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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that you haven't spent any actual time on dairy farms. Early in my career I worked in the fertilizer business and a large part of my customer base were dairy farmers.

I worked with dairy farmers with as few as 100 cows and as many as 1200. These were family farms and they cared well for the animals. Antibiotics were only used on sick cows and not as a daily regimen. I really respect those guys, most of them are far better businessmen than the tradesmen in town.

The few times that I saw animals mistreated were farmers who weren't very long for the dairy business.

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There's this prevalent stereotype about vegans that they are very naive and get all of their information from peta and the like. I've worked with hundreds of farm animals and seen conditions even on small family farms. I've been in contact with many animals that were neglected and abused from small farms. Of course the situations are the worst on CAFOs, but certainly not limited to them. I'm sure I have a higher standard than most, but the farms that even approach respectful treatment of animals are in a tiny minority. And those are the products for which you pay a large premium.

As with most agriculture in the US (assuming you're talking about the US), family farms are the exception - not the rule.

"In 2010, of all the farms in the United States with at least $1 million in revenues, 88 percent were family farms, and they accounted for 79 percent of production." -- http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/the-triu...

> as few as 100 cows and as many as 1200

I think those are actually pretty small numbers, and might not even count as CAFOs (confined animal feeding operation), right?

In Michigan a large CAFO is 700 or more dairy cows:

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/deq/wb-npdes-CAFO-rules-fi...

I know that farms much smaller than that have to abide by some of the CAFO rules such as having approved manure application plans.

Several of Michigan's larger farms use the manure to generate their own electricity.

Yeah, I saw similar numbers from EPA docs when I decided I might want to back up my comment, thanks :) but what I'd like to know is what the median size of a dairy farm in the US is, and what proportion of the milk we drink comes from larger operations like those described here, with head counts of 15-20,000: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_farming#Animal_waste_from...

(Of course I know Wikipedia isn't the most reliable and those specifics seem to be lacking citations)

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