[jasonv]

I visited a dairy in Utah a couple of summers ago. 130 cows, 3 employees.

It's a fully automated facility, using equipment from Germany. The cows enter a stall, the machine milks them, gives them a treat, they move on. Employees get a text if a cow hasn't milked itself in a while... usually a tap on their shoulder is enough to get them to walk over to the machine.

Even yet, the person giving the tour said they don't make enough money selling the milk to sustain the operation. They also make high-end cheeses on-prem, and that's what keeps them in the black.

[fiftyfifty]

I've helped with an IT project for several large dairies in the US (1,000+ cows each). Like you said the cows practically milk themselves. They walk by themselves into the milk barn, one person attaches the automatic milking machines to each cow as they walk into a stall. The milking machine automatically drops off the udders when the cow is done being milked and they walk back out to their pen on their own. I was told the cows like to be milked because it's uncomfortable for them when they are full of milk. Most dairies milk their cows 3 times a day around the clock. One of the dairies I've been to has a round milk barn with a rotating floor with about 100 milking stalls around the outside edge, so the guy attaching the milking machines to the cows doesn't even have to move. By the time the cows rotate all the way around the building they are done, the milking attachments drop off and the cows walk out the door on their own and go back to their pens to eat. I've shown up at these places a few times unannounced and spent 30 minutes walking around looking for a person (other than the guy in the milk barn) to let me into the office. Many times there's two people at the entire dairy: the guy in the milk barn and a guy driving a tractor that drops the feed for the cows along the sides of their pens. Each pen has artificial wood floors kind of like trex decking material and sprinklers in the roof of the pen that run automatically several times a day to wash away the poop which drains into holding ponds. The holding ponds have machinery just like a waste water treatment plant: the solids settle to the bottom of the ponds, and the water is used for corn crops that are fed back to the cows. The manure is dredged from the holding ponds, dried, and distributed on the fields with tractors to fertilize the corn. The majority of food fed to the cows is corn silage, which is the entire corn plants ground up and composted/fermented in large covered piles for a while to make it easier for the cows digest. This makes the whole setup fairly self sustaining. If they need to, the dairies will buy feed, but they try to minimize that because it increases their expenses. Most of these large dairies own thousands of acres around the dairy that is almost entirely dedicated to growing corn to feed the cows. After being to these kinds of setups it's clear to me that there's no way a small operation could compete. If they could replace those last two employees with machines, they would.

[laszlokorte]

I had to look that up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLjI_eixBQk

[jasonv]

Yeah, the screen looks the same, I think the Utah dairy had a newer model.

They also mentioned that there were only 3 dairy farms in the state with any kind of automated milking machines.

[BitwiseFool]

I recall hearing that there is a glut of milk in the US because there are just too many dairy cows. Is this still true?

[anonAndOn]

Don't forget rBGH.[0] Canada and the EU banned it, but thanks to big Pharma, you can get still get hormone adulterated milk in the US of A.

[0]https://www.organicvalley.coop/blog/rBGH-decoded-what-is-bov...

[samatman]

I'm opposed to the use of rBGH. Stating falsehoods doesn't help the cause.

The absence of evidence that rBGH ends up in milk isn't for lack of trying to find it.

I get organic milk because it tastes better. I suspect that means it's more nutritious, and further suspect that's because of the growth hormone, not the absence of some pesticides (but not others!) in the feed.

To preemptively correct a misconception which many people have: nutrition labels are based on what the government legally allows producers to claim, it isn't the result of some test performed on the food inside the package.

Just like a huge tomato doesn't have much more lycopene than a smaller one with the same genetics, it makes sense to me that most of the increased lactation from rBGH is just water.

Might be bad for the cows too, I mean I doubt it's good for them. But I consider it cheating and think we'd be better off without it.

[likpok]

I don't think I've seen milk that's not rBST free, even the cheap store brands. Where are you even finding it?

Organic milk is often UHT pasteurized which gives it a slightly scalded flavor. That might be what your tasting, rather than any nutritional difference.

[samatman]

Could be placebo, I grant you. 90% of my milk consumption is as yogurt, I get the UHT stuff by preference, so I don't have to scald it in the Instant Pot myself. The comparison is apples-to-apples along that dimension.

Your claim surprised me, so I've done a bit of looking into it, and it seems that milk from cows given rBGH/BST was never particularly prevalent, and has steeply declined over the past ten years! Also, the FDA never required the disclaimer about rBGH milk being found to be identical to non-rBGH, that's tacked on out of fear of lawsuit.

I guess next time I make yogurt I'll try the store-brand UHT and see what I think. Organic certification does have some animal welfare requirements which I support, but I eat almost a quart of yogurt a day and the difference could buy me dinner at a decent restaurant every month.

I will say that the difference between expensive eggs and cheap ones is completely obvious, while that between organic milk and the regular is subtle enough that I might just be fooling myself.

[rdtwo]

Organic milk tastes worse. It gets heated to a higher temperature for pasteurization

[oh_sigh]

And I think even if you put on your milk container that it contains no rBGH, you legally have to put an extra note on there saying that rBGH is not proven to be dangerous.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Is there good scientific evidence that rBGH is bad for you? I don't know a lot about this, but my first guess is that "naturalness" / "organicness" partisans are opposed to it for reasons related to the non-scientifically-supported ideas they have that are rooted in purity instincts.

[jamesgreenleaf]

In the US, on every carton of milk that advertises itself as being rBGH-free, there's a statement mandated by the FDA, who was apparently lobbied by the industrialized farms who thought such advertising unfair:

"The FDA has determined that no significant difference has been shown between milk derived from rBGH-supplemented and non-rBGH-supplemented cows"

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Sure, but that could be true or false. Granted, in either scenario people who use rBGH are incentivized to want it to be true. I assume the fact that it's on cartons at all is a loss for the industrialized farms, though.

[OldHand2018]

Yes, but I think it depends on the location. At my local grocery store in Chicago, milk has been $2 per gallon ($0.53 per liter) for years, as long as you buy 2 gallons or more. When I was in Florida for a few months, I couldn't find it for less than $3.79 per gallon ($1 per liter) anywhere.

The cheaper milk in the upper midwest tastes better too, as it all comes from Wisconsin and Indiana where the cows can feed on green grass that grows naturally because it gets plenty of rain, etc.

[llsf]

I pay $5.69 the gallon in SF at grocery store.

[AtlasBarfed]

Is there still that weird law that fixes the price of milk based on how far from Wisconsin it is?

[wyldfire]

Unlikely. The article mentions something that sounds related:

> This was in the heart of America’s dairyland by the way, to the point that federal milk pricing used to be based on how many miles away from here you were.

This sentence cites a WSJ article from 1997 [1].

BTW, California has had bigger dairy production than Wisconsin for decades [2].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB880411473424429000

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/01/561427862/is...

[OldHand2018]

Hey, you know you may be right - I guess I just assumed about the source of the milk. Try this out: go to Aldi [1] and choose grocery pickup for anywhere in Illinois or Indiana, and you’ll see a gallon of milk for somewhere between $1.95 and $2.50 per gallon (depending on the store location). Click on the milk and you can clearly see the “Real California Milk” label.

[1] https://www.aldi.us/en/pickup-delivery/grocery-pickup/