Soya is rapidly becoming an essential ingredient in a considerable range of human foodstuffs and industrial products, including pesticides and textiles, although its primary use is in industrial farming of poultry and pigs, with a lesser amount used in feeding intensively kept dairy cattle, whose productivity depends on the protein obtained from it.
Glyphosate made a fortune for Monsanto, the American multinational company that first synthesized it. It is sold under various brand names – in Britain as Roundup. In 2008, scientists working for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) described it as a ‘virtually ideal’ herbicide, ‘a one in a hundred-year discovery, as important for global food production as penicillin is for battling disease’.
This assumes that the only way to feed people is through intensive industrial farming, with fewer and fewer farmers managing ever-larger acreages of monoculture sustained by agrochemicals. At the very least this assumption is questionable. Of course scientists involved in the manufacture of glyphosate are going to promote their product. But it is a false analogy to equate antibiotics used specifically to treat an infection to save life with a product like glyphosate that is designed to kill all life except the kind that scientists have created. It is far from certain that the routine use of such a substance will not be harmful in ways that these clever scientists cannot foresee. Already plants are developing resistance to glyphosate, just as bacteria have with antibiotics. Instead of putting our trust in and working with nature, increasing dependence on ever more ingenious ways of defeating natural processes may have rather different consequences from those the scientists hope for.
Monsanto claim that glyphosate is harmless once it reaches the soil, with negligible residue in plants. But foodstuffs are not tested for glyphosate by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This is despite field tests finding it in lettuce, carrots and barley up to one year after the soil had been treated with it. The US government has set the acceptable daily intake of glyphosate at 1.75 mg per kilo of bodyweight per day, while the EU considers 0.3 mg per day to be the maximum safe intake. The truth is, nobody knows what is safe; it depends who is setting the limits. Not only are huge profits generated in the USA from worldwide sales of glyphosate, and above all the GM seed they have developed, but the herbicide is used so extensively and routinely that to set any lower limit on safe consumption would be to condemn vast areas of crop-growing land across the US as unsafe for cultivation.
Another concern is that in processing soya beans to make meal and oil, the bean is ‘cracked’ and the oil extracted chemically using hexane, a petrochemical solvent, which is added to the crushed beans. Hexane is a known neurotoxin and air pollutant. Tests have found residues of it in soya products, even though the processors claim almost none of it finds its way into the resultant oil or meal, and anyway it is harmless. Again, it depends who is doing the testing.
There is also some unease in certain circles over evidence that soya and anything made from it affects the function of the thyroid gland and interferes with the immune system. Soya contains oestrogen-like compounds, similar to those in the contraceptive pill, which can upset the body’s hormonal balance. Recent research suggests that increasing consumption of soya, either directly in the diet, or indirectly in meat and milk, is diminishing male fertility and disrupting our immune systems by blocking the synthesis of thyroid hormones and interfering with the absorption of iodine essential to the proper functioning of the immune system. Western processed food contains little enough iodine without the effects of soya and all the other pollutants we are exposed to or ingest. Americans consume more than 9.3 million tons of soya bean oil every year, half of which is hydrogenated – chemically altered by adding hydrogen under heat, with a metallic catalyst such as nickel, so that it is easier to manufacture and keeps longer. Evidence is accumulating that processed soya and corn consumption are not unconnected with the epidemic of obesity and ill-health in the US. Is it a good idea to be putting this into people’s bodies? The FDA may be right that such chemicalized foodstuffs do no harm to human health, but where is the benefit, other than to big business and industrial farming?
Over the last 60 years, huge industrial, ‘bio-secure’ dairy farms with thousands of Holsteins have almost taken over the supply of dairy produce in the US. They are closed to everyone except visitors who have made an appointment to visit. Some of the more media-savvy operations offer guided bus tours organized by their public relations people. Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana is one of the biggest and slickest of these operations. Its tour buses are painted black and white to look like the markings on a Holstein cow. As the bus progresses slowly round the farm, a recorded voice feeds the passengers the litany of bigger and better statistics that so impresses the American psyche. Fair Oaks owns 19,000 acres of land. It has 30,000 cows that live in ten barns the size of industrial units, which is what they actually are. Four hundred people look after the herds, which produce 250,000 gallons of milk a day. They boast that unlike more than half of dairy producers in the US they don’t use artificial hormones to stimulate milk production. All the waste from the cows is processed through a bio-digester, which produces enough methane to generate the electricity the huge operation needs.
Milking continues twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, with each cow being milked three times in one of the ten milking parlours. After each milking the parlour is cleaned automatically before starting the next one. Visitors can climb up to a glassed-off viewing area (bio-security again) above the milking parlour, where a huge carousel slowly rotates 72 cows at a time. It reminds me of William Harley’s nineteenth-century milking operation in Glasgow, where people could buy a ticket to a viewing platform in his cow house to watch his herd being milked. The only difference is he didn’t have electricity.
You can go to the ‘birthing barn’ to watch, from behind a mesh and glass barrier (more bio-security) the arrival of one of the 80–100 calves born every day. Female calves are destined to become replacements for their mothers in the dairy, but male calves are just a nuisance and are slaughtered as soon as possible. As do most modern intensive dairying operations, Fair Oaks inseminates the cows with sex-selected semen, ensuring that 80 per cent of calves will be female. These are then sent to be reared in Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri on pasture farms. There they are artificially inseminated, and when seven months pregnant, at two and a half years old, they are brought back to Fair Oaks to one of the huge barns, where they will stay as long as they can produce enough milk to justify the cost of keeping them – on average three to four years. They will never again step outside the barn until the day they are sent for slaughter.
Fair Oaks is not only a ruthlessly efficient industrial farming operation, it is a slick public relations set-up as well. They have disingenuously adopted the language of the small local farmers who are trying to carve out a market directly with the public by stressing that their produce hasn’t travelled very far, is from ‘farm to fork’, kind to the environment, sustainable, eco-friendly and so on.
There is so much to take issue with here that it’s hard to know where to start. The farm is an industrial facility that uses huge amounts of energy. Every scrap of feed and all the waste from the cows has to be carried to and from them. We get a glimpse of the amount of diesel used when Fair Oaks boasts of saving two million gallons by extracting the methane from cow and pig muck. But putting the waste through digesters means that the huge amounts of energy the farm consumes are obtained from a different source – namely the fertility that would have gone back on the land. There is no mention of the thousands of tons of nitrogenous fertilizer, extracted from oil, they use to replace that lost through the digestion process. No mention either of what they grow to feed the cows – how much GM seed and glyphosate is used on the soya and maize.
The ultra-high-yielding Holstein cows used in this kind of farming are giving enormous amounts of milk, but are worn out by the age of six, after three to four lactations. There is therefore much greater cos
t in breeding replacements because between a fifth and a sixth of the herd has to be replaced every year, compared with a pasture-fed lower-yielding breed of dairy cow, which routinely achieves eight, ten or more lactations, depending on breed.
High-yielding herds cannot afford to have cows that will not get in calf. Therefore there is a cull of about 12 per cent of ‘barren’ cows in such herds, compared with 5 per cent or fewer in pasture-fed herds. Pasture-fed cows produce less than half the milk – about 3,000 litres a year – of the Holstein industrial herds, which average 7,600 litres in a lactation. In a single year, this is about ten times the cow’s bodyweight.
Although, to its credit, Fair Oaks does not give its cows hormones, a good deal of the high output from American dairy herds is achieved by administering a synthetic version of bovine somatotropin, or somatotrophin (abbreviated bST or BST), which is a hormone produced in the pituitary gland of cattle. About half the dairy cows in the US are routinely injected with the substance. The biotech company Genentech discovered and patented the gene for the hormone in the 1970s, and allowed it to be made artificially. This gave the American scientific establishment the excuse to invent yet another acronym, rBST, which stands for recombinant bovine somatotropin. Monsanto was the first to obtain FDA approval for rBST, which they sold as Posilac. They disposed of their interest in it in 2008 to another big pharma company, Eli Lilly and Co.
The hormone is banned in Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Argentina and the EU, yet the FDA says it is safe for human consumption. It may be harmless to humans, but it is far from clear that it is harmless to cows. An EU animal welfare report concluded that it can cause ‘severe and unnecessary pain, suffering and distress’ to cows, from serious mastitis, foot disorders and reproductive problems. It is also doubtful whether its use increases profit by much, if at all. When the cost of extra feed, veterinary bills to deal with mastitis and other ailments, and the shorter life span of cows are taken into account, the extra 10 to 15 per cent of milk is hardly worth its use.
Compared with the US, where they have had mega-dairies since the 1960s, the UK lags far behind. One of the pioneers in England of the expansionist course is David Metcalfe, from Leyburn in North Yorkshire. When I met him at Washfold Farm in 2016, he was milking 900 British Holsteins, producing 22,000 litres (5,000 gallons a day), all sold wholesale to Paynes Dairies at Northallerton. He was in the process of increasing the herd to 1,300 cows by building a vast new shed and milking parlour at a cost he wouldn’t disclose, though it’s bound to be into the millions. The new farm buildings are stretched out like units on an industrial estate, connected by concrete roads, dwarfing the original farmhouse and stone buildings. The enterprise has expanded beyond anything imaginable 70 years ago, when his grandfather started farming there with 18 Dairy Shorthorn cows.
Washfold’s pedigree British Holstein herd averages 10,800 litres (2,375 gallons) per cow per year, at 3.8 per cent butterfat and 3.2 per cent protein. If the average length of lactation is 320 days, each cow is averaging nearly seven and a half gallons of milk a day. This is a phenomenal yield. They show the best animals in the herd and regularly win prizes for their quality; in 2012, they were awarded the prize for the best herd in the North Eastern Holstein Club competition. Everything is highly efficient and competitive. They use sex-selected semen from the best AI bulls. They also sell pedigree bulls.
This is serious industrial dairy farming, with everything pushed to its full capacity. In the interests of efficiency, the cows never leave the sheds and are milked three times a day. Everything they would graze is cut in the fields and carried to them, and all their muck is taken away mechanically. Their daily forage ration is scientifically calculated and made up of winter wheat harvested as ‘whole crop’ when it’s green, plus grass and whatever protein supplement is added to make their ‘TMR’ – an American acronym for total mixed ration – which contains the bulky part of what the cows need for maximum production. The rest comes from high-protein cow cake fed in the milking parlour according to yield.
David Metcalfe wouldn’t tell me how much money he was losing on every litre of milk the farm produces, but he says he can afford it for now. His heavy road haulage business subsidizes the farming, and his bank is happy. The only thing on the farm that turns a profit is the bio-digester extracting methane from cow muck and powering an engine to generate electricity.
‘It’s coming to something,’ I said, ‘when the slurry from 900 cows pays better than selling their milk.’ He didn’t reply, but made a gesture that meant something like ‘that’s the way it is, we’ve got to live with it’.
He says he is ‘hanging on by his fingernails’ in the hope that in the next couple of years most of the farmers now contributing to the British and European milk surplus will go out of business. There will be a shortage, the price will rise dramatically, and these mega-producers will have a monopoly and ‘clean up’, as he puts it. That’s the theory anyway.
Until the 1980s, most of Britain’s milk was supplied by thousands of small farms spread across the country. But if current trends continue, the future of milk production will be the way the Metcalfes do it: in huge operations with the financial clout to take on the dairy processing companies and the supermarkets. In the US, 85 per cent of family dairy farms have disappeared in the last 40 years and the number of mega-farms with more than 2,000 cows has increased by over 100 per cent. What happens in America usually happens here sooner or later.
As we drove around on a fine, still morning, I noticed some of the cows gazing out over the metal gates across huge grass fields that stretch away from their massive building and wondered aloud if they might not be longing to be out in the pastures, grazing in the spring sunshine. ‘They’ve never eaten grass so they don’t know what they’re missing,’ he replied. I don’t think I could have resisted letting them out to graze, even if only to relieve the monotony of their lives and see what they would do. But that would have ruined the whole tightly controlled system. And actually the cows aren’t suffering. They have everything they could want – except sunshine on their backs, grass long enough to wrap their tongues around and pull, and the daily exercise of walking to and from their pastures.
But they are cows, and so far as we know, they are not given to introspection or existential angst. Moreover, they’re dairy cows, a highly unnatural kind of bovine bred to produce milk, and lots of it, much more milk than a whole tribe of calves could ever consume. Whether they were inside or outside they would still exist to produce milk for us. It seems to me that there is no reason to feel sorry for them being confined to sheds all their lives, with everything laid on. I can’t see much difference between their existence and that of the average coal-miner – or, in our own times, Amazon warehouse worker – who are given to introspection and angst.
It seems that a more realistic and less sentimental way would be to see it as a further example of the intimate and eternal relationship we have with cows, and of how much we rely on them. Spending their lives in huge sheds is no worse than being tied by the neck in a dark byre all winter, only able to stand up and sit down. The more important difference is that cows that would otherwise have been dispersed amongst a hundred farming families in a hundred villages are gathered together in one place. Might a more pertinent criticism of this kind of intensive dairy farming be to ask where it is all leading and whether it is right that farming is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. And is the milk they produce as good as that from traditional cattle grazing grass?
The leggy, large-framed Holstein has come to dominate industrial dairying in Western countries. But it is a high-maintenance beast, not bred to survive on grazing alone. It is definitely not a dual-purpose cow – its carcase is worth very little at the end of its short life – so it has to justify the cost of its keep by producing large amounts of milk. It is very much a cow for our modern throwaway world: bigger, faster and disposable, just like the consumer goods that we produce with shorter and shorte
r lives. It even breeds like the modern Western family, having fewer than three calves. It is an animal treated as an object, which must fit in to a vast industrial dairying operation and produce like some bovine Stakhanovite during its short existence on concrete.
But cows produce their highest yields during their fifth, sixth and seventh lactations. And the best cows from the more traditional breeds will go on to have ten, twelve or more lactations and produce more milk in total over that time at a much lower cost in terms both of rearing replacement cows and being able to produce from home-produced feed. Unlike the Holstein, their calves will find a ready market either for rearing for beef or for crossing with beef bulls to breed suckler cows for beef production.
Is it to our national benefit that dairy farmers should be forced into beggar-thy-neighbour capitalism, and that within a few years only a few massive industrial farms will be producing all our milk? They will be easier for the state to control, of course, which will suit those who see farmers as bloody-minded individualists, who despoil the land, but will it benefit our society to denude the land of the people who live on and work it? Where will the country people come from who know their own land and maintain the drains and hedges and walls? And how will the health of the soil react to this industrial onslaught?
CHAPTER 7
The Miracles of AI and Pasteurization
TWO INNOVATIONS HAVE transformed dairying in the last hundred years: artificial insemination (AI) and pasteurization. AI is almost a miracle, and probably the innovation that has had the most profound effect on cattle breeding in history. It has transformed the quality of stock, allowing farmers to select semen from the best sires in the world, from a catalogue, without needing to own a bull, and storing it until they need it.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 12