Milking the planet dry
Every morning at dawn, Joseph gets up with the sun to draw six litres of milk from his cow before putting on his shirt and tie and going to work. His cow’s name is Veronica, and her milk provides the main daily protein requirement for Joseph, his six children and two wives.
Joseph lives on a cattle ranch in Kenya, but the farm isn’t his: it belongs to the Hamiltons, fourth-generation expats who run almost 2,000 cows on their land near Lake Naivasha. Joseph is the gardener, and although he knows a lot about cattle thanks to Veronica, he’s content with his lot as a part-time herder – to own even one cow in Kenya confers significant status. As the converted Christian son of a Samburu, a semi-nomadic tribe from Kenya’s northern deserts who live entirely from cattle, Joseph has cattle in his blood.
Cows and humans have coexisted for millennia. Venerated in 30,000-year-old Stone Age art, cattle were first domesticated in around 7,000 BC: after the dog, but before the horse. Early farmers moved their herds nomadically, milking and slaughtering them when they needed food and clothing.
Cattle’s economic worth gained ground in Roman hands: their modern name derives, like ‘chattel’, from the Latin for ‘goods’. But it wasn’t until the 18th century, when British farmer Robert Bakewell began to experiment with selective breeding, that we started to farm them intensively. Since then, the expansion of cattle across the globe has been unstoppable.
Today, the global cattle population numbers around 1.5 billion. Each animal requires about four hectares of pasture a year, which, in rotation, takes up more than a tenth of the Earth’s total terrestrial surface, or a third of all currently occupied agricultural land. A further third of this land is taken up by animal feedcrops. The number of people employed in the livestock industry is of the same order, some 1.3 billion, with a large but incalculable proportion directly linked to cattle production.
The balance of cattle to grass is relatively sustainable at present, but with the growth of major developing powers such as China, India, and Brazil, the demands that cattle make on land are beginning to exceed supply. More worryingly still, the signs are that these demands will continue to grow. And the question on the lips of the world’s top agricultural advisors is: how do we deal with the consequences of this unprecedented growth?
Asian invasion
Around a third of the world’s cattle are in Asia. Of those, some 200 million cattle and 100 million farmed buffalo are in India, where both milk and beef consumption are on the rise.
In the past 50 years, India has increased its per capita annual milk intake from 4.7 litres to nearly eight litres. In parallel to this increase has come a trebling of the country’s population, leading to an almost sixfold total increase in consumption.
‘We’ve seen the Green Revolution,’ says Professor PN Bhat of the World Buffalo Trust in Noida, Delhi. ‘Today, in India we call this the Livestock Revolution.’ This revolution has led to dramatic changes in India’s agricultural policy. ‘Seventy five per cent of the workforce in livestock are women: milking, feeding, calving and taking care of every aspect of production except the point where money changes hands.’ To harness this, India has reformed policy – training and empowering the female rural workforce to improve production techniques and streamline the delivery of, and payment for, dairy produce.
Meanwhile, among India’s wealthy, demand for beef continues to rise, despite the fact that the slaughtering of cows is still only legal in two states. ‘We are seeing a growth rate of five to seven per cent annually; the young Indian culture is increasing very quickly towards non-vegetarianism,’ Bhat says.
A similar picture of burgeoning cattle consumerism has emerged in China. The huge rural-to-urban migration that has redefined China’s demographics over the past 15 years, with its emphasis on increased sophistication and spending on diet, is, according to experts, the main reason for China’s surge in consumption of cattle products.
‘Within urban households, beef and milk are taking rising shares of household spending on animal products, at the expense of pork (the traditional meat in Chinese diets),’ says Professor Allan Rae, director of the Centre for Applied Economics and Policy Studies at Massey University in New Zealand.
China’s urban population increased its dairy consumption by 296 per cent between 1990 and 2006. Meanwhile as a nation, China has become the world’s biggest consumer of meat, having doubled its per capita consumption from 25 to 53 kilograms in the past decade.
Government policy is undoubtedly behind many of these changes. For example, in 2006, Premier Wen Jiabao introduced a programme to give every child in the country half a litre of milk a day. Similarly, increasing prosperity brought about by economic liberalisation has undoubtedly played a role in changes to diet.
The changes in diet have seen a corresponding change in agricultural production. During the early 1970s, crops formed 82 per cent of China’s agricultural output. That share has dropped to half, while livestock has more than doubled its share from 14 per cent in 1970 to 36 per cent today. But whereas in India, increased production has kept pace with demand for milk and outstripped it for beef, China is a net importer of both.
For the time being, ‘backyard, part-time animal-raising is still the dominant form of livestock production in China’, says Rae. ‘But production is moving nearer to major markets, and as much as 50 per cent of China’s total milk production could now be occurring in specialist dairy farms. A big unknown is to what extent domestic industry can continue to supply the growth in demand, especially as sustainability becomes more important. Environmental problems are already occurring, and overgrazing of grasslands is a problem in the cattle sector.’
With 20 per cent of the world’s population and only seven per cent of its agricultural land, China’s increasing demand for beef, milk and other livestock products is certain to remain the dominant strain on global food resources.
The bovines from Brazil
Despite China’s colossal statistics, the most dramatically emerging player on the global bovine stage is Brazil. In the past five years, Brazil has become the world’s leading exporter of beef. It’s home to 200 million cattle, occupying nearly a tenth of the country’s available agricultural land, up to a third of which – some 13 million hectares – was once Amazonian rainforest.
‘Sixty to 70 per cent of deforestation in the Amazon results from cattle ranches,’ says Rhett Butler of online rainforest watchdog Mongabay.com. ‘But it isn’t only cattle – soybean farmers are there in numbers, too.’
Brazilian soybeans are a major source of cattle feed in both Europe and China, where pastureland is relatively scarce. A 2006 Greenpeace report, Eating up the Amazon, stated that ‘50 per cent of all soy produced in the Amazon goes to European livestock farms’, and prompted a moratorium on felling rainforest for new soy cultivation.
The report pinned the blame for soya expansion on three big US commodities firms. Giant agricultural traders Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill all came in for severe criticism for supplying the seeds, pesticides, mills and port facilities to enable soya production on a massive scale in the heart of the Amazon. Another of Greenpeace’s targets is leading Brazilian soya exporter Maggi, whose owner also happens to be governor of Mato Grosso state.
But while the moratorium means it’s no longer fashionable to buy Brazilian soya (even McDonalds stopped buying Cargill’s Amazon soy), soybean planting is extremely difficult to monitor, meaning that the vast majority of Brazilian-grown animal feed still comes from illegal producers.
And cattle’s implication in Amazon deforestation is linked to soy in another way: whereas Brazilian soy production is now under international scrutiny, there are still no restrictions in place against clearing rainforest for cattle. Soya farmers are then free to buy up and convert ranchland to their crop, cattle acting as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for the sacking of the Amazon.
‘In Brazil, what we’re seeing is a major expansion of cattle into areas currently under humid forest,’ affirms Butler. ‘The impact on biodiversity is unimaginably bad.’
Just the bare statistics paint a stark picture of expansion at biodiversity’s cost: Brazilian beef exports have more than tripled since the late 1990s; almost 40 per cent of Brazil’s cattle herd lives in the Amazon; and according to the Centre for International Forestry Research, 80 per cent of growth in Brazil’s livestock industry has taken place in Amazonia.
Worse still, increased demand for animal feed from countries such as China drive up prices, which in turn calls for further expansion. Even if the USA were to reallocate its total annual output of corn produced for ethanol to animal feed (some 2.3 billion tonnes), China’s demand is such that this would be swallowed up within four years. Continued expansion into Brazilian rainforest by both cattle and soy plantations seems inevitable, and despite recent collaboration between the commodities giants and environmental organisations, the rainforest soya moratorium is set to expire in July this year.
Land degradation
Cattle’s effect on the landscape isn’t restricted to deforestation. Henning Steinfeld, author of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s recent report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, summarises the damage: ‘[Cattle] overgraze vegetation, disrupting its role of trapping and stabilising soil. Concentrated hoof action in feeding and watering sites mechanically disrupts dry and exposed soils – and soils loosened in the dry season are a source of sediments at the start of a new rainy season.’ In other words, extensive areas of nutrient-rich topsoil are washed away each year due to cattle grazing.
So far, signs of desertification directly linked to cattle production are largely confined to smaller producers, but the impact is by no means minimal. According to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, the worst offenders include countries in Central America that experience long dry seasons, such as Honduras, and in Africa, where 65 per cent of agricultural land suffers some form of degradation.
In northwestern China, desert has encroached at a tremendous rate on pasture thanks to overgrazing. ‘Pastureland has suffered severe degradation caused by overstocking and bad management due mainly to poorly defined property rights,’ says Professor Yuman Liu of the Rural Development Institute in Beijing. In this part of China, up to half of the land has been severely degraded. Estimates from Len Berry, director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies, have put the annual combined costs of this degradation at up to 20 per cent of China’s GDP.
Desertification brings increased pressure to bear on indigenous wild ruminant species such as argali sheep and saiga antelope, as well as wild horses and camels. As increasing numbers of cattle, sheep and goats are pushed onto their land by farmers desperate for new pasture, these species have nowhere to go, and their numbers have been diminishing dramatically.
But China is desperate for good agricultural land and has made a sizeable effort to halt desertification: its huge reafforestation campaign has seen more than 46 million trees planted since 1998. And intensive soy- and grain-fed cattle farms are encouraged, and are increasingly being moved away from urban centres to offset water pollution issues.
Faecal matters
These pollution issues are a problem for livestock production in general. In the USA, for example, two per cent of farms currently produce 40 per cent of all animals. Collectively, these farms output more than 330 million tonnes of manure each year, which they store in vast open lagoons. When floods occur, these lagoons can be a major cause of waterway pollution; recent spills across the USA have killed tens of millions of fish, caused disease and even killed people.
Natural runoff from cattle lots causes algal blooms in seawater, which can kill off the majority of marine organisms in the vicinity. Each summer, the world’s second-largest ‘dead zone’ – covering an area of some 15,000 square kilometres – forms in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi deposits 41 per cent of all US cattle manure runoff.
But it isn’t just cattle’s liquid output that’s damaging. Methane, an estimated 60 million tonnes of which is emitted by cattle each year, is 23 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Most of this methane – which represents almost three quarters of all methane emissions from agriculture – comes out as eructation, or burps, caused by the fermentation of food in the cows’ stomachs. As a percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions, cattle burps are small fry, but given that the total output is predicted to rise by 21 per cent between now and 2020, this byproduct of animal production merits serious consideration.
In Australia and New Zealand, experiments have been conducted to use a vaccine to produce a methane-reducing enzyme in sheep’s stomachs. According to one of the leaders of this research, Professor Andre-Denis Wright of CSIRO Livestock Industries in Queensland, ‘the vaccine, if it works, can theoretically be applied to cattle, too. But results remain a long way off.’ Genetically engineered methane-reductive grasses, which are being developed by Molecular Plant Breeding in Victoria, Australia, are also a long way from hitting the market.
Currently, the most promising solution is to offset methane via anaerobic digestion (AD) tanks, which convert livestock slurry and other agricultural waste into useable biogas. Such tanks have already been installed on more than 4,000 farms in Germany.
Peter Frost of the Agri-Food and Biosciences Unit in Northern Ireland, who is leading the research into AD, believes that this technology has the potential to provide the territory with seven per cent of its electricity supply. However, the technology’s cost is limiting take-up in the UK.
‘In terms of setup costs, we’re currently looking at a major capital investment: for a herd of 100 dairy cows, the equipment works out around £1,250 per cow,’ Frost says. ‘But AD has huge potential. If you combine animal manure with the digestible products that currently go to landfill every day from people’s dustbins (which we call “co-digestion”) you could reduce equipment payback time significantly. But we’re still waiting for the culture of landfill to change to allow co-digestion to bear fruit.
‘However, the biggest hurdle for this technology isn’t the capital cost – it’s political,’ he continues. ‘In North Carolina, the centre of the US pig industry, they’ve called biogas from AD the most important source of renewable energy. In Sweden, there is a plant that converts cow manure to biogas available from the local petrol station. In Austria, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, AD is flourishing. The UK is lagging behind. But if the political will changes, to recognise the importance of natural byproducts from livestock production, we’re looking at a vast source of independent carbon-neutral energy – one that also reduces methane output. The benefits are huge – we’re just waiting for politics to catch up.’
Increasing imbalance
As the afternoon draws in on northern Kenya, Joseph switches off the lawn sprinklers, walks to his hut and removes his shirt and tie, before going to his paddock, where Veronica awaits her second milking.
Having milked her and the other cows belonging to the families in the Hamiltons’ compound, Joseph washes out the steel churns and turns them upside down to dry in the last of the day’s sun, then takes Veronica for a walk along the roadside verge – the only place in the area where the grazing is free.
Joseph keeps Veronica not because he needs her – he has a good job. He keeps her because he is bound to her by centuries of pastoral culture. Six thousand years ago, Joseph’s ancestors farmed cattle in a manner similar to how he tends Veronica today. Two of his children are daughters, and when they marry, he will have to buy cattle for their dowries. In Africa, as in China, India and many other parts of the world, small-scale livestock farming is still a way of life – for the time being.
Meanwhile, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence from Joseph and Veronica stand 2,000 beef cattle, ready to be slaughtered and shipped to supermarkets on four continents. As the world grows wealthier, more populous and more urbanised, this imbalance is set to increase.
Britain’s bovine blue-bloods
Cattle farmers used to say that ‘Britain is the stockyard of the world.’ ‘But it’s no longer quite so simple as when we started farming cattle intensively,’ says Andrew Taylor, veterinary consultant for British Livestock Genetics.
Britain’s position at the forefront of cattle breeding was established during the mid-18th century when Leicestershire farmer Robert Bakewell began experimenting with a system of inbreeding and ruthless culling to produce animals of increased capacity for beef and milk. By the end of the century, the new breeds were almost unrecognisable from their forebears, each bred to suit local conditions and consumer demand.
Bakewell’s legacy can be seen in the fact that today, European breeds represent the genetic pool from which all successful cattle herds are derived. ‘If you look at old photographs of bulls on the walls of breed societies all over the world, so many have classical British names. But you can’t just take purebreeds and expect them to do well in the Amazon rainforest or the Pacific Rim,’ Taylor explains. ‘You need locally adapted genes for breeds to survive. So you take a Zebu cow, and you breed black-and-white into her until you have a herd that’s 80 per cent British Friesian and the rest Zebu. Then you have an animal with a high milk yield that’s adapted to tropical heat and pests.’
There is a downside: improved foreign cattle herds mean UK farmers struggle to compete. ‘We’ve retained pedigree breeding, so we have the genetic material these countries need, and we’re seeing a huge reversion to traditional British bloodlines in China, Vietnam, Thailand and Australia,’ Taylor says. ‘The irony is that we sell them high-quality cattle genes and they sell us cheaper beef and milk because of lower labour costs. But by working together, we increase productivity, and that’s what counts.’
Vertical integration
The economics of livestock production have seen the implementation of a process known as ‘vertical food-chain integration’. This is where a single bull, whose genes perform well across a range of criteria, is selected to suit a particular product line: such as a supermarket’s brand of beef. The supermarket then employs farmers to rear that bull’s offspring in isolation in such a way that they consistently produce meat with reliable marbling and taste, so that what the customer buys off the shelf in, say, Edinburgh in 2009 will be more or less identical in every respect (including genetically) to beef another customer might buy in Essex in 2015.
One notably successful example of this in cattle breeding is a bull known as Lorabar Mighty Prince, who belongs to Genus Breeding in north Wales. Prince is an Aberdeen Angus, and nearly all of his children’s valuable back ends end up in Tesco’s Finest range, while their front ends end up as McDonald’s Angus burger patties.
In Brazil, vertical integration is becoming the norm; tens of thousands of cattle are reared, finished and slaughtered on the same farm. The theory of vertical integration is agriculturally essential – with so many mouths to feed, guaranteed high-quality genes improve productivity for farmers and welfare for the cattle. But the effect is that we will one day find ourselves all feeding from the same carcass. Add to this the fact that the majority of intensive cattle feeds used in Europe (maize and soy) are genetically modified, and the picture of our increasingly factory farmed diet is complete: what goes into our bellies has been ‘improved’ in a lab.
April 2009
Joseph lives on a cattle ranch in Kenya, but the farm isn’t his: it belongs to the Hamiltons, fourth-generation expats who run almost 2,000 cows on their land near Lake Naivasha. Joseph is the gardener, and although he knows a lot about cattle thanks to Veronica, he’s content with his lot as a part-time herder – to own even one cow in Kenya confers significant status. As the converted Christian son of a Samburu, a semi-nomadic tribe from Kenya’s northern deserts who live entirely from cattle, Joseph has cattle in his blood.
Cows and humans have coexisted for millennia. Venerated in 30,000-year-old Stone Age art, cattle were first domesticated in around 7,000 BC: after the dog, but before the horse. Early farmers moved their herds nomadically, milking and slaughtering them when they needed food and clothing.
Cattle’s economic worth gained ground in Roman hands: their modern name derives, like ‘chattel’, from the Latin for ‘goods’. But it wasn’t until the 18th century, when British farmer Robert Bakewell began to experiment with selective breeding, that we started to farm them intensively. Since then, the expansion of cattle across the globe has been unstoppable.
Today, the global cattle population numbers around 1.5 billion. Each animal requires about four hectares of pasture a year, which, in rotation, takes up more than a tenth of the Earth’s total terrestrial surface, or a third of all currently occupied agricultural land. A further third of this land is taken up by animal feedcrops. The number of people employed in the livestock industry is of the same order, some 1.3 billion, with a large but incalculable proportion directly linked to cattle production.
The balance of cattle to grass is relatively sustainable at present, but with the growth of major developing powers such as China, India, and Brazil, the demands that cattle make on land are beginning to exceed supply. More worryingly still, the signs are that these demands will continue to grow. And the question on the lips of the world’s top agricultural advisors is: how do we deal with the consequences of this unprecedented growth?
Asian invasion
Around a third of the world’s cattle are in Asia. Of those, some 200 million cattle and 100 million farmed buffalo are in India, where both milk and beef consumption are on the rise.
In the past 50 years, India has increased its per capita annual milk intake from 4.7 litres to nearly eight litres. In parallel to this increase has come a trebling of the country’s population, leading to an almost sixfold total increase in consumption.
‘We’ve seen the Green Revolution,’ says Professor PN Bhat of the World Buffalo Trust in Noida, Delhi. ‘Today, in India we call this the Livestock Revolution.’ This revolution has led to dramatic changes in India’s agricultural policy. ‘Seventy five per cent of the workforce in livestock are women: milking, feeding, calving and taking care of every aspect of production except the point where money changes hands.’ To harness this, India has reformed policy – training and empowering the female rural workforce to improve production techniques and streamline the delivery of, and payment for, dairy produce.
Meanwhile, among India’s wealthy, demand for beef continues to rise, despite the fact that the slaughtering of cows is still only legal in two states. ‘We are seeing a growth rate of five to seven per cent annually; the young Indian culture is increasing very quickly towards non-vegetarianism,’ Bhat says.
A similar picture of burgeoning cattle consumerism has emerged in China. The huge rural-to-urban migration that has redefined China’s demographics over the past 15 years, with its emphasis on increased sophistication and spending on diet, is, according to experts, the main reason for China’s surge in consumption of cattle products.
‘Within urban households, beef and milk are taking rising shares of household spending on animal products, at the expense of pork (the traditional meat in Chinese diets),’ says Professor Allan Rae, director of the Centre for Applied Economics and Policy Studies at Massey University in New Zealand.
China’s urban population increased its dairy consumption by 296 per cent between 1990 and 2006. Meanwhile as a nation, China has become the world’s biggest consumer of meat, having doubled its per capita consumption from 25 to 53 kilograms in the past decade.
Government policy is undoubtedly behind many of these changes. For example, in 2006, Premier Wen Jiabao introduced a programme to give every child in the country half a litre of milk a day. Similarly, increasing prosperity brought about by economic liberalisation has undoubtedly played a role in changes to diet.
The changes in diet have seen a corresponding change in agricultural production. During the early 1970s, crops formed 82 per cent of China’s agricultural output. That share has dropped to half, while livestock has more than doubled its share from 14 per cent in 1970 to 36 per cent today. But whereas in India, increased production has kept pace with demand for milk and outstripped it for beef, China is a net importer of both.
For the time being, ‘backyard, part-time animal-raising is still the dominant form of livestock production in China’, says Rae. ‘But production is moving nearer to major markets, and as much as 50 per cent of China’s total milk production could now be occurring in specialist dairy farms. A big unknown is to what extent domestic industry can continue to supply the growth in demand, especially as sustainability becomes more important. Environmental problems are already occurring, and overgrazing of grasslands is a problem in the cattle sector.’
With 20 per cent of the world’s population and only seven per cent of its agricultural land, China’s increasing demand for beef, milk and other livestock products is certain to remain the dominant strain on global food resources.
The bovines from Brazil
Despite China’s colossal statistics, the most dramatically emerging player on the global bovine stage is Brazil. In the past five years, Brazil has become the world’s leading exporter of beef. It’s home to 200 million cattle, occupying nearly a tenth of the country’s available agricultural land, up to a third of which – some 13 million hectares – was once Amazonian rainforest.
‘Sixty to 70 per cent of deforestation in the Amazon results from cattle ranches,’ says Rhett Butler of online rainforest watchdog Mongabay.com. ‘But it isn’t only cattle – soybean farmers are there in numbers, too.’
Brazilian soybeans are a major source of cattle feed in both Europe and China, where pastureland is relatively scarce. A 2006 Greenpeace report, Eating up the Amazon, stated that ‘50 per cent of all soy produced in the Amazon goes to European livestock farms’, and prompted a moratorium on felling rainforest for new soy cultivation.
The report pinned the blame for soya expansion on three big US commodities firms. Giant agricultural traders Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill all came in for severe criticism for supplying the seeds, pesticides, mills and port facilities to enable soya production on a massive scale in the heart of the Amazon. Another of Greenpeace’s targets is leading Brazilian soya exporter Maggi, whose owner also happens to be governor of Mato Grosso state.
But while the moratorium means it’s no longer fashionable to buy Brazilian soya (even McDonalds stopped buying Cargill’s Amazon soy), soybean planting is extremely difficult to monitor, meaning that the vast majority of Brazilian-grown animal feed still comes from illegal producers.
And cattle’s implication in Amazon deforestation is linked to soy in another way: whereas Brazilian soy production is now under international scrutiny, there are still no restrictions in place against clearing rainforest for cattle. Soya farmers are then free to buy up and convert ranchland to their crop, cattle acting as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for the sacking of the Amazon.
‘In Brazil, what we’re seeing is a major expansion of cattle into areas currently under humid forest,’ affirms Butler. ‘The impact on biodiversity is unimaginably bad.’
Just the bare statistics paint a stark picture of expansion at biodiversity’s cost: Brazilian beef exports have more than tripled since the late 1990s; almost 40 per cent of Brazil’s cattle herd lives in the Amazon; and according to the Centre for International Forestry Research, 80 per cent of growth in Brazil’s livestock industry has taken place in Amazonia.
Worse still, increased demand for animal feed from countries such as China drive up prices, which in turn calls for further expansion. Even if the USA were to reallocate its total annual output of corn produced for ethanol to animal feed (some 2.3 billion tonnes), China’s demand is such that this would be swallowed up within four years. Continued expansion into Brazilian rainforest by both cattle and soy plantations seems inevitable, and despite recent collaboration between the commodities giants and environmental organisations, the rainforest soya moratorium is set to expire in July this year.
Start the slideshow (6 pictures)
Land degradation
Cattle’s effect on the landscape isn’t restricted to deforestation. Henning Steinfeld, author of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s recent report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, summarises the damage: ‘[Cattle] overgraze vegetation, disrupting its role of trapping and stabilising soil. Concentrated hoof action in feeding and watering sites mechanically disrupts dry and exposed soils – and soils loosened in the dry season are a source of sediments at the start of a new rainy season.’ In other words, extensive areas of nutrient-rich topsoil are washed away each year due to cattle grazing.
So far, signs of desertification directly linked to cattle production are largely confined to smaller producers, but the impact is by no means minimal. According to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture, the worst offenders include countries in Central America that experience long dry seasons, such as Honduras, and in Africa, where 65 per cent of agricultural land suffers some form of degradation.
In northwestern China, desert has encroached at a tremendous rate on pasture thanks to overgrazing. ‘Pastureland has suffered severe degradation caused by overstocking and bad management due mainly to poorly defined property rights,’ says Professor Yuman Liu of the Rural Development Institute in Beijing. In this part of China, up to half of the land has been severely degraded. Estimates from Len Berry, director of the Florida Center for Environmental Studies, have put the annual combined costs of this degradation at up to 20 per cent of China’s GDP.
Desertification brings increased pressure to bear on indigenous wild ruminant species such as argali sheep and saiga antelope, as well as wild horses and camels. As increasing numbers of cattle, sheep and goats are pushed onto their land by farmers desperate for new pasture, these species have nowhere to go, and their numbers have been diminishing dramatically.
But China is desperate for good agricultural land and has made a sizeable effort to halt desertification: its huge reafforestation campaign has seen more than 46 million trees planted since 1998. And intensive soy- and grain-fed cattle farms are encouraged, and are increasingly being moved away from urban centres to offset water pollution issues.
Faecal matters
These pollution issues are a problem for livestock production in general. In the USA, for example, two per cent of farms currently produce 40 per cent of all animals. Collectively, these farms output more than 330 million tonnes of manure each year, which they store in vast open lagoons. When floods occur, these lagoons can be a major cause of waterway pollution; recent spills across the USA have killed tens of millions of fish, caused disease and even killed people.
Natural runoff from cattle lots causes algal blooms in seawater, which can kill off the majority of marine organisms in the vicinity. Each summer, the world’s second-largest ‘dead zone’ – covering an area of some 15,000 square kilometres – forms in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi deposits 41 per cent of all US cattle manure runoff.
But it isn’t just cattle’s liquid output that’s damaging. Methane, an estimated 60 million tonnes of which is emitted by cattle each year, is 23 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Most of this methane – which represents almost three quarters of all methane emissions from agriculture – comes out as eructation, or burps, caused by the fermentation of food in the cows’ stomachs. As a percentage of global greenhouse gas emissions, cattle burps are small fry, but given that the total output is predicted to rise by 21 per cent between now and 2020, this byproduct of animal production merits serious consideration.
In Australia and New Zealand, experiments have been conducted to use a vaccine to produce a methane-reducing enzyme in sheep’s stomachs. According to one of the leaders of this research, Professor Andre-Denis Wright of CSIRO Livestock Industries in Queensland, ‘the vaccine, if it works, can theoretically be applied to cattle, too. But results remain a long way off.’ Genetically engineered methane-reductive grasses, which are being developed by Molecular Plant Breeding in Victoria, Australia, are also a long way from hitting the market.
Currently, the most promising solution is to offset methane via anaerobic digestion (AD) tanks, which convert livestock slurry and other agricultural waste into useable biogas. Such tanks have already been installed on more than 4,000 farms in Germany.
Peter Frost of the Agri-Food and Biosciences Unit in Northern Ireland, who is leading the research into AD, believes that this technology has the potential to provide the territory with seven per cent of its electricity supply. However, the technology’s cost is limiting take-up in the UK.
‘In terms of setup costs, we’re currently looking at a major capital investment: for a herd of 100 dairy cows, the equipment works out around £1,250 per cow,’ Frost says. ‘But AD has huge potential. If you combine animal manure with the digestible products that currently go to landfill every day from people’s dustbins (which we call “co-digestion”) you could reduce equipment payback time significantly. But we’re still waiting for the culture of landfill to change to allow co-digestion to bear fruit.
‘However, the biggest hurdle for this technology isn’t the capital cost – it’s political,’ he continues. ‘In North Carolina, the centre of the US pig industry, they’ve called biogas from AD the most important source of renewable energy. In Sweden, there is a plant that converts cow manure to biogas available from the local petrol station. In Austria, Germany and elsewhere in Europe, AD is flourishing. The UK is lagging behind. But if the political will changes, to recognise the importance of natural byproducts from livestock production, we’re looking at a vast source of independent carbon-neutral energy – one that also reduces methane output. The benefits are huge – we’re just waiting for politics to catch up.’
Increasing imbalance
As the afternoon draws in on northern Kenya, Joseph switches off the lawn sprinklers, walks to his hut and removes his shirt and tie, before going to his paddock, where Veronica awaits her second milking.
Having milked her and the other cows belonging to the families in the Hamiltons’ compound, Joseph washes out the steel churns and turns them upside down to dry in the last of the day’s sun, then takes Veronica for a walk along the roadside verge – the only place in the area where the grazing is free.
Joseph keeps Veronica not because he needs her – he has a good job. He keeps her because he is bound to her by centuries of pastoral culture. Six thousand years ago, Joseph’s ancestors farmed cattle in a manner similar to how he tends Veronica today. Two of his children are daughters, and when they marry, he will have to buy cattle for their dowries. In Africa, as in China, India and many other parts of the world, small-scale livestock farming is still a way of life – for the time being.
Meanwhile, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence from Joseph and Veronica stand 2,000 beef cattle, ready to be slaughtered and shipped to supermarkets on four continents. As the world grows wealthier, more populous and more urbanised, this imbalance is set to increase.
Britain’s bovine blue-bloods
Cattle farmers used to say that ‘Britain is the stockyard of the world.’ ‘But it’s no longer quite so simple as when we started farming cattle intensively,’ says Andrew Taylor, veterinary consultant for British Livestock Genetics.
Britain’s position at the forefront of cattle breeding was established during the mid-18th century when Leicestershire farmer Robert Bakewell began experimenting with a system of inbreeding and ruthless culling to produce animals of increased capacity for beef and milk. By the end of the century, the new breeds were almost unrecognisable from their forebears, each bred to suit local conditions and consumer demand.
Bakewell’s legacy can be seen in the fact that today, European breeds represent the genetic pool from which all successful cattle herds are derived. ‘If you look at old photographs of bulls on the walls of breed societies all over the world, so many have classical British names. But you can’t just take purebreeds and expect them to do well in the Amazon rainforest or the Pacific Rim,’ Taylor explains. ‘You need locally adapted genes for breeds to survive. So you take a Zebu cow, and you breed black-and-white into her until you have a herd that’s 80 per cent British Friesian and the rest Zebu. Then you have an animal with a high milk yield that’s adapted to tropical heat and pests.’
There is a downside: improved foreign cattle herds mean UK farmers struggle to compete. ‘We’ve retained pedigree breeding, so we have the genetic material these countries need, and we’re seeing a huge reversion to traditional British bloodlines in China, Vietnam, Thailand and Australia,’ Taylor says. ‘The irony is that we sell them high-quality cattle genes and they sell us cheaper beef and milk because of lower labour costs. But by working together, we increase productivity, and that’s what counts.’
Vertical integration
The economics of livestock production have seen the implementation of a process known as ‘vertical food-chain integration’. This is where a single bull, whose genes perform well across a range of criteria, is selected to suit a particular product line: such as a supermarket’s brand of beef. The supermarket then employs farmers to rear that bull’s offspring in isolation in such a way that they consistently produce meat with reliable marbling and taste, so that what the customer buys off the shelf in, say, Edinburgh in 2009 will be more or less identical in every respect (including genetically) to beef another customer might buy in Essex in 2015.
One notably successful example of this in cattle breeding is a bull known as Lorabar Mighty Prince, who belongs to Genus Breeding in north Wales. Prince is an Aberdeen Angus, and nearly all of his children’s valuable back ends end up in Tesco’s Finest range, while their front ends end up as McDonald’s Angus burger patties.
In Brazil, vertical integration is becoming the norm; tens of thousands of cattle are reared, finished and slaughtered on the same farm. The theory of vertical integration is agriculturally essential – with so many mouths to feed, guaranteed high-quality genes improve productivity for farmers and welfare for the cattle. But the effect is that we will one day find ourselves all feeding from the same carcass. Add to this the fact that the majority of intensive cattle feeds used in Europe (maize and soy) are genetically modified, and the picture of our increasingly factory farmed diet is complete: what goes into our bellies has been ‘improved’ in a lab.
April 2009
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