Continue Reading Below Advertisement

The only way this could have gone worse for the calf is if it was part vampire.

Options are extremely limited in times like this. While modern medicine certainly can be an option, it impacts the farm's production greatly. "If a cow is super sick and you have a way to treat nonorganically, you can do so. But, the cow is never allowed to join the herd again. Some farms just sell for beef; we sold ours at a massive discount to a nonorganic down the road (our calving manager was a softie). From what I understood from what the vet told me, this is a pretty gray legal area."

After a while, those losses become nearly impossible to bounce back from. "If you need to restock your herd, as you might if a disease wipes out some strong milkers or you've had a bad calving year, you can only buy from organic dairies. Since there's really no big organic dairies anywhere, this makes it hard to find a fairly priced cow."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Magic beans don't fetch nearly as much as they used to.

Healthy cows that call organic farms home have their own troubles to deal with. To combat the nightmare-inducing image of an animal trapped in a dirty cage, organic farms must make sure that their cows have the ability to roll around in the grass any damn time they please. Sounds wonderful, right? Well, yeah ... sometimes: