We've taken the tour at Fair Oaks a couple times. It was pretty interesting, on an industrial scale. The cows give birth and the calf is quickly weaned. They load up the calves and take them to Kentucky and Tennessee where the land is less suited for crops, but better grazing. Males are sold to beef producers. Females graze and grow for a year, are artificially inseminated, and a couple months before birth, they are trucked back up to Fair Oaks in NW Indiana. They give birth. Wean the calf. Repeat. The first-year moms then head to the milking barn where they'll spend the rest of their lives eating, sleeping, milking for 6-7 years more or less. They'll never leave that barn. There's a birthing section down at one end. Their butts are painted different colors for when they are ready to be inseminated, pregnant, or about to give birth. Once they are no longer producing enough milk to be profitable, they get sold for meat, animal byproducts, whatever they make out of old cows.
The cows eat and sleep on sand beds. Every day a machine comes through and picks up the dirty sand and replaces it with clean sand. The dirty sand goes to machines that squeeze out the manure and urine. The sand goes back to be used as bedding again. The manure and urine go through a digester that extracts methane. All of the farm vehicles, tractors, loaders, tour busses, semi trucks, etc... run on that gas. Anything that's left over gets run through a power plant the provides all the electricity for the farm and sold to the grid.
Any liquid manure/water that's left over from the process gets piped to fields where large tractors pull miles long hoses and inject the manure into the ground. I forget how many acres they control, but I recall a number of something like 30,000. Surprisingly, a lot of it is in wildlife habitat and erosion control. The rest is feed for the cows.
The last time we were there, about 2-3 years ago, they said they were running between 60-80 semi tankers of milk out of there each day! They go as far south as Georgia, and the super-insulated trailers only loose about 1-2 degrees of temperature on the way.
The also have a pig operation, where they raise pigs, then sell the piglets to pork producers.
As I mentioned, it's all pretty interesting as far as economics go. If you ever get the chance to tour it, do it. Wether you are for or against industrial farming, it's still a good idea to understand what's going on there. The last time we were there, there was a tour bus of dairy farmers from Wisconsin. We took the tour with them. The main comment I heard was that they were glad they were retired/retiring. I didn't ask them any questions, just listened.
It's all family owned as well. Several families, but still family owned.
