From disposable calf to alpine saviour

For a cow to give milk, she must give birth to a calf. But while the female calf later becomes a dairy cow itself, the male calf is merely a waste product of the dairy industry. The calves of high-yielding cows are a particular problem. Bred for milk, they hardly produce any meat. They end up in highly specialised fattening facilities, often outside the EU. But dairy farmer Marcel Renz has decided to change things and founded an initiative: ‘Weiderind vom Bodensee’. Together with a small group of farmers, restaurateurs and retailers, he is trying to change the system. But it also requires the willingness of the customer to pay a little more. Hannes Hönegger's customers have plenty of this willingness. These include Tim Mälzer and the professional squads of BVB and RB Leipzig. The trained butcher works with small, traditional organic farms. Their cows are traditional so-called second-use breeds. Cows and calves are suitable for milk and meat production, just as they used to be. Instead, they feed almost exclusively on what grows on the pastures. Pastures and alpine pastures in the Alps are also the connecting element of all the protagonists, from the Allgäu to South Tyrol. And this is precisely where the opportunity for more sustainable agriculture lies: Thomas Zanon fattens a small herd of bull calves on his alpine pasture that he has rescued from the dairy industry. His main job, however, is as a junior professor of livestock farming at the University of Bolzano. If you take all factors into account, he says, then milk is in no way inferior to milk substitutes made from oats or soya. And so the rescue of bull calves comes together with a new approach to sustainable milk production.