I've recently come across research that inducing lactation in cows is possible without regular pregnancy via hormone treatment.
From a welfare standpoint this seems in some ways better than current regular artificial insemination and impregnation, however currently economical incentives seem slim, as veal is valuable and there doesn't seem to be awareness for the possibility of milk production without veal production.
To my uninformed view this seems to be a gap similar to in-ovo sexing in chickens, where driving customer awareness could motivate farmers to switch and reduce suffering in the dairy industry.
I can see a risk that this doesn't fully abolish dairy production, however it seems more readily tractable than e.g. artificially produced casein etc, which doesn't currently seem to be available technology.
Current limitation of the technology seems to be response rate and lower milk yield.
I'd be interested to know whether such technology as been previously evaluated or if there are obvious issues with such an approach from a welfarist view.
Some rather old research and some review papers:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022030204734657
Thanks for the post!
One question is how much artificially induced lactation could reduce breeding in practice, given that dairy farms still need to breed cows to replace older cows.
Could combining this with sexed semen to produce predominantly female calves further reduce the number of male calves born, similar to in-ovo sexing in the egg industry?
(Sorry for not answering your question, and asking even more questions haha)