welfare(, for lack of a better term,) results in higher environmental impact, because slower growth, longer lives and less conversion, require more feed and produce more emissions. At least globally - locally, large-scale concentrated operations have a high impact.

I can speak for southern Germany where there are still many small farms in villages. Due to space constraints, those businesses have to extract as much as possible out of every animal. I only have german sources, but this is what those stalls can look like: https://www.ariwa.org/leben-in-ketten-video/

The text says that cows are tethered like this for months or even years (basically their whole life). It's estimated that this affects about 1 million or about a quarter of the german dairy cows. I think the Matrix would compare favorably to this.