I founded Happy Cow Milk to make a difference in dairying. I failed
thespinoff.co.nz
thespinoff.co.nz
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.
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 would customers who didn't recycle the plastic bottles be more inclined to recycle the glass jugs? Just to get a tiny deposit back?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524299/
> 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.
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.
https://bcdairy.ca/milk/articles/does-milk-contain-growth-ho...
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)
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.
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.
[0] https://www.strausfamilycreamery.com/mission-practices/susta...
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.
You may not care, but some people (customers, as they are known colloquially) do.
More info (and you can also support him) here: https://www.happycowmilk.co.nz/
“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?
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.
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.
Best would be to institute a carbon tax at the point of fossil fuel extraction, then let the free market figure out the rest.
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).
For a layman such as myself, it would seem that producing a plastic bottle should be significantly more expensive than reusing one.
Similar to this: http://www.moobar.com.au/
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.
http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/04/raw-milk-v...
Of course, if the calf was a boy they would slaughter it about then. But that's another discussion entirely.
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.
But as for almond milk and soy milk and coconut milk, their taste, to me, is clearly superior to cow's milk.
That said, there have been improvements and more awesome brands appearing every year! Check out miyoko’s cheeses and butter!
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
The more important issue is taste and certain chemical/technological properties, which we need in other dairy products
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).
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.
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.
I think you mean million, not billion. And even then that number is high for estimates.
edit: I missed the part about fowl (I am dumb)
Accepting the truth is the first part, the next step is aligning your actions to your beliefs. Took me maybe 20 years for that second step.
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.
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.
> Low sodium
What has that got to do with plant-based vs meat?
More accurately, created for the purpose of elimination.
…more accurately, consumption, and more charitably, harvesting.
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."
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?
the difference in the eggs is striking: thicker shells, much deeper orange yolks.
NPR did a great break down of all the trending terms for eggs: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/12/23/370377902/fa...
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.
Males don't produce milk or eggs, and so are killed at a younger age.
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.
AFAIK, about half the cows and chicken being born are male, and “eliminated” applies (even) more to them than to their female counterparts.
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.
Bombs were bombs a hundred years ago and they will still be bombs in 2118.
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).
Here's a Jewish Holocaust survivor https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2h8df0/i_am_an_80year... that gladly uses the word holocaust to talk about what is happening to docile, domesticated animals all over the world.
Here's a notable survivor too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer#Vegetari...
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.
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).
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.
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)?
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.
As for the process of straining it and feeding it to perpetually make more kefir, I've known about that for quite sometime.
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.
But cow milk == killing calves.
Now that is disgusting. Good job finger-waggers, you've just caused more waste and inefficiency in the world because of poor ethics.
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.
This where I stopped reading. Don't let lesser issues get in the way of solving a major one.
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.
And then he wouldn’t have had to shoulder that burden himself all by his lonesome.
I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe something that can sit in your fridge with a valve a kid could turn.
It’s such a simple thing but if your best customers can’t access your product without assistance the industry could actually be losing a lot of money.
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.
https://amr-review.org/sites/default/files/Info%204%20bar%20...
Also, some British supermarkets are now publishing farm antibiotics data from their supply chains:
http://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/waitrose-asda-ms-publish-farm...
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.