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Milk; it has something for every industrial scale

June 12, 2009

GrrlScientist is on a roll finding super-interesting videos, and this latest one is fairly mind-blowing: What does a mega-industrial dairy farm look like?  As in, how do you manage a dairy farm large enough to produce all the liquid-milk needs of Chicago and Indianapolis combined?

The farm has a visitor’s center, with animatronics, tours, a birthing theater (eighty calfs a day) so city-slickers can see the wonder of life and all that.  The whole video is worth it just to see the milking carousel.  As you might expect a lot of Information Technology is at work managing the cows, right down to tracking each one’s milk production and making sure they move enough to be healthy. 

And what do you do with all that poop?  Generate a lot of electricity with it, turns out.

The narrator reminds me of Charles Kuralt, the peripatetic journalist of Americana.  So if there’s a dark side to this facility, you won’t see it in the video.  But it’s interesting to contemplate a mega-farm that opens up so much of its operation to public observation.  It’s also one of those; “bet you never imagined the scale of this industry” moments.  When I hear calls to change one industry or another, most people are thinking in much smaller-than-reality terms. There are a lot of moving parts in the system that they don’t consider because they aren’t aware of them.

Categories: Uncategorized
  1. June 13, 2009 at 07:51 | #1

    All this industry for a product which, if it wasn’t around, wouldn’t really matter much to adult nutrition.

    I hear dairy prices at the farm have slumped a lot, but not at the grocery. Hmmm.

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