For years, this South Australian Dairy Farm has been hiding a secret… Minko North Dairy is one of South Australia’s largest dairy farms. With a close connection to the University of Adelaide’s Roseworthy Campus, it has been used as a training facility for the University since 2013. But, if you were to walk behind the sheds, filled with cows and calves, and examine the piles of freshly turned earth, you would find a scene straight out of a nightmare.
The bodies of cows and calves lie scattered through the landscape, evidence of years of slaughter and death. Some had been freshly dumped, their bloated bodies barely covered by dirt, while others have decomposed until only their skeletons remain.
Some cows and calves show evidence of having been killed by a bolt gun, while others seem to have succumbed to sickness or injury. Determined to uncover what was happening at this dairy, investigators installed cameras and monitored the farm by drone. Over the course of a year, they saw newborn calves separated from their mothers, ear-tagged, and restrained while their horn buds were burnt off. Sick and weak calves were filmed in the pens, then days later filmed being dumped on the mass grave. Mother cows would be milked twice daily, with those unable to walk lifted by a tractor and driven to the milking shed.
Despite their monitoring, we still don’t know how many of the cows and calves hidden behind the sheds at Minko North were killed.
Do you have information about what this dairy has been doing to their cows? Send us a tip at [email protected].
