Ah a full stack failure. That is when you decide to change (or implement) everything in the full stack from raw material to consumer in one go. As a "go to market" strategy it is usually fatal. In the technology business it is a company that makes their own CPU, their own operating system, and then opens their own retail stores for selling their computers with their own software. Plastic Logic failed this way when instead of just marketing their screens they tried to build an entire reader (screen/case/os/etc).
Based on the telling of the tale, a different strategy might have been to a milk packer that used re-usable glass bottles. Buy milk from Fronterra, then package it in re-usable packaging, and work with the grocery stores to stock it and handle the returns. Work that cycle developing tools and processes that get the use of reusable containers to the same level of efficiency as the plastic containers. That is like a 5 year project right there. Surveys of stores on their return process, helping them improve it, maybe building receiving kiosks that handle it without the store having to train employees to do the return.
Just doing that and you have helped the dairy business be more sustainable. Once that is running, then start looking at remote milking the cows. Your bottling company now has two brands, "earth friendly" milk in sustainable bottles, and "earth and cow friendly" milk in sustainable bottles from happy cows.
Many problem solvers fail to take into account that a solution does not all have to be done in one swoop, but that it can be made much less risky and more likely to succeed by proceeding in stages. Only Superman jumps buildings in a single bound. The rest of us have to use the stairs.
I propably shouldnt say this- but i always loved farmers and there fast, and practical solutions to problems. Have yet to see a farmer meeting where a bunch of yesman and naysayers boil great ideas down to the smallest comon demnominator.
The fact that he even got this far- doing it all by himself, where others would have run out of money just making plans for a bottling plant- that alone is quite impressive.
The valley can learn a thing or two from those proto-typing maniacs out there, who dont spend half a year on there knees to get the procurement management to sign of on some vital investment just so that some hierarchy and kings-court do feel important.
The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.
The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf. The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain. Since that age, whenever I hear anyone postulate that animals cannot really feel emotions, I need only to replay that torturous sound in my memory of that mother cow crying her bovine heart out to her infant. Mother's love knows no species barriers...
Why not just compromise on the plastic jugs? I don't understand why he was so hung up on the plastic jugs. The humane milking part seems much more important, and more people would probably buy it in that form.
Why would customers who didn't recycle the plastic bottles be more inclined to recycle the glass jugs? Just to get a tiny deposit back?
Here in small-town Kansas, we buy our milk at the supermarket. You can choose from the store brand in plastic or a local dairy, Hildebrand Farms, in glass jars. If you go with the local stuff, you pay a $3 deposit on the bottle. It's a strong incentive to return them. We wait until we have four or five jars and return them in a batch. The milk is fantastic and I've toured their dairy so I know what I'm getting and where it came from.
Here in the Bay Area we also have Strauss Family Creamery. I massively cut down on the amount of dairy that I consume a few years ago, but before that I would buy Strauss and it would be a similar deposit, about $2.50 if I recall correctly.
You can read about their sustainability practices here.[0]
I am pretty happy to here there are similar creameries around the country. Certainly there are some advantages to interstate Trade for many classes of products, but there's little reason not to be able to source things like good milk locally, cutting down on transport costs and energy expenditure.
Here in small-town BC, I buy local milk at a chain grocery store in glass bottles with a 2 dollar deposit. the clean empties can be returned at the checkout when buying your groceries. the milk is great and the bottle process works.
I think it's mostly the other (more expensive, and 'radical' changes to the milking process) challenges to do with keeping the cows with the calfs that were what killed this attempt.
That implies that if you don't know that it's dangerous. That may not be the case because milk naturally contains hormones that can effect the endocrine system.
> In summary, it seems that steroid hormones are very potent compounds in dairy foods, which exerting profound biological effects in animals and humans. Most of the previous knowledge about the steroids is according on their physiologic and sometimes supra-physiologic concentrations of steroids but recently it is found that these compounds even at very low doses may have significant biological effects.
Not sure how your'e making the jump from bottled milk to hormones in milk.
That said, hormones in dairy products are a real issue. It's illegal to use hormones in Dairy Cows in Canada, and when antibiotics are necessary for treatment of sick cows, their milk is discarded until it tests clean. Diary products typically cost more in Canada than the U.S. as a result, but I don't mind paying for the extra safety.
"That may not be the case because milk naturally contains hormones that can effect the endocrine system."
NATURALLY CONTAINS HORMONES. This isn't about added hormones for growth. But the fact it contains natural hormones which grow baby cows as fast as possible. Basically, unless you're a calf, you shouldn't drink milk. I'm less sure about processed milk products (butter, hard cheeses, etc)
fair comment about existing hormones. Adding the modifier 'added' makes my statement more accurate, but misses the criticism of drinking milk at all due to the inherent levels of hormones. I am biased to assume the concern was about added hormones because it's a specific problem addressed by Canadian laws.
That said, if you think the science supports the case for limiting oestrogen intake in our diets, a practical step might be to lobby for limits to the use of those hormones in dairy production (like most other western countries) as a first step. Trying to somehow have people stop consuming dairy products seems like a much larger hurdle, limiting it's effectiveness in actually reducing consumption of those hormones.
Because, economics aside, it's a waste, and it hurts the Earth. There's literally an island of garbage, mostly plastic, just floating around in the ocean, killing sea turtles and other cute animals.
You may not care, but some people (customers, as they are known colloquially) do.
I think it's a matter of choosing your battles. It seems short sighted to jeopardize the mission of ethical, sustainable dairy over packaging which can be changed later when you have more leverage as an established business.
The point isn't that the plastic doesn't matter--it's that addressing animal treatment and packaging in one fell swoop is incredibly unlikely to succeed.
For those who didn't actually get to the end of the article, he hasn't given up yet -- he made the decision to, and then the overwhelming support he received changed his mind. He's still "fighting the good fight" for the sake of kinder treatment of cows and letting them stay with their calves.
“And then my fatal flaw emerged. The one that got me past all those early ‘no’s and sustained me through four years of hard graft – my relentless optimism.
So 24 hours later, I was back on Facebook, sketching out ideas on how Happy Cow V.2 might work.
Change is hard. You have to climb over a lot of ‘no’s to get there. But this story might not be quite over.
If you would like to help our cause please consider signing up for updates at happycowmilk.co.nz“
> So you’d ask, what about reusable milk cans or kegs to supply cafes? Again. No.
Every time I go to a coffeehouse I see that, even in the biggest chains, baristas serve milks (animal/plant based) from normal bottles. I have always wondered why is that: aside of how wasteful it is, isn't it also more expensive?
The word “wasteful” is only meaningful in the context of a valuable resource that is being consumed. Automated manufacturing of disposable containers uses very little valuable resources, as is reflected in their monetary cost. The logistics of reusing more durable containers consumes substantial valuable human resources, resulting in the use of the solution that is consuming the least, on a value basis.
Human time is not free, and manufactured goods are far less expensive than people imagine, because they are not produced by human labor. The cost to mechanically produce a disposable package is not the same as it intuitively would cost you personally to make a package.
What about the investment in fuel, energy, water, and detergents: to collect the reusable containers, bring them to a sorting facility, sort them, bring them to the manufacturer, and wash them before they can be refilled?
Disposable containers are much lighter and cheaper since they don't need to be so durable for repeated washing and filling. The additional fuel costs of shipping heavier reusable containers around must be pretty substantial in itself, let alone all of the other steps.
And that's the problem in a nutshell: it's very easy to calculate the cost of mass-producing disposable packaging. It's much harder to calculate the cost of disposing of it (i.e. the impact on the environment).
Apparently the cost to use disposable packages, including disposing them after use, is lower than the cost of recycling for this particular chain. Most likely it is not really the cost of separating the containers into a separate bin or whatever, but the separate logistics train back to the manufacturer that costs more. The logistics to remove waste are there anyway, so if you can reuse that for packaging all the better.
While arguably the total costs including pollution are greater for disposable packaging, most of those costs are not borne by the corporation and so it makes sense (for the corporation) to skip using recyclable packaging unless there are other factors (for example, there are customers who will pay extra for the warm feeling of knowing they are helping to reduce waste).
I've just started going to a cafe in London which uses a kind of tap to fill the milk jug from a keg. They get a keg delivered, and then when the keg's empty it goes back, gets cleaned and refilled for another customer. It's one of those things that when you see it, you think why isn't everywhere doing this? Especially eco-conscious coffee shops.
The pub and bar industry seem to have it figured out. I get that it's milk so it'd probably need doing more frequently but as starting points go it's probably not a bad one
It may have something to do with getting back and cleaning up the reusable containers afterwards.
I remember that in Germany my school had a system to sell little glas milk bottles, and they were reused. Milk is still sold in glass bottles sometimes, but these bottles are just recycled.
And here is a successful way to do a similar idea in NZ with unpasteurised milk in reusable containers that has been going for many years on a few farms:
Disagree. This startup is using genetically engineered yeast to produce milk proteins which can be used to form things that are exactly like milk: http://www.perfectdayfoods.com/ They're launching soon.
Awesome :) I think I've tried "Go Veggie!" and "Daiya" brands from the super market. If you melt the Go Veggie brand into vegetable chili and then put that on top of some baked pita chips, you are in for an enjoyable meal ^.^
Just FYI, Go Veggie isn't vegan or dairy free (at least last time I checked), it's lactose free.
Also, Daiya isn't the state of the art by a long shot. If you're adventurous and have a large grocery budget, Chao (served cold) is the most cheese-like cheeze that I've had so far.
I try to mix it up a bit with my vegan milks. Right now I am using Oatly milk. I love the coconut-almond blends, and try to stay away from soy milk, since I eat a lot of soy in different products already.
There's something about the acidity of coffee and tea that makes most veggie milks curdle; the result tastes something like cardboard. There were some soy-based (So Good or So Nice branded) coffee creamers that my first-year residence cafeteria offered years ago which stood up nicely in coffee, but I haven't seen them for sale since.
I’ve never had problems with almond milk, cashew milk, coconut milk, or soy milk not being able to stand up to coffee, which usually has a lot more acidity than tea.
For me, it’s been more about the taste of the non-bovine milk itself. And almond milk is by far the best thing I’ve found so far. I also like when it is mixed with other non-bovine milks, like cashew and coconut.
If you use cold-brewed coffee, that has a lot less acidity than hot-brewed coffee. So, it works even better with non-bovine milks.
Shouldn't it be possible to give the calf all the milk until it's old enough to wean, but keep milking the mother.
I think that's what they used to do in the days of sustenance farming.
Of course, if the calf was a boy they would slaughter it about then. But that's another discussion entirely.
The farmer in the article does it that way. Cows produce the most milk right after birth. Then they reduce the production, because the calve starts eating on its own.
I think keeping the calves with the mothers is the smallest part of the problem. The premature slaughter of cows and the slaughter of male calves and "surplus" female calves is the bigger issue for me.
Apparently the cows now produce way more milk per day than the calf needs. The wikipedia also says calves grow a lot faster when kept with their mother.
Agreed. I neglected to add that this means they are really going after a small and ephemeral niche: those who want to spend more for more humane milk but still drink cows milk. Many people in that position may find themselves adopting a plant based diet.
That's something we need to be aware of and do everything we can to prevent. Humane animal products are even more unsustainable than stomach-turningly efficient animal products. The world population continues to shift toward a meat-filled American diet, and it would be catastrophic to meet the whole world's demand with old-fashioned farms where animals have outdoor space to roam and aren't loaded up with steroids and antibiotics, let alone the ecological costs of keeping the useless males alive.
With the adavances of lab grown meat, I’d bet they could.
Makes ya think though doesn’t it? There could be a time when humans are drinking lab produced cows milk from an artificial organ. And people call us vegans extreme ;)
I really long for the day where we can grow in the lab the stuff we currently harm animals for, but a big "if" will be whether we can replicate the nutritional profile. A lot of vegan-friendly food I find is bulked up with carbohydrates and/or soy protein.
That's a very valid concern. For our space faring successors though, this would perhaps be the most important breakthrough.
Going off on a tangent here but If you could replicate earth-obtained food in space, it would probably make me much more amenable to the idea of shooting out into the void and living my whole life there.
Much of the milk isn't produced in the udder, but transported through the blood.
But there is also a whole lot of immune tissue and hormonal regulation going on. I doubt that the way towards "cow less cow's milk" will go through ex-vivo mammaries.
He believes everything has to be perfect or if not he does not do it. Because of that at the end of the day we have nothing.
With a company you need to compromise. Probably you can no use glass, but you can use polyethylene and paper (tetrabrick).
Step by step you could do a lot. We take lots of technical debt, if we make something that is not a perfect solution but it is better than anything that exist on the world, we ship it. The world improves.
Yes, it is not perfect, but if the product success over time you could pay your technical debt and make it perfect. If not , it just means that people's pockets is not where their mouth is(which is common by the way).
I think it was Seymour Cray that said to push the boundary in one dimension at a time.
However, in this person was trying to do two new things at the same time: reusable glass bottles and humane cow treatment. Both of those caused friction with the existing infrastructure. I think that if he had just tried to have humane cow treatment and just used the disposable bottles that everyone was using, he would have had a better chance to succeed.
The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones.
A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year. No one gives a damn.
Heck, even I don't. I drink my milk and eat my chicken. I consider those things mine and don't care if the milk is a product of forced selection that created a monster of a species, or that chicken is a flesh of an innocent animal.
I do not even care about what it does to the environment.
I'm voting with my money to have this practice continue.
The whole system is built for meat and milk to work. Yeah, it's some wierd suboptimal local minimum but that's what it is. I live in a meat culture and don't care if I can survive eating only plants.
Man is not killing earth, man is killing man and there will be casualties along the way, but earth will continue without man. Species go extinct all the time, and homo sapiens shall join the list in turn.
I straight up started to taste grass when drinking milk. Then later I realized how bland meat is. I can cook much more flavor and texture into a plant based meal than ever achievable with traditional animal products. Low sodium,cholesterol free, etc etc.
Iirc beef tasted similarly “grassy”. Essentially my tastebuds changed. Food suddenly had different tastes than I remembered. Could be age changing my taste buds, could be focusing my diet on healthier choices changed my tastebuds, etc.
Its common for people who closely monitor their salt intake to be unable to eat many packaged food items - as they suddenly taste all the added salt.
> I can cook much more flavor and texture into a plant based meal than ever achievable with traditional animal products.
That's a bit of a strange way to put the comparison, as non-vegan meals can include all of those plant based options (just with meat in addition to them). And whether you like meat flavour and texture or not, there is a lot of unique variety in meat flavour and texture that's distinct from what's in plant-based options.
People care enough to pay extra for cage-free chicken eggs at the supermarket. My local Safeway has about as many cage-free offerings as not. So people do care, and enough that catering to it is profitable. The question is whether they care enough to pay enough extra to significantly affect treatment of animals.
And who knows what the limit is as we grow wealthy enough to willingly pay extra to salve our souls. With enough wealth and wokeness, could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?
Because of how confusing all those labels are, here in Seattle some grocery stores display a cheatsheet explaining the difference between them and even some info about the certifications.
But you and I do pay extra even for that small improvement, to buy eggs with a little less self imposed shame. We'd probably pay a bit more for a bit more improvement. It'll never be as cheap to raise animals without cruelty. But we could become wealthy and horrified enough to be willing to pay the difference.
>could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?
I would say yes. It's certainly not a new concept, if unfamiliar with Judiasm, part of the Jewish dietary laws knows as Kashrut (where the term kosher is derived) address this.
I have an old book somewhere that said the dairy cow is the most efficient way to convert the grass on a rocky hillside into human-usable protein.
Meat is rather inefficient. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman who designed more humane slaughterhouse systems. A quote in the HBO movie about her sticks with me: "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."
Switzerland/France. I've seen farmers take their mobile milk-carts up mountains to milk them in-situ. Not sure whether they do the same thing with calves or not though.
So called "Mutterkuh-Haltung", where the calves are kept with the mother, is increasingly popular. This occasionally causes problems, as hiking paths often intersect grazing ranges, and cows will defend their calves aggressively from perceived threats.
" The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones."
That's the beauty of our modern society. Most of us never see the dirty stuff that's going on. We only get a very sterilized image of the world. Just go into a chicken or pig farm and see how horrific the conditions really are. But we get protected from having to see this and get our meat with nice clean pictures on it.
Some years ago I saw a video some journalists that got in a "surgical" airstrike. Same thing. We only see clean images from above but their footage showed had terrible such a strike is. Cut off limbs everywhere, people screaming, badly burned children. This took my excitement for modern weaponry down a lot.
We are now as cruel or probably more cruel than people in that past. We just don't have to see it anymore because only a few people will do the dirty work.
I do have an addition to offer to your first sentence. The thing is, people don't care about almost anything that affects others (or even themselves). Most people act or react based on their habits and what's convenient for them. If most people were rational, then things would be a lot better for humans and non-humans.
Since you yourself referred to it as "a holocaust", and seem to know more, you could still make changes, however small they may seem to anyone else (or even to you).
Jeez. You do know that Israel had it's 70th birthday only a couple of days ago and you sit here and, basically, relativize the Holocaust. Please don't do that. Thanks.
> I did not call the non-human animal holocaust as The Holocaust (committed by the nazis).
Maybe this is because (at least in Germany and France) any kind of Holocaust comparison is widely deemed offensive. It may be seen as OK in the US sphere, but not in Europe. We actually have a word for this in German ("Holocaustrelativierung"), and organizations like PETA which routinely use Holocaust comparisons when talking about e.g. chick sexing, regularly get flamed for it.
The AfD are far more frightening a right-wing group, and have far more power, than e.g. UKIP in Britain. I believe that because Germans refuse to see the Holocaust as anything other than a singular event they are now at risk of repeating it all over again. Their inability to relativise it (if that can be taken to mean to put it in a historical continuum in which other events of comparable atrocity are committed) means it's snugly in the past. I think this leads to a false sense of security.
Cows and other animals involving factory farming are the least endangered species on the planet. There is literally zero effort to eliminate cows from the gene pool, except by activists who want to see these animals fend hilariously ineffectively for themselves in the wild. Their predators and their reliance on humans would ensure the genocide you speak of would actually happen.
The parent post wasn't claiming extinction or genocide in their post, they were using Holocaust in the sense of a continuous, horrific mass slaughter.
Most animal rights activists I know know that cattle mostly exist due to animal agriculture. They would rather the cows not exist at all then to suffer corralled, forcefully bred, fed and slaughtered in a short brutal life. The human diet does not require animal protein to live.
He went way too big. This is a business plan that needs to start very locally. Trying to hit retailer shelves with this is counter to the premise of sustainability; if a combustion engine is used for shipping the milk, and if refrigeration is used, there is no sustainability left. We ferment milk, using what's called 'kefir' bacteria's - the health benefits compared to raw milk are hard to believe, and the milk can sit at room temperature for over a year without any problems. We make cheese with it and it ages very well. Raw milk isn't sustainable.
>He went way too big. This is a business plan that needs to start very locally. Trying to hit retailer shelves with this is counter to the premise of sustainability.
That sounds reasonable but the scale and population of NZ prevents this. Many 'Cities' here, excluding the biggest few, would be considered small towns in most other countries. Regardless of the small scale, corner stores are owned by one of two big groups. The non-retailers you're imagining him leveraging don't really exist here on any scale that would work.
The population, outside of these few cities is so sparse that there's no small-scale retain presence. So if you attempt to start local you're selling to a market of a few hundred, at best. Of that market you would need significant uptake to make any headway.
> We ferment milk, using what's called 'kefir' bacteria's - the health benefits compared to raw milk are hard to believe, and the milk can sit at room temperature for over a year without any problems.
Once you ferment it, isn't it yogurt, and no longer milk? Do you use it for beverages like coffee, tea, shakes, etc.? If you leave it out for a year (or even a few weeks), doesn't it get completely fermented and become sour? Doesn't it get fungus after a few weeks? Or do you turn it into cheese soon after fermenting (which has a much longer life)?
I’m not an expert, and a year sounds like a long time, but here’s some information to answer a few of your questions.
Is it yogurt? Sort of. Sour cream is also fermented milk products, but we don’t call it yogurt. That’s maybe a bit arbitrary, but there it is. In the case of kefir, I’d argue that the distinction is valid. Yogurt is just inoculated with various strains of bacteria, which eat milk sugars and produce lactic acid. That lactic acid is delicious, and it also tends to kill any invading microbes that might make us sick, like fungi. Kefir is similar, but is inoculated with “grains” of a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. Kefir is like... milk kombucha. Sort of. (Real) Kefir is actually carbonated and very slightly alcoholic, because the yeast is doing part of the sugar-eating, producing CO2 and ethanol as a result. In that sense it’s kind of like milk beer, or milk-yogurt-beer, you get the idea.
Cheese is a whole different beast! When you make cheese you use an enzyme, rennet, to separate curds from whey in fresh milk. What you next depends on the cheese, and doesn’t have to even involve aging or fermentation. Of course, some cheese is allowed to react with fungi (Brie), or swabbed with bacterial cultures(Muenster), or exposed to wild strains of both. Incidentally you can also ferment butter, which develops a somewhat cheesy flavor due to lactic acid fermentation, but because it’s not treated with rennet and is almost pure fat is Not cheese.
Finally, the lactic acid produced in any fermentation process will eventually be concentrated enough to kill everything including the “good” bacteria, just like yeast will eventually kill itself with a high enough concentration of alcohol. So there is a limit to how fermented something can be, and after that you’re just aging it. Of course the traditional way with kefir was to keep adding milk and kefir grains to the existing kefir. The result was sort of perpetual fermentation, almost like a sourdough starter, or kombucha “mother” can be continuously fed and fed upon.
Thanks for the detailed reply. I do know a bit about kefir and have used it to ferment things. So I was wondering what product is it that stays out for long, which I now understand is kefir itself. For some reason I thought maybe it was referring to something else in the GPs comment.
As for the process of straining it and feeding it to perpetually make more kefir, I've known about that for quite sometime.
> But I wasn’t comfortable with the practice of removing calves from mothers and sending four-day-old calves to be slaughtered.
Calves are a by-product of milk. The world doesn't need calves, doesn't want (or like) veal. Calves exist because in order to get milk, we need to get the cows pregnant. Then we kill the calves.
There is no other way to get cow milk; there is no way to make "humane" milk. We can either, not use milk, or devise a way to produce synthetic milk.
It doesn't have to be like that. I grew up on a Norwegian dairy farm. Killing calves is not something that my parents or anyone else in the business did. Female calves get to grow up and become milk cows, for male calves they are kept around until they are full grown and then get slaughtered for meat. There is a lot of places where this isn't the standard procedure, but it is an option.
There’s consumer demand for veal. It’s delicious. Companies just don’t want the headaches caused by the finger-waggers. So many male calves are shot and discarded instead of becoming food. It’s insane.
> So many male calves are shot and discarded instead of becoming food.
Well, at least now I think I found out where all that cat and dog food comes from. Seriously, 90 million cats and 70 million dogs alone in the US, that's a huuuuuge load of food.
That's weird. In Canada every health food store carries organic milk in glass bottles for about $3/L. Not sure if the calves are taken from their mothers or not, but the farming practices of the particular brand I'm talking about ensure healthy soil. It's not as cheap as plastic jug milk, but the stores give you I think $.50 for returning the bottles.
> At this point you might just decide that there’s no way around this and put your milk in plastic bottles. This is what most smart people would do. But I know that most of the plastic milk bottles in New Zealand are not actually recycled. And so I built my own milk factory.
This where I stopped reading. Don't let lesser issues get in the way of solving a major one.
The dairy industry is about the worst industry to start anything. I've seen it up close in Germany, where some milk farmers still want to expand or set up new farms, despite lamenting about the poor price of milk. The farmers seem to have some kind of myopia where all they see is milk farming, and damn if the market needs it.
And it's going to get worst. Pretty soon we will discover that you don't need a whole cow to make some milk. Substitutes for milk components are already in use everywhere, but it shouldn't be that difficult to produce "authentic" milk proteins and other components using synthetic biology.
Before that, maybe we don't need a calve from every cow, improving at least that part of the animal welfare issue.
And even a "disruptor" with cow-less milk may fail quickly, as consumers don't like change and milk is so damn cheap anyway.
Why not just go with paper milk cartons? They are very recyclable and biodegradeable and I think it would be easy to find a supplier/packager and the stores would have no problem selling it.
if your customers are willing to pay a premium for your product just because you are doing things in a more humane way then they are probably also the type to actually recycle their cartons.
Honestly, going for carton seems like it would have made his whole thing a lot easier and it's not that bad. Also easier to brand I think since the whole thing can be printed on.
IMO, the biggest mistake he made was not keeping in touch with the final consumers of the product, as he was building the rest of the process. If he’d done regular posts on social media about what he was trying to do, he could have gotten good feedback and contacts with like-minded people much earlier.
And then he wouldn’t have had to shoulder that burden himself all by his lonesome.
I wonder if he could patent that portable milking station thing and just license it to other milk producers. I definitely would be more likely to buy milk that didn't require the slaughter of calves. Not aware of any options for that in the US though.
Male dairy calves are always slaughtered, b/c (with rare cross-breed exceptions on tiny farms) they are the wrong breed for meat and nobody wants to buy and raise them as pets.
Farmers in the UK inject cows with estrogen and antibiotics to make them grow faster and bigger. We are messing with nature and making them and ourselves sick. Cows need milking, they feel pain with full udders, but not at the mass production level where they are also subjected to being killed for meat.
Farmers in the UK inject cows with estrogen and antibiotics to make them grow faster and bigger.
This is not true. EU rules ban the use of growth hormones and antibiotics as a growth agent in livestock. Antibiotics are still (overused) for disease prevention but there is a realisation that this needs to change (whether it will is a different matter).
I can't find more recent data, but here are figures from 2011 on antibiotic use in livestock in countries around the world, including New Zealand, the US and the EU.
Lots of information on antibiotic use on farms in UK at www.farmantibiotics.org especially in the news section where there is an update on progress in the UK and by farm. Shows a 27% drop in 2 years and also that UK is among the lowest user of farm antibiotics in Europe. Growth promotion of any kind has been banned in the EU for 10 years, and that includes antibiotics or hormones. Please check your facts - there are a lot of differences between farming in the UK and other countries.
> Cows need milking, they feel pain with full udders
Firstly, they have been cross bred to produce a lot more milk than their ancestors even a century ago did. Secondly, female mammals of different species go through different phases in milk production vs. what's consumed by the baby. If you don't milk a dog or cat to relieve pain from having more milk, why would you want to do it for just one species? This whole thing is a human created problem that's turned into mor excuses to continue such practices.
Based on the telling of the tale, a different strategy might have been to a milk packer that used re-usable glass bottles. Buy milk from Fronterra, then package it in re-usable packaging, and work with the grocery stores to stock it and handle the returns. Work that cycle developing tools and processes that get the use of reusable containers to the same level of efficiency as the plastic containers. That is like a 5 year project right there. Surveys of stores on their return process, helping them improve it, maybe building receiving kiosks that handle it without the store having to train employees to do the return.
Just doing that and you have helped the dairy business be more sustainable. Once that is running, then start looking at remote milking the cows. Your bottling company now has two brands, "earth friendly" milk in sustainable bottles, and "earth and cow friendly" milk in sustainable bottles from happy cows.