Steve West has a genetics background, but now works as a dairy consultant to farmers and processors. His advice also includes market analysis, business and technical advice including genetics, nutrition and optimising productivity.
We need to start with some key underpinning facts about UK agriculture.
8% of the farm businesses produce 62% of the output from 33% of the land.
55% of milk is processed by two companies. 75% by the top four.
71% of GBs agricultural land is only economically suitable for growing forage/grass.
If the worlds 278M cows were as efficient as a British cow, we would only need around 76M to produce the same amount of milk.
The British herd has shrunk to 45% of the size it was in 1950 but is producing 20% more milk.
Food production in the UK is a complex industry. Dairy farming impacts the environment in many ways including carbon emissions (see figure), water pollution, ammonia and biodiversity. The Paris Agreement has pressured the industry to reduce carbon emissions. The fact that methane emissions, from natural rumen fermentation in cows, is more than 25 times more warming than carbon dioxide has put dairy production in the spotlight. To make the comparison fair, for UK producers and other food types, emissions reductions need to be understood in the light of the nutrition produced, and other consequences.
Only 2% of cows are farmed in Western Europe (79% in Asia, Africa and South America), and their average carbon footprint is much lower than the global average figures on the bar chart (see annotations). For example milk produced on the average Western European farm emits 1.2kg compared to the global average of 3.15kg, due to much more efficient production processes. These figures also ignore the carbon savings achieved by good soil management, renewable energy creation on farms and tree or hedge planting on farmland. Steve argued that methane emissions from cows are sustainable because they are constantly recycled (burps oxidise into carbon dioxide which photosynthesizes into plants that cows eat) over about a 12 year timeframe. Emissions from fossil fuels are not sustainable because they release greenhouse gases from prehistoric tropical forests.
Farms work within tight margins. The pressure from processors on carbon metrics is requiring farmers to become more and more efficient and this is driving intensification and growth of farms, making it challenging to fully consider nature outcomes without incentives.
67% of the world’s agricultural land is ‘marginal’ and we need to feed 10 Billion people by 2050. Dr Anne Mottet’s work shows that a cow could create 1kg of human edible protein from 0.6kg of human edible protein. Cows also have a role in building organic matter in soil just by bringing them into arable rotations – just 1% increase in soil organic matter can store an additional 10 tonnes/hectare of carbon.
There is no doubt the industry needs to improve but there are questions about whether the focus is in the right place.
You can download all of Steve’s slides as a pdf here.
