Here is one narrative violation in the usual drumbeat of doom that we’re used to hearing about housing in America: The rent, in many cities across the US, is getting cheaper. 

After soaring to Covid-era highs, rents have cooled. Last month, the national median rent was down 1.7 percent from one year prior, according to research from the rental marketplace Apartment List. This made it the biggest annual decline since the company started tracking rent data in 2017. 

One success story stands out among all the rest: Austin, Texas, where rents dropped by a full 6 percent over the past year, more than in any other large metro area in the US. The Austin area’s median rent, at $1,274, is back to roughly where it was right before the pandemic — which means that, in 2026 dollars, it’s significantly cheaper than it was in 2019.

For the past decade, Austin has been a standard-bearer for the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement, passing a barrage of policy changes to make it easier to build new housing, especially new apartment buildings. According to a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, these reforms are responsible in large part for the sharp drop in rents enjoyed by Austinites over the last several years. 

Housing economists overwhelmingly agree that, to bring home prices down, cities need to embrace supply-side reforms that cut away the thicket of regulation that make it oddly difficult to do something as seemingly simple as build an apartment building — an argument that I and others at Vox have echoed many times. 

But housing markets are enormously complicated and shaped by many factors; it’s challenging for researchers to measure the exact effects of policies like those rolled out in Austin. Pew’s report certainly provides strong suggestive evidence that the city’s policy reforms made a real difference — but remember that, since around 2022, rents have fallen nationwide, too, and in many other cities quite substantially. So it seems likely that at least some of Austin’s rent decline would have happened anyway, even without its full suite of YIMBY reforms. 

How do we isolate the impacts of reforms meant to increase housing supply, figure out which ones worked, and to what extent they worked? Those are questions housing experts are taking up right now, and they’re not merely academic ones. Getting them right is how we will claw our way out of a housing affordability crisis that almost no one doubts exists — even as some disagree over how to solve it. 

Austin’s housing boom, explained 

In the 2010s, a local boom fueled by tech jobs drew hundreds of thousands of new residents to Austin and its suburbs. Following a trajectory familiar to other high-demand cities during that period, Austin’s rents soared — in their case by nearly 50 percent in that period, according to data from the Census Bureau — and single-family home prices climbed even faster. So the city sought ways to rapidly expand its housing supply to meet the surge in demand. 

Austin is hardly the only city that has tried to unfetter homebuilding to ease its cost of living. But it is remarkable for the sheer breadth of reforms it’s adopted, Alex Horowitz, project director for Pew’s housing policy initiative, told me — which was one of the most important takeaways from his team’s Austin research. Those reforms have included: 

• Updating zoning codes across parts of the city to automatically allow the construction of tall apartment buildings in some places rather than requiring each to go through a long and costly permitting process. 
• Reducing and later, in 2023, eliminating parking minimums for virtually all new homes. (Elsewhere in the US, parking mandates — i.e., a minimum number of off-street spaces available per unit — make housing more expensive, and sometimes physically impossible, to build.) 
• Making it significantly easier to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs), which are smaller homes that sit alongside houses on single-family lots. 
• Allowing up to three homes to be built on lots zoned for single-family houses and greatly cutting down the minimum lot size required to build a single-family home, encouraging builders to add small, less expensive starter homes. 
• Creating density bonuses that allow developers to build taller in exchange for setting aside some units as income-restricted at lower rents — an approach that, the Pew report notes, has added more market-rate and more affordable apartments. 
• Last year, Austin’s city council voted to legalize apartment buildings up to five stories built with a single staircase, instead of the two staircases required by default in most US building codes — a longtime YIMBY holy grail because it can drop the cost of new buildings and open up more space and unit layout flexibility.  

“Not many cities have taken as many different steps as Austin has,” Horowitz said. That matters because passing any single reform — even if it’s a big one, like Minneapolis’s 2018 decision to end single-family zoning — may not spur much home construction if an insurmountable wall of other rules still makes projects infeasible. 

As housing advocates have put it to me before, housing is like a door with many deadbolts on it; unlocking just one will not magically open the door for more building. You can legalize triplexes on every single-family lot in America, but if the local zoning code requires every single unit to have two off-street parking spots, the triplex will not get built because there’s just not enough room for all that parking. 

Austin’s broad range of policy changes meant that, between 2015 and 2024, the city managed to add 120,000 homes, Pew found — a stunning 30 percent increase in its housing stock. From 2023 to 2024, rents fell especially fast in “Class C” buildings — older, less expensive buildings generally occupied by people of modest incomes. This was a particularly important finding because NIMBYs routinely oppose new-construction “gentrification buildings” on the grounds that they’re unaffordable to all but the affluent. But by the laws of supply and demand, building new homes in an area lowers the cost of housing across the board, including older, cheaper units, a phenomenon that has been demonstrated empirically.  

Attacking the city’s housing shortage from so many different angles has also accomplished another thing, Horowitz pointed out. Austin has built an unusually diverse mix of new homes, including not just apartments in large buildings — although those still make up nearly half of the city’s new units because they’re such an efficient way to house people — but also smaller apartment buildings, single-family homes, and townhouses. These varied options give residents more choice in where to live, and also may help retain people in the city as they have families and seek more living space.

The unexpected state of the US rental market 

But how does Austin’s experience — its steep rise in home prices in the 2010s and early 2020s, and subsequent decline — compare to what’s been happening in other cities? 

Here is one interesting observation about Apartment List’s latest analysis — the one that found a striking drop in rents nationwide over the last year: 

From 2017 to 2026, the US national median rent grew by about 3 percent per year on average — less than the overall rate of inflation during the same period. The early 2020s run-up in rents ended up being partially canceled out by a sustained (if uneven) decline that began in 2022. 

That happened because many metro areas, especially in the Sunbelt, built lots of new apartments in the past few years. “We’ve been going through this big multifamily construction boom,” Chris Salviati, chief economist for Apartment List, told me. “When we started to see rent growth softening over the past couple of years, I think that was expected because we had all these units that were getting completed.” Rents have fallen sharply in cities from Denver to San Antonio to Portland, Oregon. 

Looking at that chart, you might even think, “Wait, what housing crisis?” It turns out that many cities and their surrounding areas were perfectly capable of adding new housing to meet the early 2020s’ surge in demand. So were restrictive zoning codes really holding them back in the first place? Rent increases have even moderated over the last decade in notoriously unaffordable markets like San Francisco — since 2017, rents in that metro area have only grown, on average, less than 1 percent per year:

So, are US housing markets not as catastrophically dysfunctional as we’d been led to believe by the housing shortage doomsayers? 

A more careful look at the evidence suggests it wouldn’t be right to go quite that far. For one thing, we have not seen as much moderation in the cost of homes for sale as we have in rentals. And housing markets are hyper-local, so nationwide rent averages obscure a lot of regional variation. Plenty of cities have seen rapid recent growth in housing prices that have far outpaced inflation — like Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, where rents have climbed by more than 7 percent per year on average between the beginning of 2017 and 2026:

Coastal superstar cities like San Francisco, meanwhile, were already at a hyper-expensive baseline pre-pandemic because their home prices had been frog-boiling toward unaffordability over the course of decades. That is part of what’s pushed many Americans to move to cities like Austin (and Madison, for that matter) in search of good jobs and greater affordability. And that rents have slowed in the Bay Area is not necessarily evidence that the region has built enough housing to meet demand. 

In fact, we know it’s been underbuilding for many years: By the city’s own accounting, San Francisco added 211,000 jobs from 2009 to 2019, creating a need for 154,000 housing units, but it built only 29,500 homes in that period. It’s woefully off track to meet its homebuilding goals this decade, too. So the relatively flat rents in the city may more likely suggest that it has hit an “unaffordability ceiling,” as Salviati put it. “We just hit a point where the market can no longer sustain prices going up by 5-plus percent every year,” he said. (And would-be residents of the city are simply pushed to move farther afield.) 

Causation is tricky to prove in housing markets, though, and looking at short-term price changes alone can easily lead to misinterpretation. You can have an extremely high-demand metro that doesn’t build much, like San Francisco, that sees plateauing prices because it’s already so expensive that the market can’t bear much more. And you can have a city that builds a lot of new homes relative to its existing housing stock — as Madison has over the last decade — and still sees soaring rents because it didn’t build enough to accommodate all the people who want to move to the area, and still had more room to absorb rent growth. Madison, for example, added 22,472 homes — more than three-quarters of which were apartments in developments with at least 25 units — between 2015 and 2024. That is a lot relative to the city’s size: a 20 percent increase in its housing stock. But it still underproduced what it needed, a shortfall that quickly piles up in the shape of limited supply, high demand, and rising rents. 

What’s not in doubt is that housing supply is crucially important in shaping costs. And post-pandemic, many US cities showed an unexpected ability to add enough supply to push down some of the prices that caused Americans so much heartburn around the pandemic years. The relevant question for judging the ramifications of Austin’s housing reforms is not just whether housing got built after they passed or even whether the city’s rents dropped, but whether those things wouldn’t have happened if not for those new laws. 

Could the skeptics have a valid point?

I first became obsessed with that question when, a few months ago, I stumbled on a fascinating (to a weirdo like me) bit of economics drama. Although most experts would tell you that reforming restrictive zoning laws in hot markets like Austin will bring down home prices, a contrarian group of economists recently dared to ask: What if it doesn’t? 

In a controversial working paper, those researchers argued that measured housing supply constraints — like zoning codes that ban anything but single-family homes in most US neighborhoods — may not matter much for home prices across US metro areas, actually. One author of that paper, economist John Mondragon, a research adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cast doubt on the YIMBY narrative about Austin in a LinkedIn post earlier this year. 

“The Austin, TX housing supply success story is something of a shibboleth in most housing circles,” he wrote. “Often the large decline in Austin house prices or rents over the last few years is marshaled as evidence. Unfortunately, I do not find this kind of casual look at the data to be very illuminating.”

The working paper has been a lightning rod in the field, drawing formal refutations from economists Michael Wiebe and Salim Furth; the authors published their own responses to those responses, as well as a nine-page document of frequently asked questions. Fully accounting for the dispute is outside the scope of this piece (to understand it, one economist encouraged me to contact a theoretical econometrician, which is like an economist but with even more math). But suffice it to say that as a working paper, it should be taken with a hefty serving of salt. 

Regarding Austin, however, Mondragon raises a valid point. The city, like so many others, saw an extreme rise in rents early in the pandemic; that tends to induce developers to build more so they can benefit from high prices. So it’s hard to untangle whether Austin’s construction boom and subsequent rent declines are the result of its new zoning policies, or simply the market’s natural response to pandemic-era price spikes.

Home construction often happens in boom-and-bust cycles like these — developers build lots of housing until the supply glut pushes prices down, which reduces the incentive to build more and often limits how much further prices can be reduced. That’s what appears to have happened in US cities in the last few years, and it’s not unreasonable to think this dynamic was at play in Austin, too. Interestingly, a 2025 post by the National Multifamily Housing Council, a trade association for the apartment industry, made a similar argument about Austin — that its rent drops had more to do with builders responding to price signals than it did with any recent regulatory reforms.

This disagreement matters not just because it’s important to understand what shapes housing affordability, but also because a growing YIMBY consensus in US politics — nationally and locally — is still a fragile one, and it needs to be able to answer challenges and counterarguments, and think carefully about causation. Local policy leaders increasingly agree that there is a relationship between housing supply and housing prices, just like the basic economic forces at play in markets for all kinds of goods. But many communities across the US are still pushed about by NIMBYs who advocate fiercely against allowing more housing construction. Mondragon and his co-authors’ paper was quickly taken up as ammunition by these development opponents.

Meanwhile, a steady drip of other reports, sometimes sloppy, uncontrolled ones authored by non-economists, still downplay the role of housing scarcity in driving high home prices. It’s “a cottage industry of producing anti-YIMBY, low-quality studies,” Ned Resnikoff, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who recently wrote a response to a few of those reports, told me. 

When I raised all this to Pew’s Alex Horowitz, I got the sense that he was annoyed at the suggestion that there’s any real debate here. “The overwhelming majority of academic research papers on this topic have reached the same conclusion, which is that supply influences costs,” he said. “Periodically there is a paper that comes out in a different place, but, I would say, not using conventional economic methods.”

Economists have estimated the importance of supply constraints on housing using a range of methods: If home prices in a city far exceed the cost of building a home, for example, like they do in the most expensive US cities, then that ought to induce developers to want to build more because they stand to profit a great deal. If they don’t build much in spite of this, then that points strongly to the likelihood that supply constraints — regulation, as well as geographic limits — are getting in the way. Researchers have also directly estimated how much regulatory red tape adds to the cost of homebuilding — it’s a lot!

Although the precise forces behind Austin’s recent rent declines have not yet been thoroughly dissected in a controlled, peer-reviewed study, Horowitz said that the evidence from Pew’s case study points overwhelmingly to the effectiveness of the city’s building reforms. The researchers “very explicitly see that a lot of the new homes getting built [in Austin] weren’t previously allowed,” he said. “It just doesn’t take much of a leap to see the causality there.” 

The two perspectives may not, in the end, be that hard to reconcile. Mondragon and his co-authors don’t deny that housing supply shapes prices (you’d be laughed out of the field for suggesting otherwise). However you slice it, we need a sufficient supply of housing in order for housing to be affordable. The authors are, rather, unconvinced that constraints like zoning are meaningfully holding back supply. But even that claim, which has been ferociously contested by other housing researchers, is weaker than it appears at first glance because the working paper does acknowledge that supply constraints “almost certainly” matter at the level of individual neighborhoods (the authors argue that those effects don’t show up at the level of entire metro areas).  

Ultimately, we need not wait for perfect evidence to be able to speak about what is, to the best of our understanding, likely happening in the American housing market. It seems unlikely to be a mere coincidence that the cities that had the greatest recent rent declines are concentrated in the Sunbelt, which tends to have fewer constraints on building housing than coastal cities. Even within that region, Austin outperformed both in how many homes it added and in how much prices dropped: “Austin is the market that has built the most new multi-family housing per capita by a pretty wide gap,” Salviati said.  

Is it possible that all those new homes and lowered rents had nothing to do with Austin’s aggressive push to make it easier to build more homes? Perhaps, and maybe peer-reviewed research will eventually find that Austin’s zoning changes weren’t as big a deal as YIMBYs thought, though my hunch is that they’ll end up mattering quite a lot. In the meantime, there is every reason for New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their suburbs to try the same experiment in housing abundance that Austin has. They can start with what Horowitz calls the “one-two punch” of policies for improving housing affordability: allow apartment buildings to be built by right in as many places as possible, and reduce parking mandates.

And like any good experiment, we’ll need exacting analysis to know how it’s working. Maybe I’ll call that theoretical econometrician after all — or at least ask my mayor to.  

I first noticed it when, a few months ago, I opened an email from Ian, my literary agent. Before I’d had a chance to read anything he’d written, Gmail was recommending a full, fleshed-out, AI-generated reply, ventriloquizing ideas for a book and even my feelings about the job transition I’d recently made. It had mined my inbox to infer why Ian was writing to me and ingested bits of my style, even signing off with the lowercase “m” that I use with people with whom I have an easy familiarity. 

For around a decade, Google had been suggesting very generic, sometimes monosyllabic “smart replies” — things like “Okay” or “Thanks!” or “Any thoughts?” I’ve used these to send quick acknowledgements to emails I’d have otherwise forgotten about. But in the last couple years, Gmail has begun to offer fully formed draft replies that presume to impersonate my own, individual reactions to my interlocutors’ questions, ideas, and emotions. 

This felt like a striking turn. I reflected with some sadness on the idea of sending one of these to someone who matters to me — how dehumanizing to both me and Ian it would feel to make him read a counterfeit subjectivity pretending to be my own. 

You might say this is no big deal; maybe it gives you time back for deeper work or more meaningful parts of your life (I wouldn’t begrudge that at all — AI saves me time, too!). We’re all drowning in too much email, much of it pointless or lacking any great meaning. Isn’t that exactly the kind of day-to-day tedium that we should happily invite AI to liberate us from? 

But I think that this machine-generated personal correspondence, which is only likely to spread further into other forms of communication, has preoccupied me because there’s something deeper going on here. A lot of ink has been spilled in the last few years about AI-generated writing and its social consequences — how it will deskill millions of workers, outsource our thinking, confuse kids growing up in the AI age about the difference between real and synthetic friends, and so on. We already know that AI language is unnervingly good at sounding like it’s the product of a fellow consciousness. But the particular creepiness of elaborate email autocomplete is that it’s training on and simulating your consciousness. And as it does so, it also gives you a little less reason to actually be conscious.

AI writing and “cognitive surrender”

Like many knowledge workers who derive their living and their identities from cognitive capacities now being at least partially replicated in silicon, I have a complicated and ambivalent relationship with generative AI. I now depend on it to research almost every story I work on, a purpose for which it’s obviously very useful (despite those who still insist it can never be useful for anything). 

I am, though, deeply skeptical of using it for writing, because, as many writers smarter than me have already noted, writing is inextricable from thinking, and short-circuiting it can diminish our capacity for deep thought. The friction of writing is not dead weight but is part of how you decide what you mean and give coherence to ideas. For that reason, my former Vox colleague, the brilliant Kelsey Piper, who is generally positive about AI’s potential to make us more productive and improve human life, said on a recent podcast episode, “I would never use it to write.”  

In a recent paper, a pair of University of Pennsylvania scholars described the wholesale outsourcing of cognitively complex tasks to AI as “cognitive surrender.” “An abdication of critical evaluation,” they write, “where the user relinquishes cognitive control and adopts the AI’s judgment as their own.” This is one reason why it felt especially inappropriate to have AI generate thoughts for me in reply to someone with whom I’m brainstorming about writing a book, likely one of the most cognitively demanding things I’ll ever do. Email, for all of its annoyances, is also relational. And letting a machine generate your side of the exchange diminishes the authenticity of your connection to another person. 

Sometimes the AI drafts, of course, are plainly wrong. An AI-suggested email might, for example, say you’ve read a book that you haven’t, perhaps making it more likely that you go along with the false claim. But what unsettles me the most is not the mere hallucination, it is when the AI is right, or right enough. My email’s AI is pulling from its knowledge of everything I’ve written before, so it can often make a reasonable guess of what I’d want to say anyway. The system is not wholly failing to reproduce my mind, but is actually producing a close-to plausible substitute for it. 

It feels like the beginnings of what Silicon Valley has prophesized for decades as a coming merge (sometimes called the “singularity”) between human and machine minds. I used to consider this a totally improbable idea, but I hadn’t been open-minded enough. It might turn out to be dispiritingly easy for an advanced AI to train on a sample of your past thoughts and write future ones for you. 

Still, it seems unlikely that we will simply acclimate to the idea that all the written communication we encounter and generate every day may be AI-generated. So much, if not most, of our interpersonal communication now takes place in writing. However vulnerable we may be to cognitive surrender, humans also have a deep countervailing need to experience language as coming from another conscious mind — to feel seen and known, and to assert our own distinctness in return. 

And anyway, Gmail isn’t yet that good at imitating my conscious voice. I would never write, “Lots of interesting stuff coming up at Vox!” (Which isn’t, of course, to say that there isn’t a lot of interesting stuff going on at Vox.) That still leaves me, for now, with the pleasure of figuring out what I want to say. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

The dairy industry uses cows to make two things: milk and baby cows. The milk, we know its fate. But what of those 9 million babies born to dairy cows each year? 

Many get carted off — sometimes over great distances, typically at not more than a few days old — to live out their calfhoods at a place like Grimmius Cattle Company.  

Spanning hundreds of acres across its two main locations in Tulare County and Kings County, California, in the heart of California’s Central Valley, Grimmius provides a transient home for close to 200,000 calves at any given time in their first months of life. Seen from above, Grimmius’s hundreds of identical rows sprout from the ground with the neat uniformity of an urban street grid. Each of the newborn calves that populate this miniature city occupies what Grimmius calls “apartments” — individual outdoor hutches, less than one-tenth the size of a typical parking spot.

The Central Valley is America’s top milk-producing region, known for its dense concentration of mega dairies. But Grimmius isn’t one of them. Instead, its work — and that of similar calf-ranching companies — is a little-known but essential component of industrial-scale dairy: It raises calves on dairy farms’ behalf during the fragile infant stage in which they’re too young to bring in any revenue. 

Dairy farming revolves around constant reproduction, since cows, like humans and other mammals, must give birth in order to lactate. And so, on dairy farms across the country, calves are constantly being born. Some will eventually replace their mothers as dairy cows, while the male calves — and some “excess females,” too — are raised for beef. Increasingly over the last few decades, dairy farms have been outsourcing the raising of these calves, including those destined for both dairy and beef production, to specialized, large-scale facilities known as “calf ranches” or “calf nurseries.”  

Grimmius is the largest such calf raiser by population in California, according to the most recent available data from the State Water Resources Control Board. It’s a mega-farm in its own right, easily surpassing the size of many of the largest dairies in the US. “It is the heart of factory farming,” said Cassie King, communications lead for the animal rights advocacy group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). “It’s linking so many different factory farms, so many dairies across the state, and multiple massive feedlots.”

Over the course of about six months starting last August, DxE filmed Grimmius’s operations using drone cameras, documenting many of the grim realities ubiquitous in the mass production of animals for food: calves being handled roughly, hit, and pushed to the ground. But perhaps most remarkably, the footage offers a rare view of what is arguably the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals in the US. 

Farm animal advocates have, over the last few decades, successfully drawn public attention to and meaningfully reduced the caging of egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs, and calves being raised for veal. But the routine isolation of millions of dairy industry-born baby cows in their formative months of life, in crates where they are deprived of physical and social stimulation, has not received nearly as much scrutiny.  

Grimmius, on its website and social media, expresses pride in its animal care. I had hoped to speak with the company about the context behind the findings in DxE’s footage, but it did not respond to multiple emails and phone calls seeking an interview for this story. 

The dairy business is, at bottom, organized around the hyper-optimization and commodification of one of life’s most intimate processes: pregnancy, birth, lactation. The rising importance of calf ranches, where calves are confined by themselves by the hundreds of thousands, represents one particularly extreme expression of that logic. It’s a stark reflection of how little dairy farming resembles the picture that many Americans have in their minds of free-roaming cows on pasture. And it is made possible by a striking lack of policy attention to the plight of these vulnerable, highly social animals. 

The baby cow supply chain

Grimmius Cattle Company’s business model, and that of calf ranches more broadly, tracks one of the most important shifts in the economics of dairy over the last several decades: As US dairy farms have consolidated into mega dairies housing thousands or even tens of thousands of cows each, they have found it more profitable to hand off calf-raising to outside companies.  

To grow up on a calf ranch, newborn calves must first make the journey there — and that itself is no small obstacle. Transit is taxing for any farmed animal, and it is even more so for babies. The fragile newborn animals are loaded into semi-trailers, which can be high in disease-carrying pathogens, for hours-long journeys often without food, water, or temperature control; they’re jostled around, often overcrowded, and frequently handled roughly by workers who must quickly load and unload them.

A 2024 investigation by the nonprofits Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) and Animals’ Angels found that dairy farms across the country were shipping neonatal calves, umbilical cords still attached, to calf ranches on stressful journeys of hundreds or even upwards of a thousand miles away. California’s Central Valley and the Southwestern US, which are hubs of the calf ranching industry and where summer temperatures often soar into the triple digits, are especially popular destinations, even for calves from far-flung states. Public records obtained by AWI show that in 2022, Grimmius received calves from as far away as Fair Oaks, Indiana, a more than 30-hour drive away.

In 2014, the most recent year for which USDA data is available on the subject, a majority of large dairy farms (which make up most of the industry) sent their calves to be raised at outside facilities. And since then, the calf-raising industry has, by all accounts, expanded significantly. In California today, a very large share of dairy calves are sent to be raised on calf ranches. 

Lewis Bernier, an organizer for DxE who led the investigation of Grimmius, argues that the segmentation of dairy production also makes it easier to hide the nature of dairy farming from consumers. “You can tour a dairy, and you don’t even think about the fact that there are babies constantly being born because you don’t even see them,” Bernier said. “They’re not even there anymore.”

Calf sickness and death, for example, is a routine part of calf rearing: In one clip from DxE’s footage of Grimmius, sick calves are tossed in a pile and killed by rifle. “One of the first things we saw there was calves being dragged out of a truck bed and shot in the head,” King said. Killing by gunshot is an industry-standard form of euthanasia, although throwing calves is forbidden by industry calf-raising guidelines.

Calf ranches often advertise their unique ability to care for young animals. “We provide specialized care for dairy calves during their most vulnerable life stage — and we love it,” Grimmius’s website reads. Because dairy farms are focused on adult, milk-producing cows, they may lack the expertise to raise calves, whereas a dedicated calf ranch can ideally provide more specialized attention.  

But some of the footage of Grimmius taken by DxE shows disturbing conditions that appear to be at odds with the calf-raising industry’s own animal care standards. In one clip, a worker appears to push the metal rods of a calf restraint device into the backside of a calf to get the animal to turn around in their hutch. In another, workers are seen unloading calves from a truck and moving them into hutches. The calves are hit with paddles, aggressively pulled by their ears and tails, grabbed by and hit in the face, and pushed in an effort to get them to move. One calf slips down the ramp at the back of the truck after being pushed, falls to the ground, and is grabbed by the ear in an attempt to get the animal to stand. 

A handful of veterinarians and animal welfare experts I reached out to for this story, including one who was very concerned about the findings in the footage, were reluctant to comment on the record — a reflection of just how difficult it can be to have open conversations about the treatment of animals in the face of industry power. A few, however, pointed me to a manual by Calf Care and Quality Assurance (CCQA), an industry program that publishes guidelines on the appropriate treatment of calves. According to that document, hitting calves is an “unacceptable” handling practice, as is “pulling by the ears, tail, hair, neck, or a single limb.”

“Calves can be fearful, unsteady on their feet, uncoordinated, and unsure of your expectations of them…These animals must be handled calmly, gently, and with great patience,” the guidance reads.

“Loading and unloading can be the most stressful process for calves,” it continues, adding that “a zero-tolerance policy for unacceptable handling must be in place.”

In a statement, Josh White, senior executive director for producer education at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told me that “​​The practices seen in this video are not representative of Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) guidelines and standards. The BQA program stands by our mission to guide producers towards continuous improvement, using science-based practices to assure cattle well-being, beef quality and food safety.”

The Beef Quality Assurance program, which co-created CCQA, gave Grimmius an award last year for its work. 

Revelations of cruelty to dairy cows and their babies have emerged in investigation after investigation into dairy farms of all sizes and styles, including those that call themselves organic, humane, raw, and all manner of other labels. The overwhelming majority of industry workers don’t want to abuse animals, but the very structure of dairy farming makes it hard to avoid because it forces them to interact with animals as commodities. Cows and calves are large, heavy animals, making it difficult for workers under pressure to move them around and get them to do what they want. 

“There are so many animals on these sites, and they only have so many people that are there to take care of those animals,” Adrienne Craig, a senior policy associate and staff attorney at AWI who led the organization’s research on calf transportation, told me. “These workers are under time constraints to do the work in short periods of time, and I think that that necessarily translates into rough handling in a lot of cases.”

How tiny, solitary crates affect calves

But the greatest animal welfare problem for calves at Grimmius and across the dairy industry may be their confinement in tiny stalls where they have nothing to do and scant ability to express natural behaviors, something evident in footage of company facilities. 

Cows and calves are intensely social herd animals with a hard-wired need for contact with others of their kind. But dairy farming disrupts the normal rhythms of bovine life, beginning with the near-immediate separation of mother cows from their babies after birth. Without the opportunity to nurse, be groomed, and receive round-the-clock care from their mothers, dairy calves in the US, on both dairy farms and calf ranches, are most commonly housed in solitary hutches.

And many of those hutches, especially in the Western US, really are exceptionally small. Standard wooden calf hutches provide about 13 square feet of space per calf, which is enough for them to stand up, lie down, and usually to turn around, but little else. The calves can see and make some nose-to-nose contact with other calves in adjacent hutches, but there is little to no group socializing until they are moved from their hutches to group dirt pens at around two months old. An older, archived version of Grimmius’s site stated that calves are moved out of individual living areas at 60 days old, which is an industry standard and corresponds to the age at which calves are typically weaned, though there can be variation in that threshold; its site now says that calves are moved after weaning. 

Many dairy operations and calf ranches use a different, plastic hutch style that provides more space, but smaller wooden hutches, like those used at Grimmius, are particularly common across California and the Southwest. Nationally representative statistics on the use of different hutch types are hard to come by, but one small survey of calf ranches in a peer-reviewed study found that about half allotted calves less than 15 square feet each.   

Los Angeles-based veterinarian and animal rights advocate Crystal Heath, who spends much of her time in the Central Valley documenting the conditions of farmed animals there, has filmed many frustrated calves in wooden crates at dairies and calf ranches across the region, engaging in behaviors that signal boredom, such as rolling their tongues and licking at their surroundings. These are “well-recognized coping behaviors associated with early extreme confinement,” Heath, who is the executive director of the nonprofit Our Honor, told me. “The intense boredom, sensory and social deprivation these calves face at the critical period during brain development leads to heightened fear in new environments, social dysfunction, [and] lifelong abnormal behaviors.” 

Why house calves like this? The US dairy industry began adopting individual hutch-style housing in the mid-20th century, to reduce disease spread among the youngest animals and simply to ensure each calf is eating enough. (The calves no longer have access to their mothers’ milk, which is reallocated for human consumption.)

Although the industry often argues that solitary hutches are best for calf welfare because they allow them to get individual care, it would probably be more accurate to say that hutches optimize calf health exactly to the extent that it benefits the industry’s bottom line. Dairy farms are businesses: They may care very much if a calf gets sick and loses value, but they may have little incentive to care if a calf is depressed from social isolation and lack of exercise.

I contacted Western United Dairies, a trade group for California dairy farming, for the industry’s perspective on hutches, and received this statement from Michael Payne, a livestock veterinarian at UC Davis’s veterinary school and dairy outreach coordinator for the university’s Western Institute of Food Safety and Security: “Individually housing calves for the first six to eight weeks of life is an essential management tool for dairy and beef calves,” he wrote. “The practice promotes health and welfare of calves primarily by minimizing exposure to respiratory and gastrointestinal pathogens from the environment, the dam [the calf’s mother], and other calves. A robust body of scientific literature demonstrates that the use of good sanitation practices — including hutches — improves health, reduces morbidity and mortality, and has no effect on behavior or later productivity.” 

In recent years, however, there’s been a turn against solitary hutches even among many industry-affiliated veterinarians and animal welfare experts, who argue that housing calves in pairs is far better for them and does not need to come at the expense of their physical health. Research into the preferences of calves themselves has found that they value social contact so dearly that they will choose to endure conditions like heat stress to remain with their peers. And anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing calves with space to roam freely knows how eager they are to sprint and buck across open pasture. 

The Dairy Cattle Welfare Council encourages housing calves in pairs or groups, and even the industry-written Calf Care and Quality Assurance guidelines state that “individually housed calves have a harder time coping with changes in housing and diet and may have cognitive and developmental disadvantages, including poor learning skills and deficient social skills.” It continues: “There are some benefits to having socially reared calves including increased body weight gain and increased feed intake.”

The double standard that leaves dairy calves without protection against confinement

Calf ranches and industrial dairy farms aren’t cruel to cows merely because they’re big — their treatment of animals in many ways is better than the practices on small dairy farms, where it’s not uncommon to tie up cows by their necks. But mega farms reflect the experiences of the overwhelming majority of animals in the dairy industry, and they show the vast scale on which animal welfare on such facilities is sacrificed to achieve economies of scale. 

That calves are allowed to be confined in 13-square-foot hutches reflects a profound recent shift in American dairy farming — and a gap in animal welfare law hiding in plain sight.  

For decades, the animal advocacy movement has focused on a singular, clear-cut goal: ending extreme confinement. This effort successfully turned “cage-free” into a household phrase and a corporate mandate. In California, that culminated in Proposition 12 — one of the most celebrated and hard-won animal welfare laws in the world. Passed by ballot measure in 2018, Prop 12 bans eggs and pork from animals raised in tiny cages, as well as veal from calves raised in “veal crates” — very small crates, often reported at around 12 square feet, that allow little room for movement. Under the law, veal calves must be allotted at least 43 square feet each. Several states have passed similar laws banning extreme confinement — part of a wave of such legislation championed by animal advocates in the 2000s and 2010s. 

But while the movement successfully branded the veal crate as a symbol of cruelty, the dairy industry’s business model was already shifting away from veal. Although veal was once the destiny of many male calves born into the dairy industry, it has cratered in popularity in the US, now amounting to a rounding error in the nation’s overall meat production. As a result, bans on veal crates don’t actually protect very many animals in practice. And, meanwhile, state crate-free laws don’t offer any protection to the millions of other dairy calves kept in tiny hutches, even though they are often similar in size to veal crates.

Following the collapse of veal production, raising calves for beef has rapidly become a core part of the dairy industry’s business structure, with the majority of dairy farms now cross-breeding dairy cows with Angus beef genetics to produce offspring that are more valuable on the beef market (a service that Grimmius supports by selling bull semen). Because these animals are destined for burgers rather than for veal piccata, they are legally allowed to be kept in conditions that would be illegal under Prop 12 if they were being raised for veal. 

“The public is against these practices overwhelmingly,” DxE’s King said. “And I think the public’s just been deceived and thinks that they voted to ban this, but in reality, there’s this massive loophole” for dairy calves. 

States have many other individual laws pertaining to animal health and welfare at their disposal. In November, DxE sent a criminal complaint to Sarah Hacker, the district attorney for Kings County, California, where one of the Grimmius facilities that they filmed is located. They alleged, among other things, that Grimmius’s confinement of calves in hutches violates a California law, separate from Prop 12, that requires confined animals to be allotted an “adequate exercise area.” But in a letter replying to the complaint, Hacker did not reference the “adequate exercise” law. Instead, she wrote, the confinement was not illegal because “the calves are not raised for veal, meaning the specific square-footage requirements for veal production do not apply.”

In a statement to Vox, Hacker did not directly respond to a question about how an “adequate exercise area” is defined, but wrote that an investigation into Grimmius’s facilities in response to DxE’s complaint found that the company “maintains its calf raising program in compliance with the law and industry standards,” and that it “worked closely with veterinarians and state officials to provide a safe and healthy environment for their calves.” 

The vagueness of California’s “adequate exercise” law, compared to the specific provisions of Prop 12, limits the leverage that rural county prosecutors like Hacker might otherwise have to enforce the law in animals’ favor. But there is an obvious absurdity to basing an animal’s right to movement not on their biological needs, but on their eventual market destination.

“Laws like Prop 12 give both the public and prosecutors a false sense that the problem of egregious harms to animals has been remedied and no further action is necessary,” Justin Marceau, a professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and a Vox contributor, told me. “Calves raised in hutches suffer in unconscionable ways, but Prop 12 — ostensibly the most robust animal welfare law in the country — ignores these animals entirely,” he added. 

The success of state animal confinement laws, including Prop 12 and others, represented tremendous progress for millions of animals and a rare political victory for the tiny animal rights movement. The absence of calf hutches from those laws is mostly an artifact of path dependence and political pragmatism — it would have been an overwhelming feat to challenge a central practice of California’s powerful dairy industry. 

And now, the era of passing new anti-confinement laws has mostly passed, Josh Balk, a veteran animal advocate who was a key strategist in the state-by-state movement to ban extreme confinement, told me. Amending them to cover all dairy calves would be an enormous undertaking, and it’s not clear whether it would be the best use of animal advocates’ limited resources. The animal movement has largely moved on to other priorities, particularly focusing on helping animals who are raised for food in the greatest numbers and experience the greatest suffering. By that measure, it is hard for calves to compete for attention with the suffering of chickens, more than 9 billion of whom are slaughtered for meat every year in the US. 

Still, that strategic math does not make it easy to ignore the misery of millions of sensitive baby cows trapped in small wooden crates. Balk himself is unequivocal about the cruelty of the practice: “It’s completely shameful what they’re doing to those poor calves,” he said. Their suffering represents a still-unfinished mandate in the long fight to end the worst abuses in our food system.