Ah a full stack failure. That is when you decide to change (or implement) everything in the full stack from raw material to consumer in one go. As a "go to market" strategy it is usually fatal. In the technology business it is a company that makes their own CPU, their own operating system, and then opens their own retail stores for selling their computers with their own software. Plastic Logic failed this way when instead of just marketing their screens they tried to build an entire reader (screen/case/os/etc).
Based on the telling of the tale, a different strategy might have been to a milk packer that used re-usable glass bottles. Buy milk from Fronterra, then package it in re-usable packaging, and work with the grocery stores to stock it and handle the returns. Work that cycle developing tools and processes that get the use of reusable containers to the same level of efficiency as the plastic containers. That is like a 5 year project right there. Surveys of stores on their return process, helping them improve it, maybe building receiving kiosks that handle it without the store having to train employees to do the return.
Just doing that and you have helped the dairy business be more sustainable. Once that is running, then start looking at remote milking the cows. Your bottling company now has two brands, "earth friendly" milk in sustainable bottles, and "earth and cow friendly" milk in sustainable bottles from happy cows.
Many problem solvers fail to take into account that a solution does not all have to be done in one swoop, but that it can be made much less risky and more likely to succeed by proceeding in stages. Only Superman jumps buildings in a single bound. The rest of us have to use the stairs.
The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.
The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf. The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain. Since that age, whenever I hear anyone postulate that animals cannot really feel emotions, I need only to replay that torturous sound in my memory of that mother cow crying her bovine heart out to her infant. Mother's love knows no species barriers...
Why not just compromise on the plastic jugs? I don't understand why he was so hung up on the plastic jugs. The humane milking part seems much more important, and more people would probably buy it in that form.
Why would customers who didn't recycle the plastic bottles be more inclined to recycle the glass jugs? Just to get a tiny deposit back?
Here in small-town Kansas, we buy our milk at the supermarket. You can choose from the store brand in plastic or a local dairy, Hildebrand Farms, in glass jars. If you go with the local stuff, you pay a $3 deposit on the bottle. It's a strong incentive to return them. We wait until we have four or five jars and return them in a batch. The milk is fantastic and I've toured their dairy so I know what I'm getting and where it came from.
Because, economics aside, it's a waste, and it hurts the Earth. There's literally an island of garbage, mostly plastic, just floating around in the ocean, killing sea turtles and other cute animals.
You may not care, but some people (customers, as they are known colloquially) do.
For those who didn't actually get to the end of the article, he hasn't given up yet -- he made the decision to, and then the overwhelming support he received changed his mind. He's still "fighting the good fight" for the sake of kinder treatment of cows and letting them stay with their calves.
“And then my fatal flaw emerged. The one that got me past all those early ‘no’s and sustained me through four years of hard graft – my relentless optimism.
So 24 hours later, I was back on Facebook, sketching out ideas on how Happy Cow V.2 might work.
Change is hard. You have to climb over a lot of ‘no’s to get there. But this story might not be quite over.
If you would like to help our cause please consider signing up for updates at happycowmilk.co.nz“
> So you’d ask, what about reusable milk cans or kegs to supply cafes? Again. No.
Every time I go to a coffeehouse I see that, even in the biggest chains, baristas serve milks (animal/plant based) from normal bottles. I have always wondered why is that: aside of how wasteful it is, isn't it also more expensive?
The word “wasteful” is only meaningful in the context of a valuable resource that is being consumed. Automated manufacturing of disposable containers uses very little valuable resources, as is reflected in their monetary cost. The logistics of reusing more durable containers consumes substantial valuable human resources, resulting in the use of the solution that is consuming the least, on a value basis.
Human time is not free, and manufactured goods are far less expensive than people imagine, because they are not produced by human labor. The cost to mechanically produce a disposable package is not the same as it intuitively would cost you personally to make a package.
I've just started going to a cafe in London which uses a kind of tap to fill the milk jug from a keg. They get a keg delivered, and then when the keg's empty it goes back, gets cleaned and refilled for another customer. It's one of those things that when you see it, you think why isn't everywhere doing this? Especially eco-conscious coffee shops.
It may have something to do with getting back and cleaning up the reusable containers afterwards.
I remember that in Germany my school had a system to sell little glas milk bottles, and they were reused. Milk is still sold in glass bottles sometimes, but these bottles are just recycled.
And here is a successful way to do a similar idea in NZ with unpasteurised milk in reusable containers that has been going for many years on a few farms:
Disagree. This startup is using genetically engineered yeast to produce milk proteins which can be used to form things that are exactly like milk: http://www.perfectdayfoods.com/ They're launching soon.
Shouldn't it be possible to give the calf all the milk until it's old enough to wean, but keep milking the mother.
I think that's what they used to do in the days of sustenance farming.
Of course, if the calf was a boy they would slaughter it about then. But that's another discussion entirely.
He believes everything has to be perfect or if not he does not do it. Because of that at the end of the day we have nothing.
With a company you need to compromise. Probably you can no use glass, but you can use polyethylene and paper (tetrabrick).
Step by step you could do a lot. We take lots of technical debt, if we make something that is not a perfect solution but it is better than anything that exist on the world, we ship it. The world improves.
Yes, it is not perfect, but if the product success over time you could pay your technical debt and make it perfect. If not , it just means that people's pockets is not where their mouth is(which is common by the way).
I think it was Seymour Cray that said to push the boundary in one dimension at a time.
However, in this person was trying to do two new things at the same time: reusable glass bottles and humane cow treatment. Both of those caused friction with the existing infrastructure. I think that if he had just tried to have humane cow treatment and just used the disposable bottles that everyone was using, he would have had a better chance to succeed.
The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones.
A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year. No one gives a damn.
Heck, even I don't. I drink my milk and eat my chicken. I consider those things mine and don't care if the milk is a product of forced selection that created a monster of a species, or that chicken is a flesh of an innocent animal.
I do not even care about what it does to the environment.
I'm voting with my money to have this practice continue.
The whole system is built for meat and milk to work. Yeah, it's some wierd suboptimal local minimum but that's what it is. I live in a meat culture and don't care if I can survive eating only plants.
People care enough to pay extra for cage-free chicken eggs at the supermarket. My local Safeway has about as many cage-free offerings as not. So people do care, and enough that catering to it is profitable. The question is whether they care enough to pay enough extra to significantly affect treatment of animals.
And who knows what the limit is as we grow wealthy enough to willingly pay extra to salve our souls. With enough wealth and wokeness, could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?
I have an old book somewhere that said the dairy cow is the most efficient way to convert the grass on a rocky hillside into human-usable protein.
Meat is rather inefficient. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman who designed more humane slaughterhouse systems. A quote in the HBO movie about her sticks with me: "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."
" The thing is, people don't really care about animals. Especially not the kind, calm and docile ones."
That's the beauty of our modern society. Most of us never see the dirty stuff that's going on. We only get a very sterilized image of the world. Just go into a chicken or pig farm and see how horrific the conditions really are. But we get protected from having to see this and get our meat with nice clean pictures on it.
Some years ago I saw a video some journalists that got in a "surgical" airstrike. Same thing. We only see clean images from above but their footage showed had terrible such a strike is. Cut off limbs everywhere, people screaming, badly burned children. This took my excitement for modern weaponry down a lot.
We are now as cruel or probably more cruel than people in that past. We just don't have to see it anymore because only a few people will do the dirty work.
I do have an addition to offer to your first sentence. The thing is, people don't care about almost anything that affects others (or even themselves). Most people act or react based on their habits and what's convenient for them. If most people were rational, then things would be a lot better for humans and non-humans.
Since you yourself referred to it as "a holocaust", and seem to know more, you could still make changes, however small they may seem to anyone else (or even to you).
He went way too big. This is a business plan that needs to start very locally. Trying to hit retailer shelves with this is counter to the premise of sustainability; if a combustion engine is used for shipping the milk, and if refrigeration is used, there is no sustainability left. We ferment milk, using what's called 'kefir' bacteria's - the health benefits compared to raw milk are hard to believe, and the milk can sit at room temperature for over a year without any problems. We make cheese with it and it ages very well. Raw milk isn't sustainable.
>He went way too big. This is a business plan that needs to start very locally. Trying to hit retailer shelves with this is counter to the premise of sustainability.
That sounds reasonable but the scale and population of NZ prevents this. Many 'Cities' here, excluding the biggest few, would be considered small towns in most other countries. Regardless of the small scale, corner stores are owned by one of two big groups. The non-retailers you're imagining him leveraging don't really exist here on any scale that would work.
The population, outside of these few cities is so sparse that there's no small-scale retain presence. So if you attempt to start local you're selling to a market of a few hundred, at best. Of that market you would need significant uptake to make any headway.
> We ferment milk, using what's called 'kefir' bacteria's - the health benefits compared to raw milk are hard to believe, and the milk can sit at room temperature for over a year without any problems.
Once you ferment it, isn't it yogurt, and no longer milk? Do you use it for beverages like coffee, tea, shakes, etc.? If you leave it out for a year (or even a few weeks), doesn't it get completely fermented and become sour? Doesn't it get fungus after a few weeks? Or do you turn it into cheese soon after fermenting (which has a much longer life)?
> But I wasn’t comfortable with the practice of removing calves from mothers and sending four-day-old calves to be slaughtered.
Calves are a by-product of milk. The world doesn't need calves, doesn't want (or like) veal. Calves exist because in order to get milk, we need to get the cows pregnant. Then we kill the calves.
There is no other way to get cow milk; there is no way to make "humane" milk. We can either, not use milk, or devise a way to produce synthetic milk.
It doesn't have to be like that. I grew up on a Norwegian dairy farm. Killing calves is not something that my parents or anyone else in the business did. Female calves get to grow up and become milk cows, for male calves they are kept around until they are full grown and then get slaughtered for meat. There is a lot of places where this isn't the standard procedure, but it is an option.
There’s consumer demand for veal. It’s delicious. Companies just don’t want the headaches caused by the finger-waggers. So many male calves are shot and discarded instead of becoming food. It’s insane.
That's weird. In Canada every health food store carries organic milk in glass bottles for about $3/L. Not sure if the calves are taken from their mothers or not, but the farming practices of the particular brand I'm talking about ensure healthy soil. It's not as cheap as plastic jug milk, but the stores give you I think $.50 for returning the bottles.
> At this point you might just decide that there’s no way around this and put your milk in plastic bottles. This is what most smart people would do. But I know that most of the plastic milk bottles in New Zealand are not actually recycled. And so I built my own milk factory.
This where I stopped reading. Don't let lesser issues get in the way of solving a major one.
The dairy industry is about the worst industry to start anything. I've seen it up close in Germany, where some milk farmers still want to expand or set up new farms, despite lamenting about the poor price of milk. The farmers seem to have some kind of myopia where all they see is milk farming, and damn if the market needs it.
And it's going to get worst. Pretty soon we will discover that you don't need a whole cow to make some milk. Substitutes for milk components are already in use everywhere, but it shouldn't be that difficult to produce "authentic" milk proteins and other components using synthetic biology.
Before that, maybe we don't need a calve from every cow, improving at least that part of the animal welfare issue.
And even a "disruptor" with cow-less milk may fail quickly, as consumers don't like change and milk is so damn cheap anyway.
Why not just go with paper milk cartons? They are very recyclable and biodegradeable and I think it would be easy to find a supplier/packager and the stores would have no problem selling it.
if your customers are willing to pay a premium for your product just because you are doing things in a more humane way then they are probably also the type to actually recycle their cartons.
Honestly, going for carton seems like it would have made his whole thing a lot easier and it's not that bad. Also easier to brand I think since the whole thing can be printed on.
IMO, the biggest mistake he made was not keeping in touch with the final consumers of the product, as he was building the rest of the process. If he’d done regular posts on social media about what he was trying to do, he could have gotten good feedback and contacts with like-minded people much earlier.
And then he wouldn’t have had to shoulder that burden himself all by his lonesome.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|7 years ago|reply
Based on the telling of the tale, a different strategy might have been to a milk packer that used re-usable glass bottles. Buy milk from Fronterra, then package it in re-usable packaging, and work with the grocery stores to stock it and handle the returns. Work that cycle developing tools and processes that get the use of reusable containers to the same level of efficiency as the plastic containers. That is like a 5 year project right there. Surveys of stores on their return process, helping them improve it, maybe building receiving kiosks that handle it without the store having to train employees to do the return.
Just doing that and you have helped the dairy business be more sustainable. Once that is running, then start looking at remote milking the cows. Your bottling company now has two brands, "earth friendly" milk in sustainable bottles, and "earth and cow friendly" milk in sustainable bottles from happy cows.
[+] [-] tomohawk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miles|7 years ago|reply
The human body has no more need for cows' milk than it does for dogs' milk, horses' milk, or giraffes' milk.
The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf. The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain. Since that age, whenever I hear anyone postulate that animals cannot really feel emotions, I need only to replay that torturous sound in my memory of that mother cow crying her bovine heart out to her infant. Mother's love knows no species barriers...
[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michael_Klaper
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimmaswell|7 years ago|reply
Why would customers who didn't recycle the plastic bottles be more inclined to recycle the glass jugs? Just to get a tiny deposit back?
[+] [-] chrissnell|7 years ago|reply
http://hildebrandfarmsdairy.com
[+] [-] fragmede|7 years ago|reply
You may not care, but some people (customers, as they are known colloquially) do.
[+] [-] zebraflask|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chias|7 years ago|reply
More info (and you can also support him) here: https://www.happycowmilk.co.nz/
[+] [-] igravious|7 years ago|reply
“And then my fatal flaw emerged. The one that got me past all those early ‘no’s and sustained me through four years of hard graft – my relentless optimism.
So 24 hours later, I was back on Facebook, sketching out ideas on how Happy Cow V.2 might work.
Change is hard. You have to climb over a lot of ‘no’s to get there. But this story might not be quite over.
If you would like to help our cause please consider signing up for updates at happycowmilk.co.nz“
[+] [-] _nalply|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pera|7 years ago|reply
> So you’d ask, what about reusable milk cans or kegs to supply cafes? Again. No.
Every time I go to a coffeehouse I see that, even in the biggest chains, baristas serve milks (animal/plant based) from normal bottles. I have always wondered why is that: aside of how wasteful it is, isn't it also more expensive?
[+] [-] trevyn|7 years ago|reply
Human time is not free, and manufactured goods are far less expensive than people imagine, because they are not produced by human labor. The cost to mechanically produce a disposable package is not the same as it intuitively would cost you personally to make a package.
[+] [-] cjrp|7 years ago|reply
Similar to this: http://www.moobar.com.au/
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|7 years ago|reply
I remember that in Germany my school had a system to sell little glas milk bottles, and they were reused. Milk is still sold in glass bottles sometimes, but these bottles are just recycled.
[+] [-] robocat|7 years ago|reply
http://www.villagemilk.co.nz
http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/04/raw-milk-v...
[+] [-] wes-k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmgrosen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anoncoward111|7 years ago|reply
But as for almond milk and soy milk and coconut milk, their taste, to me, is clearly superior to cow's milk.
[+] [-] gnud|7 years ago|reply
Of course, if the calf was a boy they would slaughter it about then. But that's another discussion entirely.
[+] [-] rhn_mk1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matte_black|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scarblac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pipio21|7 years ago|reply
He believes everything has to be perfect or if not he does not do it. Because of that at the end of the day we have nothing.
With a company you need to compromise. Probably you can no use glass, but you can use polyethylene and paper (tetrabrick).
Step by step you could do a lot. We take lots of technical debt, if we make something that is not a perfect solution but it is better than anything that exist on the world, we ship it. The world improves.
Yes, it is not perfect, but if the product success over time you could pay your technical debt and make it perfect. If not , it just means that people's pockets is not where their mouth is(which is common by the way).
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|7 years ago|reply
However, in this person was trying to do two new things at the same time: reusable glass bottles and humane cow treatment. Both of those caused friction with the existing infrastructure. I think that if he had just tried to have humane cow treatment and just used the disposable bottles that everyone was using, he would have had a better chance to succeed.
[+] [-] btcindivist|7 years ago|reply
A holocaust is happening currently, 60 billion most docile and mostly female cows and fowls are eliminated every year. No one gives a damn.
Heck, even I don't. I drink my milk and eat my chicken. I consider those things mine and don't care if the milk is a product of forced selection that created a monster of a species, or that chicken is a flesh of an innocent animal.
I do not even care about what it does to the environment.
I'm voting with my money to have this practice continue.
The whole system is built for meat and milk to work. Yeah, it's some wierd suboptimal local minimum but that's what it is. I live in a meat culture and don't care if I can survive eating only plants.
[+] [-] wes-k|7 years ago|reply
Accepting the truth is the first part, the next step is aligning your actions to your beliefs. Took me maybe 20 years for that second step.
[+] [-] hirundo|7 years ago|reply
And who knows what the limit is as we grow wealthy enough to willingly pay extra to salve our souls. With enough wealth and wokeness, could we someday provide our livestock with an actually good, and perhaps even idyllic life ... before we kill and eat them?
[+] [-] teslabox|7 years ago|reply
Meat is rather inefficient. Temple Grandin is an autistic woman who designed more humane slaughterhouse systems. A quote in the HBO movie about her sticks with me: "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1278469/?ref=m_nv_sr_1
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
That's the beauty of our modern society. Most of us never see the dirty stuff that's going on. We only get a very sterilized image of the world. Just go into a chicken or pig farm and see how horrific the conditions really are. But we get protected from having to see this and get our meat with nice clean pictures on it.
Some years ago I saw a video some journalists that got in a "surgical" airstrike. Same thing. We only see clean images from above but their footage showed had terrible such a strike is. Cut off limbs everywhere, people screaming, badly burned children. This took my excitement for modern weaponry down a lot.
We are now as cruel or probably more cruel than people in that past. We just don't have to see it anymore because only a few people will do the dirty work.
[+] [-] delinka|7 years ago|reply
More accurately, created for the purpose of elimination.
[+] [-] Judgmentality|7 years ago|reply
I think you mean million, not billion. And even then that number is high for estimates.
edit: I missed the part about fowl (I am dumb)
[+] [-] newscracker|7 years ago|reply
Since you yourself referred to it as "a holocaust", and seem to know more, you could still make changes, however small they may seem to anyone else (or even to you).
[+] [-] Someone|7 years ago|reply
AFAIK, about half the cows and chicken being born are male, and “eliminated” applies (even) more to them than to their female counterparts.
[+] [-] haihaibye|7 years ago|reply
Males don't produce milk or eggs, and so are killed at a younger age.
[+] [-] HIPisTheAnswer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FooHentai|7 years ago|reply
That sounds reasonable but the scale and population of NZ prevents this. Many 'Cities' here, excluding the biggest few, would be considered small towns in most other countries. Regardless of the small scale, corner stores are owned by one of two big groups. The non-retailers you're imagining him leveraging don't really exist here on any scale that would work.
The population, outside of these few cities is so sparse that there's no small-scale retain presence. So if you attempt to start local you're selling to a market of a few hundred, at best. Of that market you would need significant uptake to make any headway.
[+] [-] newscracker|7 years ago|reply
Once you ferment it, isn't it yogurt, and no longer milk? Do you use it for beverages like coffee, tea, shakes, etc.? If you leave it out for a year (or even a few weeks), doesn't it get completely fermented and become sour? Doesn't it get fungus after a few weeks? Or do you turn it into cheese soon after fermenting (which has a much longer life)?
[+] [-] bambax|7 years ago|reply
Calves are a by-product of milk. The world doesn't need calves, doesn't want (or like) veal. Calves exist because in order to get milk, we need to get the cows pregnant. Then we kill the calves.
There is no other way to get cow milk; there is no way to make "humane" milk. We can either, not use milk, or devise a way to produce synthetic milk.
But cow milk == killing calves.
[+] [-] einarfd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] txsh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmakaze|7 years ago|reply
This where I stopped reading. Don't let lesser issues get in the way of solving a major one.
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|7 years ago|reply
And it's going to get worst. Pretty soon we will discover that you don't need a whole cow to make some milk. Substitutes for milk components are already in use everywhere, but it shouldn't be that difficult to produce "authentic" milk proteins and other components using synthetic biology.
Before that, maybe we don't need a calve from every cow, improving at least that part of the animal welfare issue.
And even a "disruptor" with cow-less milk may fail quickly, as consumers don't like change and milk is so damn cheap anyway.
[+] [-] netfire|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apahwa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BLanen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomohawk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradknowles|7 years ago|reply
And then he wouldn’t have had to shoulder that burden himself all by his lonesome.
[+] [-] mrfusion|7 years ago|reply
I’m not sure what the answer is. Maybe something that can sit in your fridge with a valve a kid could turn.
It’s such a simple thing but if your best customers can’t access your product without assistance the industry could actually be losing a lot of money.