A couple of months ago, I touched on the fact (here) that giving beef cattle growth hormones and antibiotics can lower their greenhouse gas emissions. Faster growth reduces the amount of feed that the cattle require and thus the waste products that they produce. Yes, there are also downsides to speeding the growth of cattle in this manner. The subject makes for an interesting debate on the balancing of environmental concerns...at least when people aren't cowering from the debate.
Over the weekend, a study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on how giving dairy cattle growth hormones can reduce the wastes produced per unit of milk. The following article discusses the study and some of the reaction to it.
Monsanto's somatotropin, sold under the trade name Posilac, stimulates cows to produce more milk, allowing farmers to get more from each herd. But use of the hormone is controversial.
Canada and some European countries have banned it on the grounds that it causes foot and fertility problems, as well as mastitis, in cows. It remains in use in the United States, but consumers are increasingly seeking out somatotropin-free milk.
Organic milk had a 2.7 percent share of the total milk market in the U.S. last year, well up from the 1.7 percent in 2006. Several factors are impacting this growth beyond perceived health benefits, including increasing availability and a lower price premium.
Yet farmers like to use the hormone because of the higher milk yields and lower costs. Animals on Posilac require 5% less energy to produce the same amount of milk and emit 7% less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, say researchers.
Those savings translate into significant environmental benefits, claims Judith Capper of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who produced the study with colleagues.
Switching a million cows onto somatotropin would lead to savings equivalent to removing 400,000 family cars from the US road, she says. "That's a major environmental gain."
Because a herd on somatotropin could produce the same amount of milk while requiring less space and food, use of the hormone produces energy savings too. According to the study, a conventional herd that produces that same amount of milk as a million-strong herd on somatotropin would consume an additional 156 million kWh of electricity every year.
And together with the fossil fuels required to grow and harvest the extra feed, this conventional herd would use enough extra energy to power around 15,000 homes and run 1,550 cars.
Some are upset that the one of the co-authors of the study is a Monsanto employee. Yes that could be a concern...same as when environmentalists support or participate in studies that seem to prove what they're advocating, right? So let's skip the messenger bashing and address the message...or at least try to.
"It's a new form of greenwashing," says Doreen Stabinsky of Greenpeace based in Bar Harbor, Maine, US.
Dr. Doreen Stabinsky is a Professor of Global Environmental Politics and International Studies at the College of the Atlantic (in Bar Harbor) and a Greenpeace genetic engineering campaigner.
Stabinsky says that Capper framed the issue too narrowly by comparing herds with and without somatotropin. The more important question is the environmental damage done by a range of farming systems, she argues.
That requires a detailed analysis of all the costs associated with many different techniques. Farms where cows are fed on grass rather than grain, for example, have reduced greenhouse gas emissions because the feed is not grown off-site and transported in.
If you hadn't guessed, Stabinsky is also a family farm advocate. She's not disputing the findings of the study; rather, she's complaining that Capper didn't study more types of farms...smaller ones. She's on the grass-fed bandwagon, not seeming to realize that when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions--methane in particular, it's preferable that cattle have grass-alfalfa pasture rather than grass-only.
Let's try again when it comes to addressing the message.
Michael Hansen, an expert on the somatotropin at the Consumers Union in New York, also questions Monsanto's claim about the efficiency of cows on the hormone.
He says that somatotropin is labelled as increasing milk production per cow, but that government regulators from the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC, did not agree with Monsanto's claim that the hormone makes animals use feed more efficiently. If the regulators are right, many of the environmental benefits disappear, he notes.
What's he referring to? From this link...
FDA, in a letter to Monsanto dated April 3, 1988, noted that Monsanto’s data failed to show a statistically significant increase in feed efficiency. When Posilac was finally approved on November 5, 1993, the label claim for increased feed efficiency was not allowed: the FDA noted that Monsanto could not produce enough convincing data on this issue.
Okay, but why didn't Hansen didn't address the merits of Capper's study? Maybe folks have learned something over the last 15 years.
I googled all the articles on the study and couldn't find a quote from a climate change activist anywhere. Suddenly cow farts and burps don't matter?
Thanks for the laugh.
And thanks for pointing out the logical fallacy relied upon by the critics. Good post.
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Posted by: OregonGuy | July 02, 2008 at 11:08