These robots don't look conducive to automating the labor specific to factory farming. Overlap with manure cleanup at best, but do factory farms have spacious enough layouts to be compatible with those?
More generally, the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024. Cows don't have a "non-factory" label but I don't see why one wouldn't be as successful. You also supposedly get more milk per cow the nice way.
The far future will have ever more cows per capita given human fertility trends, so I don't see the preference for quality over quantity regressing, or any sudden need to produce more milk than ever.
Where I live, there are still some small, family-run dairies, and they all have customers who come to them looking for local, pasture-raised, raw milk. People will even break the law to get it, so there's definitely a market, but current regulations make it difficult to serve it.
Small, direct-to-customer farms are the ones most likely to lean into customer-pleasing animal welfare practices. But to profitably sell direct to customers within the law in most US jurisdictions, a dairy pretty much has to put in its own pasteurization setup, a major investment. That's kept dairy from developing the equivalent of cage-free eggs.
> the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024.
What does that really mean, though? A farmer down the road produces "free-range" chickens. While it is true that the operation is technically setup for it, which is what is required to meet certification, never in my life have I seen the barn doors open.
More generally, the egg market in the US has gone from 4% cage-free in 2010 to 39.7% cage-free in 2024. Cows don't have a "non-factory" label but I don't see why one wouldn't be as successful. You also supposedly get more milk per cow the nice way.
The far future will have ever more cows per capita given human fertility trends, so I don't see the preference for quality over quantity regressing, or any sudden need to produce more milk than ever.