Invaluable perspective. Thank you for your comment!

> Yeah, well, that French "Mediterranean island" is famous for its VIRTUAL cattle which only exist in documents filed for subsidies.

I meant this dairy farm, on the Aegean island of Ios:

https://youtu.be/gFrciodixsw?t=831

The bald guy is the farmer. What island did you mean? Corsique?

> Over the last 15 years (thus quickly), this has changed a lot in France. Now
the standard is having 100 cows kept most of the year in a huge shed (newly
built on subsidies), on a concrete slab partially covered with straw, behind
galvanised steel fences, fed from a tractor a mix of straw or hay and
"powdered" soja and stuff.

This and the various shennanigans you report on is getting more and more
common in the place I live, also, and it's only going to intensify unless a
serious effort is made on the part of the EU to put the breaks on the
intensification of farming - and also agriculture. Maybe that's a futile hope,
because after all it's probably EU subsidies that have motivated the farmers
to industrialise their production in the first place. If it's not subsidies,
then it's the incentives created by the market that force smaller farms to
conglomerate into giants, constantly.

Perhaps it doesn't come through in my comments but I'm desperate to see this
direction changed, turned around. Otherwise, we're just killing the goose that
lays the golden eggs and soon we'll have neither goose, nor golden eggs. I
made the point in a few comments yesterday that farming (as well as
agriculture) in most of the world is not like factory farming in American
feedlots. That is still the case. Even the hillarious 99-cow farms you report
are not that big, compared to American feedlots with thousands of animals. It
would be a disaster if everywhere ends up like in the Americas.

> But then when the daughter in law took over the business, she soon got tired
of actually performing the work; so she now buys ready-made cheese from a
bigger factory in another area, make it grow old a bit (if you are lucky),
sticks the same old brand and traditional picture over it, and sells it to
tourists as a local product (except the fine print).

Wonderful. And so very typical. This lady is basically doing at a smaller
scale what Lactalis is doing on a much grander scale with its Camembert
"fabriqué en Normandie". You probably know this but for the benefit of other
readers, "Camembert de Normandie" is the (only) PDO camembert, that must be
made in Normandy with the raw milk produced by cows of the Normandy race,
actually raised in Normandy, and with a very specific technology (for example,
the curd must be "moulé á la louche", placed in forms with scoops of a
hemispheric laddle called "louche", though not necessarily manually these
days. The moulage must be done by a fixed number of passes of the "louche" and
with precisely defined intervals between them). These very stringent
requirements meant to protect the "traditional" camembert are constantly
challenged by the industry, with Lactalis, the owner of the Président brand,
at the head. The industry primarily wants to be able to make camembert with
pasteurised milk from cows of any race, as long as the cheese is made in
Normandy (in a Lactalis factory). Because the industry is such a much bigger
and more powerful entity, it is able to call its produce "Camembert fabriqué
en Normandie", meaning "camembert made in Normandy" which is of course very
misleading, at least to the people who even know anything about the relation
of camembert and Normandie. For much of my life, I didn't and happily ate
camembert whatever thinking there's only one kind. I only realised the
distinction when I went looking for the PDO regulations because I was curious
to see how camembert is actually made in France (as opposed to the recipes for
"camembert" that one can find on hobby cheesemaking websites and books).

I digress. There's a constant struggle between large industry that wants to
eat up everything, farmers, products, land, animals, everything, and the
smaller farmers who are for whatever reason still clinging on to their "old"
ways, even if those are not that "old" (camembert was standardised to the
brilliant white Penicilium candidum coat it has today only in the 1960's and
it would have been a markedly different cheese with a gray-blue coat of P.
album, in the past). In the middle are caught all those people who want the
"authentic" in their life, and in their plates. Like myself, I confess.

Unfortunately, most of us have completely lost the thread that once kept us
connected to the treasures of the land, the "village", the farm, the sea even.
It is a tragedy. But the extreme ideologies against consumption of meat are to
me missing the point and only making matters worse: it's the industrialisation
of farming and agriculture that's the true horror, not the raising of animals
for their meat and milk.