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The giant loophole that lets Big Dairy keep baby cows in solitary confinement

Americans ditched veal. What replaced it may be just as bad.

The dairy industry uses cows to make two things: milk and baby cows. The milk, we know its fate. But what of those 9 million babies born to dairy cows each year?

Many get carted off — sometimes over great distances, typically at not more than a few days old — to live out their calfhoods at a place like Grimmius Cattle Company.

Spanning hundreds of acres across its two main locations in Tulare County and Kings County, California, in the heart of California’s Central Valley, Grimmius provides a transient home for close to 200,000 calves at any given time in their first months of life. Seen from above, Grimmius’s hundreds of identical rows sprout from the ground with the neat uniformity of an urban street grid. Each of the newborn calves that populate this miniature city occupies what Grimmius calls “apartments” — individual outdoor hutches, less than one-tenth the size of a typical parking spot.

The Central Valley is America’s top milk-producing region, known for its dense concentration of mega dairies. But Grimmius isn’t one of them. Instead, its work — and that of similar calf-ranching companies — is a little-known but essential component of industrial-scale dairy: It raises calves on dairy farms’ behalf during the fragile infant stage in which they’re too young to bring in any revenue.

Dairy farming revolves around constant reproduction, since cows, like humans and other mammals, must give birth in order to lactate. And so, on dairy farms across the country, calves are constantly being born. Some will eventually replace their mothers as dairy cows, while the male calves — and some “excess females,” too — are raised for beef. Increasingly over the last few decades, dairy farms have been outsourcing the raising of these calves, including those destined for both dairy and beef production, to specialized, large-scale facilities known as “calf ranches” or “calf nurseries.”

Grimmius is the largest such calf raiser by population in California, according to the most recent available data from the State Water Resources Control Board. It’s a mega-farm in its own right, easily surpassing the size of many of the largest dairies in the US. “It is the heart of factory farming,” said Cassie King, communications lead for the animal rights advocacy group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). “It’s linking so many different factory farms, so many dairies across the state, and multiple massive feedlots.”

Over the course of about six months starting last August, DxE filmed Grimmius’s operations using drone cameras, documenting many of the grim realities ubiquitous in the mass production of animals for food: calves being handled roughly, hit, and pushed to the ground. But perhaps most remarkably, the footage offers a rare view of what is arguably the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals in the US.

Farm animal advocates have, over the last few decades, successfully drawn public attention to and meaningfully reduced the caging of egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs, and calves being raised for veal. But the routine isolation of millions of dairy industry-born baby cows in their formative months of life, in crates where they are deprived of physical and social stimulation, has not received nearly as much scrutiny.

Grimmius, on its website and social media, expresses pride in its animal care. I had hoped to speak with the company about the context behind the findings in DxE’s footage, but it did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls seeking an interview for this story.

The dairy business is, at bottom, organized around the hyper-optimization and commodification of one of life’s most intimate processes: pregnancy, birth, lactation. The rising importance of calf ranches, where calves are confined by themselves by the hundreds of thousands, represents one particularly extreme expression of that logic. It’s a stark reflection of how little dairy farming resembles the picture that many Americans have in their minds of free-roaming cows on pasture. And it is made possible by a striking lack of policy attention to the plight of these vulnerable, highly social animals.

The life of a dairy cow

Understanding the dairy industry can teach us a lot about how animal agriculture shapes the life cycle of animals and optimizes them for profit. Last year, I wrote a comic about the life of a dairy cow, from birth to death, exploring how cows are treated at each life stage, usually at the expense of animal welfare. Read it here!

The baby cow supply chain

Grimmius Cattle Company’s business model, and that of calf ranches more broadly, tracks one of the most important shifts in the economics of dairy over the last several decades: As US dairy farms have consolidated into mega dairies housing thousands or even tens of thousands of cows each, they have found it more profitable to hand off calf-raising to outside companies.

To grow up on a calf ranch, newborn calves must first make the journey there — and that itself is no small obstacle. Transit is taxing for any farmed animal, and it is even more so for babies. The fragile newborn animals are loaded into semi-trailers, which can be high in disease-carrying pathogens, for hours-long journeys often without food, water, or temperature control; they’re jostled around, often overcrowded, and frequently handled roughly by workers who must quickly load and unload them.

A 2024 investigation by the nonprofits Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) and Animals’ Angels found that dairy farms across the country were shipping neonatal calves, umbilical cords still attached, to calf ranches on stressful journeys of hundreds or even upwards of a thousand miles away. California’s Central Valley and the Southwestern US, which are hubs of the calf ranching industry and where summer temperatures often soar into the triple digits, are especially popular destinations, even for calves from far-flung states. Public records obtained by AWI show that in 2022, Grimmius received calves from as far away as Fair Oaks, Indiana, a more than 30-hour drive away.

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