UK: Factory Milk Production Doomed, but Wait, There’s More
May 13th, 2007I love the description of the robotic milking production line, complete with RFID trackers and pedometers. This isn’t that different from the nine-to-five reality of most people. As you read this, think about the drive time commutes and that office. With both the cows and the people, The Machine is taking everything it can, and then some. This is called, efficiency.
Of course, it’s never enough. The farmers are faced with increasing efficiency even more, or getting out of the business.
But this is not just another article about milk, dear Cryptogon readers. It’s about something far more precious. More precious than oil, wheat, gold, copper or any other strategic resource I mention on Cryptogon.
Water.
Stick with this article to the very end. And then make sure that your strategic relocation plans include water security as the top priority.
Via: Guardian:
As cow 777 passes from the herd, nudged by an automated gate into the milking parlour at Kemble Farms, the signal from the transponder in the bracelet on her foreleg is read by the Cotswold estate’s computer. The cow is identified and logged in while she files down the stalls. When 777 enters the empty berth at the end of the line the bar opens for the cow behind, so the stalls fill up without the need for human intervention. In the pit below, three eastern European workers move quietly up the lines attaching automatic milking teats to 36 sets of udders at a time.
As the vacuum begins to suck, 777’s milk flows down the pipes and through an underground meter which measures and records her output, while information from the pedometer also attached to her foreleg is analysed by the latest software to calculate how far she has moved inside the adjoining cowshed since her last milking. When 777 comes into season she will walk more than usual and the computer will mark her down for her next insemination. If she has not walked as much as usual she may have an udder infection or the lameness to which cows bred for intensive dairy production are prone, and the computer will filter her out for treatment.
As 777’s udders empty and the milk stops pumping, sensors in the machine detect the interruption to the flow and water is forced automatically back up the pipes to clean cow and equipment. Then the teats pop off by themselves, leaving 777 to exit back to the shed.
Kemble Farms is one of the most efficient dairy operations in the country. The cows give so much milk they are emptied three times a day. Yields are typically 9,000 litres per cow per year, not the highest known since some farms have now broken the 10,000-litre barrier, but a long way above average and spectacular compared with a decade ago, when average yields were nearer 5,000 litres per cow. Thirty years earlier, average yields were 3,500 litres.
The herd size here, usually around 700 cows, puts Kemble in the super-efficient league too. The average number of cows in a dairy herd in the UK is now 100; in 1994 it was 79. A £2m investment in a light and airy, aircraft-hangar-sized shed, where the cows can be kept indoors seven months of the year and fed the concentrated feed they need to maintain such levels of production, has enabled the family business that owns the farm to achieve economies of scale and cut labour costs. And yet Kemble Farms has been selling milk at less than the cost of production. Its costs – fuel, fertiliser, water and feed – have gone up 8% in the last 12 months, but the price it is paid for its milk by Dairy Crest, which processes and packs it for Sainsbury’s, has fallen by 8% over the same period. Like most of the British dairy industry it is struggling to make money.
…
“We either pack up or intensify further,” says David Ball, one of the directors of Kemble Farms. “We’ve already increased output 15% in the last year. We could keep more cows, and get a further 25%. We’re aiming for 10,000 litres a year per cow in the next few months. We would be driving every-thing, the animals, the plant, to the maximum. In a factory we are used to that idea of 24/7, but with animals and land there are other considerations. We resist treating animals like machines.”
Kemble Farms has high standards of animal welfare – it is audited by RSPCA Freedom Foods. But as Mr Ball explains: “From the consumer point of view, dairy equals cows in nice pasture – and we’re being driven away from that, until we follow the poultry world.”
The irony for Colin Rank, one of the family that owns Kemble Farms, is that his cows drink water from a Cotswold spring that he could bottle and sell for 80p a litre. “We’re giving it to cows and devaluing it by turning it into milk. Like all dairy farmers we could pack up tomorrow and do something better with our capital, but we do it because we have an emotional investment in the land and the animals. And we know there’s a market for our product, if only the market worked.”
Research Credit: SW
I actually know a farmer who bought one of these machines here in the UK. He was pondering relocating to Canada, where he owned a farm, but instead sold the Canadian land and splashed out on this daft machine. Emotional attachment to his land here has plundered his resources and reduced his relocation options from Big Brother Britain. He’s clearly nuts.
I don’t think it’s nuts to be attached to your land.
I have a bizarre paranoid theory about bottled water, and Cryptogon is as good as any place to share it. If you were a so-called elite and wanted to start a mass drugging campaign, what would you do? I’m sure you’ve heard people say things like “they should put it in the water” (my own sister once said that about Prozac). But would you really want to spike the municipal water supply, which is used in much greater quantities for bathing, laundry, lawn watering, etc.? No… it would be much more efficient to persuade the proletariate that tapwater was somehow dangerous or polluted (by and large, with a few notable exceptions, tapwater is no more polluted or contaminated than the bottled water that most often comes from the same source) and sell them a putatively cleaner product in a bottle. Knowing that bottled water will be almost exclusively used for drinking, and especially by the middle classes you wish to control, you could then efficiently drug the population.
Surely such a massively evil program could not be kept secret!?! Maybe not… it would seem that somebody would eventually discover concentrations of _X_ in those pristine bottles of “Cold Moutain Crystal Springs”? Bear in mind that (1) organic compounds are notoriously difficult to detect; and (2) phthalates are known to leach out from plastic into the bottled water they contain, and phthalates are a nasty group of chemicals that are known to be hormone-disrupting. What else is there in the bottled water that is being disguised somehow by other compounds or is too difficult to detect unless you use a specific lab method to detect it?
Maybe this is too paranoid. But I leave you with this article on bottled water:
http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/exesum.asp
Slomo, I think I made it clear why it was wrong in the example I gave for someone to be emotionally attached to a piece of land. It’s all about context. Personally, I would be “emotionally attached” to whatever permits me a life of personal sovereignty at any given time. It’s thus an issue of pragmatism rather than sentimental factors.
did you know that the average dairy herd in NZ is now over 300 cows?
when i was a kid (30 years ago) 150 cows was a big herd.
@ tochigi
At least the those herds are on pasture here. Of course, never mind how hard those pastures are being farmed or what the farmers are applying to the pastures, or where all of that stuff comes from……
Kevin,
BTW, it doesn’t have to be that way though…
http://tvnzondemand.co.nz/content/country_calendar_2007andClassic/ondemand_video_skin?tab=&sb=date-descending&e=country_calendar_2007_ep3#ep_country_calendar_2007_ep3