Milking it - where have all the cows gone?

 

Milking It 

Just as environmental subsidies are allowing money to grow on trees for big companies who are buying up large amounts of land for carbon trading projects then so too are our public funds being misused in a case of missing cows helping to boost supermarket profits.

From the towns where you buy your packaged milk from the supermarket, you will not have noticed the radical changes in the fields that are taking place to provide that carton.

Yet if you are lucky enough to have the time to roam round the countryside, you will not see many cows grazing anymore. There are being replaced by black plastic bags stuffed with grass cuttings ready for storage nearer the farm for use as feed for cattle, whose pats are washed out and collected in slurry tanks, all ready to be transported by road to the fields.

Locked away

The cattle still exist and many farms now house several thousand cows - or beef cattle. They are out of sight in big barns. They stay indoors throughout the year as the drag of taking them out to fields and bringing them back, twice a day in all sorts of weathers, is several steps too far for most producers these days. Quite simply that is ‘inefficient’ in terms of energy and time consumed. The cattle are there 24 hours a day in sparse conditions. While we rightly hear about chickens indoors, we hear much less about these cattle, yet they are sentient creatures.

So, the animals stay indoors, in the dry, and eat mainly grass from the fields. But they also eat a lot of ‘concentrate’.  This is usually soy beans, £800million annually imported from Brazil, and maize (about the same amount in money) mainly imported from USA. The tax/tariff on this maize has been removed by this government in June this year, only the second tariff change since Brexit, in order to keep feed prices low. 

The change from field to factory production has gone on in the last 5-10 years out of sight and with few controls on conditions.

Banks and supermarket pressures

Banks have shoved dairy farmers, caught by supermarkets pushing them to produce milk ever cheaper, into major investment. They need massive tractors and mowers to cut the grass as quickly as possible, often 4 times a year, and then shift the cuttings into silage bags. Farmers also need slurry tanks to hold the waste washed from the barns plus slurry tankers to cart the stuff to deposit on the fields, often along busy roads at high speed. They also need to improve their own infrastructure to carry this frequently used heavyweight.  No wonder 1 in 20 dairy farmers went to the (albeit dry stone) wall last year. 

Diary workers quit over working conditions  

Many dairy workers have been replaced by ever more accurate machines to feed, precisely measured amounts, and to milk and measure the production of the beasts. There are not now enough dairy workers.  A survey for ‘The Cattle Site’ found that four fifths of all respondents were worried by staff recruitment with almost a third considering leaving the industry due to a lack of dairy labour. 28% reported staff were leaving due to unsociable working hours. It may also have something to do with working inside all day. Clearly, they need a union. 

River damage to be paid for by the public purse

The environmental impacts of these changes are poorly understood, as they are poorly studied. One big issue are excessive phosphates going into rivers, causing ‘nutrient growth’ of algae taking oxygen and thus killing other river life. Half comes from yards and half from fields. The slurry is rich in phosphates which are not held in the ground well, and so washes off.  It may also be that the slurry soil works more anaerobically, so not as efficient as old-fashioned aerobic cow manure in holding the phosphate. But I cannot find any UK Land based research looking into this issue.  

The government announced in August this year - as part of unlocking the old EU’s ‘nutrient neutrality’ law- that £280m is going to be invested directly to rivers to improve slurry damage with 4000 farm inspections being carried out by 50 new inspectors. There is also a £25m innovative research programme to improve nutrient (phosphate) holding in soil.  Are the supermarkets going to fund these government costs, rather than coming out of taxpayer’s money, to make up for their cheap milk policy? 

The really big environmental issue concerns global warming. Cows are often blamed for their methane burps, yet the cow contribution to this major problem is much more complex. Cows in fields burp across the grass, where chemicals called ‘hydroxyl radicals’ (charged OH molecules), produced in sunlight by water on grass, break the methane up into less harmful water and carbon dioxide.

In the barns there are no radicals keeping things the methane down. Also, there are all those imported feed concentrates - £1.5 billion in imports from land that would be better left for trees or ranching. The two dairy footprints - one from grazing and the other from barns are wildly different. Our food carbon footprint makes its impression all over the world, when we could be using our grass better.

New approach needed

Imagine if we used the £1.5b worth of cattle feed going to people abroad to regenerate our soils, move the cows more easily, pay dairy workers living wages, and utilise our land to grow grass without polluting the rivers. And we’d have cows back in the fields to show off our countryside.

Ex-PM Johnson promised in June 2016 at Gisburn market that the existing farming subsidies would stay. He lied. They are going. Dairy farms will be hit by the losses.  Yet new ‘environmentally friendly’ farm subsidies are doing little to address the environmental issues of barn-bred cattle. Much money is going to consultants on unworkable schemes to attract inward investors, rather than the farmers themselves. 2,000 farmers signed up to the sustainable farming incentive (SFI) scheme. By August this year, it had paid out £10,692,415– less than 0.5% of the overall £2.4bn farming budget.