There’s a bit of a stooshie going on about the farmer owned, milk co-operative Arla and its involvement with a ‘sustainable technology’ development company Royal DSM (Dutch State Mines).
The controversy centres around the possible insistence that Arla’s farmer suppliers should use the cattle feed additive Bovaer. Bovaer is a chemical compound that has been shown to reduce the amount of methane a cow burps up by up to 40% when incorporated into animal feed.
Now methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and under the Glasgow Climate Pact at COP26 held in Glasgow in 2021, the UK, along with over 120 other countries, signed up to reduce its methane emissions by 30% (compared to 2020) by 2030. Well, that’s just 5 years away and not much has been done so far.
Arla is a Danish/Swedish based co-operative and Denmark has gone further than the UK in committing to a 50% reduction in methane emissions by 2030 (compared to 1990). The Danish government are also proposing a methane tax. So, understandably, Arla are very concerned that their supplier base will be severely challenged.
The 30-40% methane reduction is a figure that represents the effect that feeding Bovaer has in intensive farming where the cows are kept indoors and fed a lot of cereals, soya, etc. It’s easy for scientists to study this kind of system because all the variables can be controlled. The results for outdoor, grass-based dairy systems is less clear, with conflicting research results.
The farming industry has known that this methane commitment is coming down the line and governments are going to have to do something sooner or later. Scientists have been working flat-out to find a golden bullet that they can sell to farmers to get them across the methane emissions reduction line. Perhaps Bovaer is this magic bullet that will keep everyone happy. What’s to lose?
Net zero in practice, and what it all means
This is where it starts getting complicated.
What about the guys doing outdoor, pasture-based systems? Bovaer doesn’t seem to work so well there. If at all.
As I mentioned, the industry has seen this methane cloud looming and there are some who have begun to argue that it has to be about methane emission intensity. That is, if a cow is producing 5,000l of milk in a year and you can get her to produce 10,000l of milk in a year, you have halved your methane emission intensity per litre. This was an argument being made by M&S a few years back and it has a lot of traction in the industry and among politicians as it favours intensive farming, which creates a lot of jobs in the supply chain.
But this is another example of methane tunnel vision. While the methane emissions might have been halved per litre by intensification, what about the other greenhouse gas emissions associated with industrial farming and all the stuff it requires to use? What about the impact on biodiversity, diffuse pollution, soil erosion and anti-biotic resistance? What about animal welfare and the social impacts?
In our case, we have been independently assessed as being one of the few ‘net zero’ dairy farms in Europe. That is, we are locking up more carbon than we are emitting through our land management that is locking carbon in our soils, our planting of tens of thousands of mixed broadleaf trees and our substantial reduction in the amount of stuff - like feed - that we need to buy-in.
In fact we've reduced our carbon dependency so much that, over 90% of our farm's greenhouse gas emissions are now accounted for by methane. So, what to do?
If the authorities insist we still have to play our part, ie. reduce our methane emissions by 30% by 2030, do we feed Bovaer to our cows? What is this stuff anyway?
Following the science?
Apparently Bovaer is mainly a chemical, 3-nitrooxypropanol or 3-NOP, that blocks an enzyme critical in the methane production pathway in a ruminants stomach.
If I did use it in our cattle feed, what would our organic and pasture-fed auditors think? Would it make any difference anyway? The science is unclear.
To reduce our methane emissions by a third, would we need to reduce our herd by a third? That would make us financially unviable and threaten ten jobs.
Back in the day when I was a farm consultant, we did quite a bit of work with scientists studying growth promoters for beef cattle, the benefits of Glyphosate (Roundup) and the like. Farms used of a lot of this stuff, and it was eventually banned in Europe because of long term health and ethical concerns.
In our 25-year journey towards a more sustainable, agroecological way of farming, I have become more and more convinced that our way of doing science is deeply flawed when it comes to complex biological systems, and yet we base so much of what we do on it. Firstly, as a scientist explained to me, scientists tend to discover what they are paid to discover. They who pay the piper call the tune. Research is expensive and somebody has to pay for it.
Is that person or organisation funding the research going to take a long-term view of the product’s social, welfare and environmental impacts? The evidence would suggest that the time element is paramount. Get your product to market before the competition, is the first rule. Any issues might eventually come out in the wash, by which time you’ll have moved on.
Even at government level, the decisions about what research and by whom is largely determined by politics and jobs and is time limited to a couple of years. If it is complex biological systems you are working with, as we were, it takes many years to see the true impacts.
Again, scientists like to have a fixed and stable system in which they can vary one, or at most a couple, of components of that system and study what happens. But in a complex biological system where everything is very fluid but connected in some way, the chain of effects and consequences can be unclear, leading to misinterpretation of the results.
We will follow nature
What I’m saying is, we interfere with natural processes at our peril.
We are not smart enough and our science is not robust enough to cope with complex biological systems. We are too driven by short term, quick techno-fixes.
In our 25-year journey we have discovered that our soil life and productivity can recover from the toxic effects of fertilisers and pesticides and produce the same amount of food but without them.
We have discovered that the health and productivity of our cows and calves in a more natural, low-stress environment can contribute more to global food supply than the industrial model, but without all the mess and misery.
We can do all that but also deliver a greatly enhanced biodiversity, a net zero food system and a sense of worth in our farm team.
We don’t need Bovaer, we need strong leadership and system change.