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225 points DonHopkins | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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decimalenough ◴[] No.43700065[source]
China famously now has "dark factories" where everything is automated, so lighting is not needed.

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.)

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Brybry ◴[] No.43701412[source]
Why would we stop at removing the human labor and doing the minimum required to keep cows alive?

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

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

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sayamqazi ◴[] No.43705083[source]
What are the risks of cell cultures develping cancer or even worse ejecting prions into the milk.
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1. LargoLasskhyfv ◴[] No.43711102[source]
Ejecting/flushing them out periodically, and starting over, as it is done for many other agroindustrially used cell cultures already?

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