I grew up around livestock. My Dad raised Black Angus cattle for a big part of his life, and even after Dad gave up farming, I worked a lot of summers in my uncle's livestock auction barn. Cows, and indeed all livestock, are responsible for a variety of, well, emissions, some of which I was required to shovel from time to time, while others just made me wrinkle my nose.
It is the latter kind of livestock emissions that Europe is all a-flutter over; specifically, methane emissions from dairy cows. Now some folks across the pond are pushing a food additive for dairy cows to reduce those emissions. They are doing this not to make life less odoriferous for the people caring for the bovines but in the name of climate change.
Europe’s biggest dairy company is facing a backlash after giving cows a synthetic additive to their feed in an attempt to cut their methane emissions.
Arla, which makes brands including Lurpak butter and Cravendale milk, said it was working with Morrisons, Tesco and Aldi to trial giving cows the additive Bovaer.
Thirty of Arla’s 9,000 farmers will test how the additives can be introduced into normal feeding routines, with the aim of then rolling Bovaer out more broadly.
Arla said Bovaer had been found to reduce methane emissions from cows by around 27pc.
We've discussed methane emissions from cattle before, but this a new wrinkle, in effect giving the cows Beano to control all this in the name of climate change. This is a topic that has been bandied about for quite a while, although nobody ever seems to be interested in discussing the emissions from the perhaps 60 million bison, each larger than a typical domestic bovine, that roamed the Great Plains only a couple of hundred years ago — during a time period that included the Little Ice Age.
The problem is that there is some — perhaps a lot — of skepticism about what effect this treatment will have on cows and humans.
The additive is made of silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and organic compound 3-nitrooxypropanol (known as 3-NOP).
Although it has been claimed the additive has no side effects on cows, a report by the Food Standards Agency last year found that 3-NOP “should be considered corrosive to the eyes, a skin irritant and potentially harmful by inhalation” to humans handling it.
However, animal nutrition specialist DSM said: “In every case, it [the additive] has proven safe for animal, farmer and consumer.”
Color me skeptical.
There is, you see, a good reason that cattle can convert plants like grasses, which are coarse, fibrous, and loaded with silica, into food for humans. We can't eat grass. Cattle can and can convert grass into beef and milk. That's because cattle are ruminants, with multi-chambered stomachs that are basically big fermentation tanks.
That process, of course, produces a lot of methane. It stands to reason that anything that interferes with that fermentation process will affect the cow's ability to digest grasses and other rough forage. This means one of two things: Either cattle will take longer to reach market age (or breeding age, in the case of dairy cattle), or they will have to have their diets heavily supplemented with higher-quality feeds. Either of those will increase the price of beef and dairy products.
Feature or bug?
See Related: Facts, Not Feelings, Must Drive Climate Science
NASA Carbon Emissions Computer Model Scare-Mongers, but Raises More Questions Than It Answers
At the UN COP29 Climate Conference: Yet Another Tiresome Proposed Sin Tax on Meat
Here's the onion: Cattle aren't even remotely the biggest emitters of biologically produced methane.
Also, regarding the effects on humans noted above, I'd be curious to know what kind of testing has been done to determine that these compounds have not proved harmful to humans. Did they test this model, where cattle's metabolisms were affected, adversely, by a cocktail of compounds given to them to reduce methane emissions — all in the nebulous name of climate change?
This is, once again, a solution desperately seeking a problem. Shouldn't human safety be the primary concern here? Why should we administer a questionable treatment that may adversely affect the metabolic processes of cattle and humans alike, in the fuzzy idea that we humans know what the planet's "correct" temperature is and should work and spend endlessly to prevent any change in a vast, chaotic system that we scarcely understand?
Europe's Arla would do well to back off and think this through — and perhaps, get out and touch some grass and reflect on the fact that they can't eat the grass unless it has been passed through the unparalleled and efficient grass-to-food machine called a cow.
