On the death of my family's dairy farm

This is not just an environmental and animal welfare concern, although it certainly is those things. But it's also a national security issue of the first order. One of the ways big factory farms work so efficiently is by utilizing mono-cropping. They'll plant acre after acre after acre of exactly the same strain of a crop. That gets their efficiency, and hence their profit margin, as high as possible. You don't have to do anything differently in order to support…

I visited a dairy in Utah a couple of summers ago. 130 cows, 3 employees. It's a fully automated facility, using equipment from Germany. The cows enter a stall, the machine milks them, gives them a treat, they move on. Employees get a text if a cow hasn't milked itself in a while... usually a tap on their shoulder is enough to get them to walk over to the machine. Even yet, the person giving the tour said they don't…

This is the blog post I mentioned I was working on in an HN comment[1] from a couple of months ago about dairy farms that got some traction. Unfortunately it took me a couple months to finish rather than a couple weeks. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942467