 When we think of UK dairy farming it conjures up images of happy cows grazing on lush green pastures being lovingly milked by a local farmer. I'm Joey Carbstrong. I decided to visit a few local dairy operations to see if that image of dairy farming matches reality. This is just mass exploitation here. We might have to make a quick getaway. A bunch of young calves behind me. Who's that? Babies torturing them in these cages. Kept in a kennel, barely got three meters to walk. There's a bucket in the cage to drink from and no mother. How sad is that? And they're taken from their mothers so that people can take their milk essentially and drink it. Innocent prisoners of the dairy industry in the UK, born into solitary confinement. You can see them desperately walking around pacing up and down, hitting the side of the cage. So here we are, these are where the mothers are kept and they could hear their babies, 100% hear their babies calling out for them. And they're in here. This is the sadness of the dairy industry, separating mothers from babies. They'll never see each other again. So how the hell is this imprisonment and exploitation camp justified? You know what I mean? How are we still doing this? Human beings doing this to these little infants, innocent infants. We've pushed it far enough, I think. So immediately, I was confronted with a sad reality of calf and mother separation that is a fundamental part of the dairy industry. Studies show that both mother and calf experience emotional pain or noticeable stress after separation. Of course, cows had to give birth in order to produce milk and it doesn't make financial sense for farmers to leave calves to drink the milk that is meant for sale. But how exactly does this process begin? I think the next facility I visited holds the answer to that question. Okay, so it's the middle of the night, it's buckling down with rain here. There's a big field here filled with bulls and this facility here is a hidden aspect of dairy that isn't much talked about. I'm going to take you into this facility and show you what it is. Let's go. Okay, so a bit of an unexpected turn here. The entire facility has its lights off, usually they're on. So we're kind of walking into the unknown. There's some tools here on the table. It's hard to make them know. Okay, so we found this. They probably hit the cows with this so that they behave or comply. All right, so we're inside the storage shed here. I can see I've been here and it's just filled with different injections for cows and leptovoid and unisolv and the amount of syringes and medicines they give to the cattle. This is crazy. This is an ear tagger. Vaseline. Okay, so this is a carfty horn I have on here. This here is all charcoal from what they do is they cauterize the calf's horn. They do this so that the horns don't grow big and they don't cause accidents with workers and they don't bruise the carcasses of the other cattle. This is done because they're kept in captivity. This is a horrible torture device and it's for calves, for baby animals. It actually feels quite horrible to hold this in my hand. Colbert, iodine, selenium. So Colbert, to give them B12 and so how you get B12 in the flesh and in the dairy is they give it to them as a supplement here. Just imagine how much medication is reserved for the dairy industry. Vaccines. And then I found an important piece of the puzzle. These are the pipettes used for insemination. That's the injection device and they pull this back and inject the semen with this. This is liquid nitrogen. Maybe this is keeping something cool. This could be semen in here. Here are these gloves. The farmer or vet will put this on. They cut their fingers like this and they insert up to their elbow and they hold the cervix of the cow through the anus. Then they'll put the pipette full of semen into her vulva. They put their entire arm nearly in the cow's anus, which is incredibly uncomfortable for the cow and just it's quite perversarily. They're a reserve breed champion. They might have some prized breeding balls here or they've also got the almond paperwork here. Pneumonia, eye infection, prolapse, prolapse, prolapse, prolapse, foot infection, nastitis, pneumonia, foot infection, prolapse, prolapse. A lot of prolapses here. The foot infections walk around in their infecies and just probably getting injuries like this. Infection following castration. Lame, lame cows. Lame-ness is a big problem with dairy cows. So this device here is called a balling gun and it's mainly used to force medication down cattle's throat. Sometimes can be used to force a magnet into their stomach in case the cattle will eat any metallic objects. The metallic objects will stick to the magnet. This looks like a cattle crush. I think the cattle coming through this way but they come down the chute here. Stop here. The gates lock on their head and then they can inseminate them, give them medication, dehorn them, things like this. They do this because the animals struggle. Insemination is obviously uncomfortable for the animals which is why they need a machine like this for multiple reasons. So they can only go through one way. Once they're in here they can't go back. This is what this is. There's a system of doors that only let a certain amount of animals through at one time what it looks like. They get pushed through here out there and they have whatever done to them and then move on to the next one. So we're seeing a lot of equipment that's usually used in dairy farms but this place wasn't a dairy farm. So what was it? So this place here they're inseminating the females to get more males to use for their semen. So they don't bring the cows here? No. They send out the semen to those subcontractors that can bring mate cows. The reason they're inseminating cows here is only to breed more bulls that will make up a sperm herd. Wait. Hold up. So you're probably a little confused. Let me explain. This place is a breeding facility where they breed stud bulls who will produce semen, most likely for beef. But what has that got to do with the dairy industry? Semen is usually taken from dairy breed stud bulls by either an artificial vagina or an electro ejaculator which sends an electric current into the anus of the bull forcing him to ejaculate. This semen is then distributed to dairies all over the UK where they will impregnate cows with it. Conventional semen only gives farmers a 50% chance of birthing a female. Female calves would make up the dairy herd. If born male they'd usually be culled on the farm or sent off for veal or beef. Male dairy breed calves obviously don't produce milk or a high yield of beef, and killing them on the farm can sometimes be more cost effective for the farmer. But since routine culling of male dairy calves has been outlawed in 2021, farmers have until the end of 2022 to end this practice. So how will dairy farmers get around this issue and still maximize profits? The answer is sext semen. Sext semen gives a 90% chance of producing females and reduces unwanted male dairy calves. Dairy cows have around three to four carvings before being slaughtered for their flesh. But what happens when farmers are not in need of more female calves? This is where semen from beef cattle comes into it. Farmers can opt to impregnate their dairy cows with semen from beef sires, which will produce crossbred calves that are genetically ideal for beef. This way the cows are still being impregnated to keep the milk flowing, but on top of this dairy farmers will also be able to maximize their profits from the specific calves their dairy herd produces. I'll let this farmer explain. For over the past two years we've been using exclusively just sext semen and beef semen. The reasons for that is that we want to maximize our genetic gain, so we're only serving our best cows to sext semen. Everything else gets served to beef, and the shot of that is that we're producing a better quality calf, beef calf, which we sell for more money, which improves our bottom line. Well there you go, they want to maximize their bottom line. Everything farmers do is to maximize their bottom line. In my opinion, I don't think they stopped killing bull calves on farms for welfare reasons at all. I think they did it for economic reasons. So directly behind me is a big facility here at this sperm farm. It's surrounded by massive gates, huge fence, 10 foot fence covered in bushes. It looks like a big prison. I'm just going to go try to show you guys because there is cameras all around this thing. What is that dude? Look at the size of this fence here. Huge razor wire fence. That's of stories higher. The only thing I can think of is because they have a sperm from these balls here. They must store it in there because the sperm must be worth so much money. So how much is the sale of semen really worth? I did a little digging into some of UK's leading semen distributors. I found prices ranging from as low as £6 per straw for semen collected from a limousine breed, £36 per straw from a Holstein breed, and some breeds were fetching up to £100 per straw. So let's do the math. On average, a Holstein bull can produce 80,000 to 110,000 straws of semen annually. So in theory, a stud bull could make a semen producer between £660,000 all the way up to £11 million per year. Garth, a one-ton bovine stud from a farm in Kent, once called Britain's biggest cash cow, produced £800,000 of semen every month. As stated in this article from Canada, where they export more than $100 million worth of semen from superstuds every year, the bull semen is like white gold. A bull with a star pedigree can produce money shots worth $50,000 each. That's $600,000 a month. There's even been reports of thieves targeting semen, as stated in this mirror article. Semen is not only extremely valuable for direct sale, but is an integral part of the dairy and beef industries. Without it, the whole industry would collapse. No wonder this place was like Fort Knox. You've got to think the amount of selective breeding these animals have a valuable genetic line. They're keeping it all in this high security that's eye-opening. Okay, so we've had to, okay, we'll just wait it back because there's a light on and we're on high alert because we might have to make a quick getaway. Let's see if we can film some of these cows in here. So this is the barn where they're kept. It's hard to see anything in here. It's completely pitch black. Can you see all their eyes? The others are all back there kicking back. But this one here is brave. They're very cautious, aren't they? Hey, buddy. So these are really big bulls. These are used for their semen. I'll take the semen from these bulls, probably distributor. Use it to seminary females here too. Like they're breeding more bulls to continue that genetic line. They look big and scary, but they're really super gentle, timid, shy. Vulnerable animals. Very easily dominated by humans. It's a massive dairy farm. Distance there where the lights are. It's a big intensive dairy farm. So this is where things get interesting. As we're walking to go approach the dairy farm, we see a worker with a flashlight walking around looking for us. I had to turn off my camera and we all hid in a ditch. I didn't really expect to be spending my Saturday night hiding in a ditch, but that's just the way it turned out. After about 30 minutes, the coast was clear and we had to abort the mission. Although the first attempt left me startled, I really wanted to film in a large intensive UK dairy farm. So even with the higher risk of getting caught, I decided to attempt it again a few nights later. This is the second try. The last time we attempted this, a couple of nights back, someone walked straight past us. We think we alerted them somehow, but we had to take cover and then abort the mission. So we're going to try again tonight, see how we go, see if we can show you what happens in these big mega dairies in the UK. They're dressed babies. See, they're trying to suckle. Still really young. Look at this baby. They're mother's are all over here and he's behind us. We can't reach them. How sickening. How sad. Look at this little baby here. There's a dead body around here. At any one time, approximately 25% of all dairy cows are lame and over a one-year period, there'll be around 55 cases of lameness per 100 cows. The fate of UK male dairy calves is either to be reared for beef, live exported to Europe for veal, or until the end of 2022, they can still be shot on the farm. As these boys were kept separate with an injured cow, who is most likely going to be culled, and since the ban of shooting calves on farms had not come into force yet, I did not have a good feeling about the imminent fate of these babies. This is where all the mothers are, pregnant mothers about to give birth, spend years for carving. One of the cruelest inhumane parts of the dairy industry is the separation of the calf from their mother. Like humans, cows have a nine-month pregnancy, and like other mammals, they have a very strong maternal bond with their baby. Yet across the board in the dairy industry, calves are taken immediately after birth. This facility was so large, it was mind-blowing. According to the AHDB, mastitis, which is a painful infection of the udder, has an incidence rate of around 30 cases per 100 cows a year. They exploit these animals until there's nothing left of them. Literally, they suck the life out of them. You see them all skinny and skin and bone and limping around, lame, and then they go straight to the slaughterhouse. No mercy, just shot in the head and cut up into pieces. And the flesh of dairy cows, spent dairy cows, will go to burgers or second-grade minced up burgers in McDonald's or something like this. It's what they do to these animals. They take everything from them and then when there's nothing left to take from them, they take their life from them. As I left the milking parlour, I could see rows and rows of calf hutches. I decided to walk over and investigate. These are all the female calves, the real little babies. They're kept in solitary confinement here, I think for around six weeks, but sometimes they've been left in there for months and months on end. Sometimes you see really big calves in here, but their mothers are over there and not too far away from them. You can hear them calling out little desperate calves, looking for their mother, looking for their milk. So small, this is like a tiny prison cell for them. As soon as these females are able to bear young, they'll be impregnated too and they'll have their calves taken. It's a horrible cycle of trauma. Look at this. All of this for milk, cheese, chocolate. Imprisoned for nothing. Imprisoned for being born a cow. As I walked through the vast maze, rows after rows of hundreds of crying babies, the sheer scale of the suffering dawned on me. This was just one farm in one part of England. Yet, as of 2020, there are nearly 12,000 registered dairy producers in this country alone and around 100 million dairy farms all across the world. How did we allow this to happen? All of this misery and cruelty taking place right under our noses. Look at how humans are separating families. And for what? A slice of cheese? A dash of milk? Or a piece of chocolate? I was feeling completely overwhelmed. But I had one more section of the farm I needed to visit before I left. Into this big shed. This big shed has all the mothers. So I could probably throw a stone from where all the babies are in those individual hutches, calling out to the mothers. That's how close they are. They can hear each other all day. That's incredibly cool. You're being separated from your baby and have to hear them crying for you and you can't nurture them. Just as the smell of this stench is really bad. The size of her udder. Distended udder. So there's what looks like thousands of animals on this farm. This is a mega dairy. It's huge. Hundreds of suffering mothers, as far as the eye could see, slaves to the dairy industry, milk machines that'll be exploited and slaughtered. Numbered property. As you can see by her udder, you can tell how large inflamed it is with just producing more milk than they just naturally would. Can you imagine how uncomfortable that would be on their hips and their bones and their joints? Just carrying all this milk around. You can actually see how much they're struggling walking around on this cold wet concrete. You can understand why they get injuries and lameness. This cow is sick, something wrong with her stomach. Because that was the most, that was just wet diarrhea. So I tried to walk as slow as I could so as not to start all the cows. They seemed very uneasy. They seemed incredibly spooked for cows who were so used to being handled by people. You know, it wouldn't be unusual for people to be walking through here. It's a dairy farm. But it seems spooked like they're afraid of getting hit or something. Can you imagine how exhausting it would be to be her carrying all that weight around in her udder? Lost how many children now? Like how many cycles has this cow been through? Losing her calf. Going to that rotating milk parlor every day. Laying on this hard concrete. Listening to her calf bellow out to her. Hello darling. Following us. Look at her back here. This is like incredibly skinny, hey? I know these breeds are going to be lean in the back anyway, but look at this. This is too skinny. Like having the life sucked out of her slowly. If you look on the floor here, it's just layers of urine and feces and yellow. It's all yellow. And they walk around here. So they're walking around wet feet. If they get the slightest scratch on their ankle, it's going to become infected. You can just see that when they're walking that they're not stable. Their bodies are so heavy and their bones become so weak because they're just having the nutrients just sucked out of them constantly. Their bodies begin to give up and then they can go down and then they'll be removed with a forklift and go to the slaughterhouse. What human beings have done to their bodies? It's just inhumane. It's absolutely shocking to walk through one of these in the UK, hey? They pride themselves on these free roaming cows and ultra humane dairy farms and then you walk through one of these and oh my god. How many people are consuming dairy out of a place like this? I don't even realise. All dairy farms are horrible just because of the suffering they cause to their mother in the calf and it will be slaughtered in the exploitation, but this one in particular, something about it, it's just, it's just worth. Just getting towards about the time farmers start to wake up and tend to the dairy cows, but I still felt like there was unfinished business here, so I continued to look around. I had a feeling they were killing animals on site, but there was no time to investigate. Dozens of workers lived on site at this dairy farm and they'd be awake any moment. So unfortunately, we had to leave. As I walked out and left all those suffering animals behind, I thought to myself, how much longer will humanity continue to exploit these gentle, vulnerable beings for needless products we have alternatives for? When will the public evolve past the subjugation of animals? When will the good-hearted people of the world live vegan?