MILKED - available to watch free on WaterBear now - follows the story of activist Chris Huriwai as he ventures deep into the land of dairy, taking on the giants of New Zealand’s most powerful industry to expose the looming sustainability crisis and the dangerous denial of impending agricultural disruption. We spoke to director and producer Amy Taylor about the issues raised in this bold new documentary.

Q: MILKED feels very much like a spiritual successor to COWSPIRACY and is of course referenced throughout. How does MILKED continue the story of industrialised dairy farming?

Although Cowspiracy and other films have touched on the subject of dairy, MILKED is the first feature documentary I know of that really dives into this subject and reveals the wide-ranging negative impacts of the industry. People have a false idea about grass-fed dairy in particular, with most assuming that it’s more sustainable and ethical, but the reality is anything but that.

Q: New Zealand makes a lot of sense as a country to focus on when telling the story of dairy. Where else do you think would be important focal points in this story that has both local and global dimensions, and why? 

There are many elements of the film that have both local and global relevance, almost everything in it is happening worldwide. Dairy cows and calves suffer in all countries even if it’s in slightly different ways. Huge numbers of newborn calves are taken from their mothers and either slaughtered or kept alive for a relatively brief time until they are also killed or used to replace the worn-out cows. Many are imprisoned and unable to experience nature during their shortened lives but it’s difficult to say if that’s better or worse than grass-fed animals who have to endure the extremes of temperatures and walking long distances to milking sheds, often dealing with lameness also. 

The environmental impacts of dairy are also global, especially greenhouse gas emissions and resource use. Oat milk has been found to use 13 times less water, 11 times less land, and 3.5 times lower emissions than cow’s milk. There’s also the pollution of waterways from the dairy industry, especially with nitrates that cause both environmental and human health issues, and the serious health risks from consuming dairy wherever you are in the world. 

Dairy products are strongly linked with some of the main killers including heart disease, cancers and diabetes, and to add to that the industry also contributes to the risk of antibiotic resistance. The fact that the demand for animal protein has been identified as the number one driver of emerging zoonotic diseases like Covid-19 is also something everyone should be aware of. 

In addition, the economics of dairy don’t stack up anywhere, with many farmers suffering from huge amounts of debt despite the subsidies and the environmental and health costs that go unpaid. Also, the coming agricultural disruption that’s predicted to wipe out the industry in the next decade is going to be a death blow to dairy farmers everywhere. 

Q: Fonterra is framed as the villain of the story, hiding its true emissions, evading interview requests and so on. But how culpable is the New Zealand government in all this, particularly as Jacinda Ardern declared a climate emergency in 2020 and committed public services to carbon neutrality by 2025?

The New Zealand government is greatly influenced by the dairy industry, and they give in to pressure instead of being brave enough to make the urgent and massive changes that are needed. Jacinda Ardern did declare a climate emergency in 2020 but as Jane Goodall says in the film, “What are the measures that will be taken to address that emergency, practical measures, things that will actually happen? Not things that we just talk about.” 

It seems that we haven’t even really taken the first step as a nation to talk about the situation honestly - Fonterra still gets away with underreporting its emissions and New Zealand is still marketed and known as the most carbon-efficient producer of dairy in the world, despite evidence that suggests otherwise, like the IATP’s reports “Milking the Planet” and “Emissions Impossible”.

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Q: Why do you think private enterprises in New Zealand like Fonterra get a free pass from sustainability targets, unlike the public sector? Is it purely the strength of the dairy farming lobby, or is this notion that dairy farming is part of New Zealand’s backbone helping it to maintain support from the general public?

I think the dairy industry here in New Zealand is so ingrained into society that most people get really upset when it’s called into question in any way. There’s also still a kind of general disbelief in society that grass-fed cows could be unsustainable, and a belief in the industry marketing and the silver bullets that are being talked about. Also with Covid-19 impacting our tourism sector, and record milk prices being paid, the dairy industry has now been elevated to hero status as the saviour of the country. 

Q: The contributions from Tom Welch and Henk Smit to the documentary are profound and heartbreaking in communicating the struggles faced by the farmers themselves. Tom’s testimony as a farmer is very familiar to us in the UK, with supermarkets and large dairy producers driving down the price of milk and increasing pressure on farmers to sustain volume. If sustainability should also include the burden on humans, as Tom rightly says, can dairy ever truly be sustainable? 

I don’t see any way for dairy to be sustainable because of the likelihood that precision fermentation will wipe it out within a decade. There are just so many sustainability issues with dairy it’s an impossible situation to resolve in any way. I also don’t think we should be spending money and time trying to make it sustainable, because it’s an inherently cruel industry. 

Q: The horrific scenes in which Chris accompanies the farm investigators and they find the piles of dead cows, pregnant mothers and skinned calves. Did you ever find out more about why they were there or if that’s normal? Having been to many farms and slaughterhouses in the UK, we’ve never seen anything like that.

We were told by a couple of the workers as we left that it was just a usual day at the tannery, and during calving season especially there would be truckloads of dead cows and calves arriving each day. From what I understood, the skins get made into leather and the flesh and bones get turned into meal and tallow products.  

Q: How is the ethical argument against dairy received by the public? What is the reaction when people learn about widespread practices like calf separation and artificial insemination?

Most people seem shocked to find out what actually happens because their belief is that unlike the meat industry no animals are harmed and it’s just that we take excess milk from cows. The general idea is that we’re doing them a favour because they produce too much milk - there’s not much understanding that humans have bred them to do that - and that cows are bad mothers so it’s best if we take their calves away anyway even though that is far from the truth. 

Q: MILKED tackles dairy farming from every angle - environmental, cultural, health, ethics and pandemics. Which would you say provides the most damning indictment of dairy farming?

For me, the ethical aspect of the industry is the most damning, but I think for most people the environmental and health impacts seem to have the most influence. Even governments who are supportive of animal agriculture can’t continue to ignore the mounting evidence clearly showing how much the dairy industry contributes to climate change, water pollution, land and water use, and the health epidemics that not only cost our healthcare system but also take lives. 

Q: For anyone who isn’t plant-based or vegan and resisting the switch away from dairy, after watching MILKED, what one message would you hope they went away with?

The fact that so much damage and devastation is caused by an industry that isn’t necessary in any way, and how simple and easy it is to make the personal choice not to support it anymore. 

From the makers of Cowspiracy, MILKED has premiered for FREE on WaterBear to pull back the curtain on New Zealand’s multi-billion-dollar dairy industry. Once you’ve watched the film, take the action by taking part in a 5-day dairy-free challenge and nominate five friends to do the same. Use the hashtag #dairyfree5 and tag @waterbearnetwork on Facebook and Instagram;  @wbnofficial on Twitter, and @waterbear_network on TikTok. 

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

This article forms part of our series marking the release of our video ‘How animal agriculture runs New Zealand’.

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