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

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 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.

In 2014, the most recent year for which USDA data is available on the subject, a majority of large dairy farms (which make up most of the industry) sent their calves to be raised at outside facilities. And since then, the calf-raising industry has, by all accounts, expanded significantly. In California today, a very large share of dairy calves are sent to be raised on calf ranches.

Lewis Bernier, an organizer for DxE who led the investigation of Grimmius, argues that the segmentation of dairy production also makes it easier to hide the nature of dairy farming from consumers. “You can tour a dairy, and you don’t even think about the fact that there are babies constantly being born because you don’t even see them,” Bernier said. “They’re not even there anymore.”

Calf sickness and death, for example, is a routine part of calf rearing: In one clip from DxE’s footage of Grimmius, sick calves are tossed in a pile and killed by rifle. “One of the first things we saw there was calves being dragged out of a truck bed and shot in the head,” King said. Killing by gunshot is an industry-standard form of euthanasia, although throwing calves is forbidden by industry calf-raising guidelines.

Calf ranches often advertise their unique ability to care for young animals. “We provide specialized care for dairy calves during their most vulnerable life stage — and we love it,” Grimmius’s website reads. Because dairy farms are focused on adult, milk-producing cows, they may lack the expertise to raise calves, whereas a dedicated calf ranch can ideally provide more specialized attention.

But some of the footage of Grimmius taken by DxE shows disturbing conditions that appear to be at odds with the calf-raising industry’s own animal care standards. In one clip, a worker appears to push the metal rods of a calf restraint device into the backside of a calf to get the animal to turn around in their hutch. In another, workers are seen unloading calves from a truck and moving them into hutches. The calves are hit with paddles, aggressively pulled by their ears and tails, grabbed by and hit in the face, and pushed in an effort to get them to move. One calf slips down the ramp at the back of the truck after being pushed, falls to the ground, and is grabbed by the ear in an attempt to get the animal to stand.

A handful of veterinarians and animal welfare experts I reached out to for this story, including one who was very concerned about the findings in the footage, were reluctant to comment on the record — a reflection of just how difficult it can be to have open conversations about the treatment of animals in the face of industry power. A few, however, pointed me to a manual by Calf Care and Quality Assurance (CCQA), an industry program that publishes guidelines on the appropriate treatment of calves. According to that document, hitting calves is an “unacceptable” handling practice, as is “pulling by the ears, tail, hair, neck, or a single limb.”

“Calves can be fearful, unsteady on their feet, uncoordinated, and unsure of your expectations of them…These animals must be handled calmly, gently, and with great patience,” the guidance reads.

“Loading and unloading can be the most stressful process for calves,” it continues, adding that “a zero-tolerance policy for unacceptable handling must be in place.”

In a statement, Josh White, senior executive director for producer education at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told me that “​​The practices seen in this video are not representative of Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) guidelines and standards. The BQA program stands by our mission to guide producers towards continuous improvement, using science-based practices to assure cattle well-being, beef quality and food safety.”

The Beef Quality Assurance program, which co-created CCQA, gave Grimmius an award last year for its work.

Revelations of cruelty to dairy cows and their babies have emerged in investigation after investigation into dairy farms of all sizes and styles, including those that call themselves organic, humane, raw, and all manner of other labels. The overwhelming majority of industry workers don’t want to abuse animals, but the very structure of dairy farming makes it hard to avoid because it forces them to interact with animals as commodities. Cows and calves are large, heavy animals, making it difficult for workers under pressure to move them around and get them to do what they want.

“There are so many animals on these sites, and they only have so many people that are there to take care of those animals,” Adrienne Craig, a senior policy associate and staff attorney at AWI who led the organization’s research on calf transportation, told me. “These workers are under time constraints to do the work in short periods of time, and I think that that necessarily translates into rough handling in a lot of cases.”

How tiny, solitary crates affect calves

But the greatest animal welfare problem for calves at Grimmius and across the dairy industry may be their confinement in tiny stalls where they have nothing to do and scant ability to express natural behaviors, something evident in footage of company facilities.

Cows and calves are intensely social herd animals with a hard-wired need for contact with others of their kind. But dairy farming disrupts the normal rhythms of bovine life, beginning with the near-immediate separation of mother cows from their babies after birth. Without the opportunity to nurse, be groomed, and receive round-the-clock care from their mothers, dairy calves in the US, on both dairy farms and calf ranches, are most commonly housed in solitary hutches.

And many of those hutches, especially in the Western US, really are exceptionally small. Standard wooden calf hutches provide about 13 square feet of space per calf, which is enough for them to stand up, lie down, and usually to turn around, but little else. The calves can see and make some nose-to-nose contact with other calves in adjacent hutches, but there is little to no group socializing until they are moved from their hutches to group dirt pens at around two months old. An older, archived version of Grimmius’s site stated that calves are moved out of individual living areas at 60 days old, which is an industry standard and corresponds to the age at which calves are typically weaned, though there can be variation in that threshold; its site now says that calves are moved after weaning.

Many dairy operations and calf ranches use a different, plastic hutch style that provides more space, but smaller wooden hutches, like those used at Grimmius, are particularly common across California and the Southwest. Nationally representative statistics on the use of different hutch types are hard to come by, but one small survey of calf ranches in a peer-reviewed study found that about half allotted calves less than 15 square feet each.

Los Angeles-based veterinarian and animal rights advocate Crystal Heath, who spends much of her time in the Central Valley documenting the conditions of farmed animals there, has filmed many frustrated calves in wooden crates at dairies and calf ranches across the region, engaging in behaviors that signal boredom, such as rolling their tongues and licking at their surroundings. These are “well-recognized coping behaviors associated with early extreme confinement,” Heath, who is the executive director of the nonprofit Our Honor, told me. “The intense boredom, sensory and social deprivation these calves face at the critical period during brain development leads to heightened fear in new environments, social dysfunction, [and] lifelong abnormal behaviors.”

Why house calves like this? The US dairy industry began adopting individual hutch-style housing in the mid-20th century, to reduce disease spread among the youngest animals and simply to ensure each calf is eating enough. (The calves no longer have access to their mothers’ milk, which is reallocated for human consumption.)

Although the industry often argues that solitary hutches are best for calf welfare because they allow them to get individual care, it would probably be more accurate to say that hutches optimize calf health exactly to the extent that it benefits the industry’s bottom line. Dairy farms are businesses: They may care very much if a calf gets sick and loses value, but they may have little incentive to care if a calf is depressed from social isolation and lack of exercise.

I contacted Western United Dairies, a trade group for California dairy farming, for the industry’s perspective on hutches, and received this statement from Michael Payne, a livestock veterinarian at UC Davis’s veterinary school and dairy outreach coordinator for the university’s Western Institute of Food Safety and Security: “Individually housing calves for the first six to eight weeks of life is an essential management tool for dairy and beef calves,” he wrote. “The practice promotes health and welfare of calves primarily by minimizing exposure to respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens from the environment, the dam [the calf’s mother], and other calves. A robust body of scientific literature demonstrates that the use of good sanitation practices — including hutches — improves health, reduces morbidity and mortality, and has no effect on behavior or later productivity.”

In recent years, however, there’s been a turn against solitary hutches even among many industry-affiliated veterinarians and animal welfare experts, who argue that housing calves in pairs is far better for them and does not need to come at the expense of their physical health. Research into the preferences of calves themselves has found that they value social contact so dearly that they will choose to endure conditions like heat stress to remain with their peers. And anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing calves with space to roam freely knows how eager they are to sprint and buck across open pasture.

The Dairy Cattle Welfare Council encourages housing calves in pairs or groups, and even the industry-written Calf Care and Quality Assurance guidelines state that “individually housed calves have a harder time coping with changes in housing and diet and may have cognitive and developmental disadvantages, including poor learning skills and deficient social skills.” It continues: “There are some benefits to having socially reared calves including increased body weight gain and increased feed intake.”

The double standard that leaves dairy calves without protection against confinement

Calf ranches and industrial dairy farms aren’t cruel to cows merely because they’re big — their treatment of animals in many ways is better than the practices on small dairy farms, where it’s not uncommon to tie up cows by their necks. But mega farms reflect the experiences of the overwhelming majority of animals in the dairy industry, and they show the vast scale on which animal welfare on such facilities is sacrificed to achieve economies of scale.

That calves are allowed to be confined in 13-square-foot hutches reflects a profound recent shift in American dairy farming — and a gap in animal welfare law hiding in plain sight.

For decades, the animal advocacy movement has focused on a singular, clear-cut goal: ending extreme confinement. This effort successfully turned “cage-free” into a household phrase and a corporate mandate. In California, that culminated in Proposition 12 — one of the most celebrated and hard-won animal welfare laws in the world. Passed by ballot measure in 2018, Prop 12 bans eggs and pork from animals raised in tiny cages, as well as veal from calves raised in “veal crates” — very small crates, often reported at around 12 square feet, that allow little room for movement. Under the law, veal calves must be allotted at least 43 square feet each. Several states have passed similar laws banning extreme confinement — part of a wave of such legislation championed by animal advocates in the 2000s and 2010s.

But while the movement successfully branded the veal crate as a symbol of cruelty, the dairy industry’s business model was already shifting away from veal. Although veal was once the destiny of many male calves born into the dairy industry, it has cratered in popularity in the US, now amounting to a rounding error in the nation’s overall meat production. As a result, bans on veal crates don’t actually protect very many animals in practice. And, meanwhile, state crate-free laws don’t offer any protection to the millions of other dairy calves kept in tiny hutches, even though they are often similar in size to veal crates.

Following the collapse of veal production, raising calves for beef has rapidly become a core part of the dairy industry’s business structure, with the majority of dairy farms now cross-breeding dairy cows with Angus beef genetics to produce offspring that are more valuable on the beef market (a service that Grimmius supports by selling bull semen). Because these animals are destined for burgers rather than for veal piccata, they are legally allowed to be kept in conditions that would be illegal under Prop 12 if they were being raised for veal.

“The public is against these practices overwhelmingly,” DxE’s King said. “And I think the public’s just been deceived and thinks that they voted to ban this, but in reality, there’s this massive loophole” for dairy calves.

States have many other individual laws pertaining to animal health and welfare at their disposal. In November, DxE sent a criminal complaint to Sarah Hacker, the district attorney for Kings County, California, where one of the Grimmius facilities that they filmed is located. They alleged, among other things, that Grimmius’s confinement of calves in hutches violates a California law, separate from Prop 12, that requires confined animals to be allotted an “adequate exercise area.” But in a letter replying to the complaint, Hacker did not reference the “adequate exercise” law. Instead, she wrote, the confinement was not illegal because “the calves are not raised for veal, meaning the specific square-footage requirements for veal production do not apply.”

In a statement to Vox, Hacker did not directly respond to a question about how an “adequate exercise area” is defined, but wrote that an investigation into Grimmius’s facilities in response to DxE’s complaint found that the company “maintains its calf raising program in compliance with the law and industry standards,” and that it “worked closely with veterinarians and state officials to provide a safe and healthy environment for their calves.”

The vagueness of California’s “adequate exercise” law, compared to the specific provisions of Prop 12, limits the leverage that rural county prosecutors like Hacker might otherwise have to enforce the law in animals’ favor. But there is an obvious absurdity to basing an animal’s right to movement not on their biological needs, but on their eventual market destination.

“Laws like Prop 12 give both the public and prosecutors a false sense that the problem of egregious harms to animals has been remedied and no further action is necessary,” Justin Marceau, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a Vox contributor, told me. “Calves raised in hutches suffer in unconscionable ways, but Prop 12 — ostensibly the most robust animal welfare law in the country — ignores these animals entirely,” he added.

The success of state animal confinement laws, including Prop 12 and others, represented tremendous progress for millions of animals and a rare political victory for the tiny animal rights movement. The absence of calf hutches from those laws is mostly an artifact of path dependence and political pragmatism — it would have been an overwhelming feat to challenge a central practice of California’s powerful dairy industry.

And now, the era of passing new anti-confinement laws has mostly passed, Josh Balk, a veteran animal advocate who was a key strategist in the state-by-state movement to ban extreme confinement, told me. Amending them to cover all dairy calves would be an enormous undertaking, and it’s not clear whether it would be the best use of animal advocates’ limited resources. The animal movement has largely moved on to other priorities, particularly focusing on helping animals who are raised for food in the greatest numbers and experience the greatest suffering. By that measure, it is hard for calves to compete for attention with the suffering of chickens, more than 9 billion of whom are slaughtered for meat every year in the US.

Still, that strategic math does not make it easy to ignore the misery of millions of sensitive baby cows trapped in small wooden crates. Balk himself is unequivocal about the cruelty of the practice: “It’s completely shameful what they’re doing to those poor calves,” he said. Their suffering represents a still-unfinished mandate in the long fight to end the worst abuses in our food system.