Do you think all dairy cows need calves to create milk? I don't care if someone disagrees with my posts I agree that they engage in conversation. Downvoting without explanation is my complaint. Finally the comment that whey production results in dead calves is pretty simplistic and not based on any analysis that I can discern.

If HN is about the struggle for truth I expect a certain amount of intellectual rigor in comments.

The mother very quickly starts producing more milk than the calf can drink. In the wild the milk production levels off to the level of the calf's intake (and then slowly rises to match their needs as they age and then tapers off as they age further).

In a small dairy situation the calves are kept off of the cows for either the morning or the evening milking and so the cows' milk production remains high the entire time. The calf weans, but from the cow's udder's perspective the calf is still suckling like mad and so the cow keeps producing milk. The calf grows up and is bred themselves, doubling the milk output over the course of two to three years.

Now this isn't sustainable in a paperclip-optimizer kind of way, so only the best milkers are kept and the ones that either have a hard time getting pregnant, or are ornery, or produce less milk, or get sick regularly wind up getting harvested for their meat. But there's no need to kill the calves (at the local dairy scale).

Wait until it is done weaning to start using it's mother's milk. Most Dairy cows don't need to have a calf to produce milk.