Cow lactation

A throwaway comment on Countryfile last night caught my attention, nothing startling, they were commenting that bobby calves were effectively useless - except that this farm was keeping them for 12 months and selling as rose veal. Their point was more that the main function of the calves was to put the cow into lactation, allowing milk collection.

All of which requires artificial insemination (or old skool bull rogering). There's a 2 month period between lactation and birth before allowing the teats to recover.

So, why can't cows be genetically engineered to lactate all the time? or for a 9 month period? In some countries cows are already fed a large number of vitamins, which arguably do more harm than genetic engineering.

Obvious problem is the consumer, for some reason they're happy to accept meat/milk choc-full of vitamins to improve milk and meat production. Probably as they don't realise it's happening. But genetic engineering, which is labelled, is rejected. It is, largely, ignorance, but I suspect if people realised how their meat/milk was actually produced then GE would be less contentious.

any thoughts why it's not looked into?

b