Recently Lesley from Eyes on Animals was visiting her parents in Canada for the summer holidays and had the chance to visit a dairy farmer there that was doing things differently. He founded Harmony Organics. Lesley had heard of him from a TV show called La Semaine Verte on CBC and thus knew he and his wife were farming with compassion and showed reciprocity to their animals.
At this farm they take into account the welfare and fate of their calves. Their calves are not put into small individual pens or into plastic igloos to live alone in confinement. Instead the calves are raised in small social groups with “nursing” mothers, in large pens with deep straw. They get to stay with nursing mothers for 6 months and then are gradually weaning off them. They have frequent access to pasture. It is not the same as the fully “calf at foot” dairy farms where the mother cows keep their own calves, as we know and support in the Netherlands such as “Kalverliefde” and “Demeter Zuiver Zuivel koe en kalf blijven samen” (and also Ethical Dairy in the UK, Eltern Zeit in Germany, Five Freedoms Dairy in the USA, How Now Dairy in Australia..), but using nursing cows for calves is still a big step in a positive direction. Nursing cows teach calves social behaviour, provide warmth and safety and enable calves to still suckle. The male calves do leave the dairy farm but go to nearby free-range smaller scale beef farms (not put on long-distance truck journeys or sold via auctions to veal farmers).
Thank you very much to Lawrence and his wife Matty at Harmony Organics for these pioneer steps and setting such a good example that we hope other Canadian dairy farmers will try to follow.
