How dairy robots are changing work for cows and farmers

Guess this means we're about to have "dark dairies" where cows can be kept chained up in perpetual darkness, with robots doing the absolute minimum required to keep them alive, pregnant and producing milk.

I know this is not a particularly pleasant thought, but I'd like to hear counterarguments about why this wouldn't happen, since to me it seems market pressures will otherwise drive dairies in this direction.

(For what it's worth, I'm not a vegan, but a visit to a regular human-run dairy sufficiently confident in its practices to conduct tours for the public was almost enough to put me off dairy products for good.)

https://www.machinemetrics.com/blog/lights-out-manufacturing

As far as why your scenario wouldn't happen: why would it? You can dream up anything you like, doesn't mean it makes sense.

More generally, the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024. Cows don't have a "non-factory" label but I don't see why one wouldn't be as successful. You also supposedly get more milk per cow the nice way.

The far future will have ever more cows per capita given human fertility trends, so I don't see the preference for quality over quantity regressing, or any sudden need to produce more milk than ever.

We could not have cows at all: bioreactors producing milk from cell cultures.

https://jasbsci.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40104-02...

Quality tech can actually improve animal welfare, as shifting costs from labor into capital makes quality of care improve.

Now, this doesn't always line up well in all kinds of animal husbandry, but you went and looked at one case where it does. The dark dairy you imagine would most likely lose money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Up880afV_qs

(Not unlike human employers who have an incentive to treat their employees well but often don't.)

Farm organizations like to say farmers have every reason to keep their livestock in the best condition, implying that they're frolicking on pasture in peak health, but that's not really true. A lot of times it means miserable condition on concrete or a freezing feedlot. Livestock animals, like humans, are resilient and can keep producing through some pretty terrible treatment. The only ways to combat that seem to be A) customers who actively seek out farms that practice good animal welfare practices, or B) reasonable animal welfare laws.

Small, direct-to-customer farms are the ones most likely to lean into customer-pleasing animal welfare practices. But to profitably sell direct to customers within the law in most US jurisdictions, a dairy pretty much has to put in its own pasteurization setup, a major investment. That's kept dairy from developing the equivalent of cage-free eggs.

No one buys pigs and cows grown chained inside abandoned mineshafts. It doesn't save any costs and just doesn't make sense.

What does that really mean, though? A farmer down the road produces "free-range" chickens. While it is true that the operation is technically setup for it, which is what is required to meet certification, never in my life have I seen the barn doors open.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_count

Cheese comes to mind, Qorn, aromes in cell cultures on wet sawdust sold as 'nature identical', countless more I don't remember ATM.