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1) In USA smelling herbicides 1/8 of a mile away they would be breaking so many laws. They'd be in jail and sued to bankruptcy.
2) My neighbor rotates pastures on his dairy. Production down some but feed costs and manure hauling are also down. On eggs, production would be down, almost non-existant in winter months, but egg prices would set all time highs as availability would be much less--that's not a bad thing.
We have laws about spray drift too. But by the time you get an official out to verify it the problem is gone.
Rotation works well if done properly. Planting with that in mind is a very regional equation. That was the trick here to keep production from dropping in a significant manner. We are lucky, in that normally we don't see any snow until late december and it is all gone by March. This last winter was an exception. We are over a month behind with everything.
Big compost pit with heat tubes to extract heat and feed it into the coop works very well for winter heat here. Cows provide all the fuel I need.
Also found sprouting all my seeds helps tremendously with feed bills and keeping winter egg production up.
Reality is that most people can't afford to make sweeping changes in their diet due to costs. But every small change people make has an effect on the market. Small easy steps and slow transitions in our food production allowed us to get where we are today.
With your friends dairy I wonder if the drop in production isn't partly a factor of the genetic lines of his cattle. I have seen reams of papers on how some genetic lines within specific breeds do not transition as well as others.