328
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
328 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3794 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Totally unrelated, but that's actually what we're doing with cows. Killing them of at age 3 bc they don't give enough milk anymore
It's what we always did with cows. To have a dairy cow you need to repeatedly get it pregnant. Why keep feeding an older less productive cow that has already calved 4 or 5 times when you've already got yourself a few new heifers.
fyi most dairy cows are kept beyond the age of 3. You can see on the World Dairy Expo YouTube channel that there are cows producing up to the age of 6.
Heifers reach puberty at about 12 months old, but some delay until up to 20 months old. After breeding they gestate for 283 days (almost 9 1/2 months), give birth to their calf and give milk for about 10 months. "Culling" a cow at the age of three would mean only getting 2 full lactation cycles of milk from them, which isn't super economical.
You're not too far off the mark, though: once any individual animal becomes less profitable than a new one could be, they get culled.
Yeah, im not that big on the details, since I don't support those industries at all.