The mystery of the missing dairy calves July 1, 2010
Posted by Angelique in Animal welfare.Tags: animal ag, animal rights, Animal welfare, cows, Food ethics, veal
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Warning: math ahead!
One of the dairy industry’s biggest PR problems is the mystery surrounding what happens to its calves. What do dairy farmers do with their male calves, anyway? They can’t produce milk. Very few are kept for breeding, given the prevalence of artificial insemination, which makes the semen of one desirable bull available to as many as 60,000 cows (!). Many organizations suspicious of livestock farming would have you think they’re delivered into the notoriously cruel hands of veal operations or are simply left to die. For example, these reports from GoVeg.com, Mercy for Animals and even Wikipedia suggest that most dairy calves are used for veal production. But all the dairy farmers I’ve interviewed, and dairy expert Marcia Endres of the University of Minnesota, claim that dairies commonly sell male calves for beef, not veal. No one admitted to just leaving the animals to die, which in any case would be a financially stupid thing for a farmer to do. So are the animal welfare activists right that most unwanted male calves suffer an ignominious end, or do the practices of small, local Minnesota producers who sell their calves for beef more accurately represent the industry?
Unfortunately, I don’t have a completely airtight answer to this question. The most straightforward way to resolve it would be to see how many male calves are born every year, and how many of those go into beef production vs. veal production vs. “disappear,” i.e. are left to die. However, it seems that no one has tracked the number of dairy calves entering beef production since a 1994 study by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The numbers for that study are unlikely to be accurate today, but I’ll note for the sake of completeness that they state that six million dairy calves entered the combined beef and veal industries. Extrapolating from USDA milk production numbers in 1994, those six million calves came from only about 9.4 million dairy cows. Considering that additional female calves were raised to replenish dairy herds, it is extremely unlikely that there would have been any surplus calves to simply leave to die.
Extrapolating from the fragments of more recent data that are available, we can confidently say that at the very least, the majority of male dairy calves are NOT going into veal production. Several websites, including the American Welfare Institute, ATTRA, and Active Farming, quote a number of approximately four million male calves currently born to nine million dairy cows annually. The USDA’s Economic Research Service verifies the nine million number, but I can’t find anything to verify the four million estimate, so let’s use a more conservative – that is, industry-critical – assumption. Of the nine million dairy cows, I’ll assume that 40% are too young to have borne a calf yet. (Cows typically calve for the first time at two years old, and at industrial farms live only about three years after that, bearing one calf per year. So 40% of their lives are non-calf bearing, and 60% are calf-bearing.) That brings the number of cows that are actually bearing calves from nine million to 5.4 million. Of those, half bear female calves, so the number of unwanted male calves could be as low as 2.7 million. Let’s use that number for now.
As I mentioned above, no one is tracking the number of dairy calves that currently enter beef production, but fortunately the USDA’s National Agriculture Statistics Service tracks the number that become veal. In 2009 it was 980,000. Let’s make it easy and call it a million. This number doesn’t include animals that were imported and exported for veal production, but since the USDA stopped separating veal and beef imports and exports in 1989, we can safely assume that those numbers are too small to influence the result significantly. So in the worst case scenario, a million out of the 2.7 million male dairy calves in the US go into veal production, which is about a third of them. And remember that our estimate of 2.7 million calves was conservative; if there are more male calves, then the percent that’s being used for veal will compute out even lower.
Thus we can safely conclude that it is NOT true that most male dairy calves in the US are used for veal. That begs the question whether the remaining two-thirds are used for beef or left to die; but plain old business sense would suggest that farmers are unlikely to waste a resource that could make them a few bucks. My money is on the beef.
The 9 million figure refers to milking cows and does not include heifers, so removing 40% is unnecessary.
For more information on dairy beef: http://www.extension.umn.edu/dairy/management/dairybeef.htm
Thanks for the clarification – in that case, the percent that go to veal operations is even smaller.
There are many beef programs based on Holstein bull calves, they just don’t advertise it as such. A tell-tale sign is if the meat is marketed as being from a single breed. Personally and professionally, I do not understand why the beef isn’t marketed as Holstein; it can be delicious.
With regard to abandoning or killing male calves at birth, the price per head farmers can get in the most recent past is often below the cost of selling them. In other words, rather than receive a check from the auction house, farmers receive a bill.
Thanks for your comment, Carrie. So it sounds like abandoning/ killing calves at birth could be financially advantageous for farmers in some markets. That’s a shame.
And the other cost that people forget about is feeding that calf to weaning. Either you use milk, which you then cannot sell or you buy milk replacer which is expensive! So your time to feed the calves isn’t paid for and then you loose money at the auction. Not good. That is why we need to re-integrate farms, Old McDonald style and make it benefit that farmer. As it is, it’s much easier to specialize. To raise beef and dairy requires several licenses!
No mention of the fact that the majority of male calves at auctions are from the dairy industry and sold for $15 to $20 each. That would contradict the assumption here of the author that a farmer would not want to take the loss of the male calves and therefore not value them for purposes other than veal. On the contrary such low value on the newborn male calf would make them a liability rather than an asset.
This is a great article and one that needed to be written . Thanks for sharing it.
i do not understand the point the author is trying to make. the production of veal is cruel and unthinkable. whether 500,000, 1 million or 10 million calves are submitted to this torture what moral difference does it make?
as to whether male calves are killed for beef or left to die what is the difference? they are still killed regardless of what happens to their bodies afterwards and it is the production of dairy products that requires this early death. perhaps the author is making some kind of twisted malthusian argument that as long as a calves die in satiation of our demand for blood milk and blood meats then this unimaginable horror is justified. the only moral wrong imaginable is that the killing machine is not efficient.
if you want to eat your “pc” beef and dairy products then be assured that ben and jerry and their ilk applaud your complacency. but please don’t mindlessly repeat the meat and dairy industry’s justification (organic or not) that it’s cruelty free. cruelty free dairy is an oxymoron.
thank you