LEAF Speak Out: Difficult Questions - Dairy

Where do cows go in winter?

Cows are outdoor animals and the main part of what they eat is grass, so they need to be in fields for this. During the late autumn, winter and early spring, they are housed in big buildings to keep them warmer and fed whilst there is no grass growing. Dairy cows also don’t need to walk so far to the milking parlour.

Why don’t baby calves stay with their mummies?

We keep dairy cows to produce milk, so we separate the cows from their calves so that we can supply milk for you to drink and to add to your breakfast cereals. The calves are very well looked after with other calves, fed milk formula, like human babies sometimes are. We keep some of the calves to become our milking cows and to have their own calves when they are older.

What happens to your bull calves?

The male calves are reared for the beef market, which is done on farms called ‘beef farms’.

Cows produce a lot of methane and are bad for the environment, shouldn’t we move to a diet with less reliance on dairy to help farming’s carbon footprint?

Some people choose to eat, and really enjoy dairy products. Some people eat it for health reasons, for example growing children drink milk to boost their calcium intake.

There are also parts of the UK where we cannot successfully grow vegetable-based diets because soils are poor, and the climate is more wet, such as in parts of Scotland, Wales and south-west England. In these regions, farms can easily grow grass. Humans don’t eat grass, but cows do. If we didn’t have cows and sheep in these areas, there would be limited, or no food produced from the land.