Where have all the cows gone?

Richard Hooper

Is the problem the ‘meat’ - or the ‘means’?

By Charlie Clutterbuck PhD Soil Ecology

When you are next on the train, hurtling through the countryside, have a look out for herds of cows. They are the big ones with large udders - do you remember them? You may see small groups of young cow (heifers - see below) or bullocks (male) and there are lots of sheep. But gone are the herds of a couple of hundred dairy animals, peacefully munching their way through acres of pasture.

If you get in your car and drive round the lanes, you have to watch out for massive tractors (size of a double deck bus) hurtling along pulling either slurry tanks or trailers piled high with grass. I remember while representing the farmworkers on the Health and Safety Executive for Agriculture asking for a risk assessment on the relaxation of regulations for farm tractors and trailers on roads - making them bigger and faster. Farmers zip back and forth to fields to cut and muck- but not as we know it.

The countryside is now a patchwork of yellow, where the field has been cut very short recently, next to bright green well-fertilised grass. The heavy machines as weighty as large dinosaurs makes for greater compaction of the soil, leading to erosion. The huge machines also require more robust roads, fences, and even cattle grids, to withstand increased wear and tear. This new infrastructure is costly. Grazing is being replaced by machines. It is called zero grazing, and while it started years ago (as ‘Barley Beef’) 50 years ago, it has taken off in the last 5 years around here in rural Lancashire, and much of the North and West. How has this happened - almost unnoticed to the madding crowd?

Capital-intensive farming

The new capital-intensive methods of beef and dairy production are very different from grazing locally produced grass. Instead of making the best use of poor land (Grade 3&4), they are wrecking some of our best land (Grade 1&2) and creating impacts across the world. It is going on right under our noses without many of us addressing the issues thrown up.

The cost of those massive machines plus all the reconstruction of roadways and buildings involve massive outlays. So how do the farmers get that capital, and why are lots investing in it. In recent years the overheads have increased dramatically - in terms of feed (up 45% in 2023), fertiliser (85%), fuel and finance itself. On dairy farms, the average Farm Business Income increased by nearly two thirds in 2023 to £229,200. A substantial rise in output was driven by output from milk rising by 48% as a result of higher prices. This more than offsets rises to input costs. Just as I was taught in agricultural economics, all that matters is the efficiency of production - how much goes in and how much comes out. But nowadays, we have to look at what else is going on.

Barns and megabarns

In this country, most cows and cattle are now kept in big barns for at least part of the year, and at least a fifth of them are kept indoors all year round. A recent estimate was that over 1,000 ‘megabarns’ have been built in the last few years for a variety of livestock. They do not need planning permission.

They are usually hidden from view and despite their size concealed from main roads with banks of soil or have newly planted trees blocking the view.

Silage IN

In the fields where cows no longer graze, massive machines now make about four cuts a year, five in some years. There is no chance for ground nesting birds. The grass cuttings are wrapped in plastic to be condensed into silage, the huge black bales left lying to spoil the look of many a field. This is the favoured feed as it preserves nutrients well and is considered by many farmers to be more economical than hay. Hay is also much more temperamental in quality.

Cattle are given pre-prepared quantities of feed and monitored for every drop of milk produced, or every ounce of beef. The aim is to make them as ‘efficient’ as can be, with no walking in and out of fields for milking to waste their energy. Music often plays in indoor systems as it’s believed to help yields.

Slurry OUT

No cows in the fields means no cowpats. We learned at agricultural college how good cow pats were at encouraging life in the soil. Various insects break them down, and then other creatures like earthworms turn the breakdown products into lumps that build the soil structure. Birds love the worms and so life cycles are built. This creates soil that breathes and so functions well, holding water and nutrients better.

But that too has gone. Now ‘slurry’ not muck is sprayed on. After the cattle yards are washed down, the liquidised muck, now known as slurry, is moved to tanks and ponds. There, the digestion process is anaerobic – i.e., without air/oxygen. It works by fermentation rather than oxygen breakdown and produces hydrogen sulphide, and, er, methane. There were 300 ‘slurry incidents’ in 2022 reported to the Environment Agency resulting in rivers being polluted with phosphates and nitrates in the slurry. About half the slurry in the local river comes from the cattle sheds and half from the fields.

The treated slurry gets loaded into tankers which hurtle along the roads delivering to farms and finally the anaerobic liquid is sprayed on the fields, probably blocking the crucial pores and pathways for aerobic metabolism Using slurry is fraught with risks to human health, the environment and river systems. I have tried to find UK research comparing soils under muck with those under slurry, and can find none. Much of our land-based research has gone since Mrs Thatcher did away with ¾ of it.

Wider Environmental Impacts

There are wider environmental impacts of these big agricultural changes, that are becoming of more interest because the COP process now considers the question of food and farming.

Many are quick to lay blame cattle for undesirable emissions of the greenhouse gas (GHG) methane. Yet, it’s not that simple. While grazing, animals roam around eating stuff we couldn’t stomach, and belching out ‘Biogenic’ methane. This amount left in the air becomes stable and is just replaced, so not adding to global warming. This is because ‘hydroxyl radicals’ produced by sunlight on water on grass breaks the methane down to water and carbon dioxide. See CLEAR center for more. Clearly this cannot happen in barns where methane accumulates. The ‘other’ - industrial - methane emitted as natural gas is a by-product of oil and gas production, and accounts for about a quarter of all methane and Russia is the biggest emitter by far. Just five of the 55 world livestock companies – JBS, Marfrig, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and Minerva – combined cause an estimated 595 million tonnes CO2-equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions per year, more than the total emissions of the UK and Ireland. Much of that will be produced in barns. (Still butchering the planet 2024)

But there is a lot more to the environment than GHGs, particularly involving our greatest living asset - the soil. Grazing grass on land that can grow little else is beneficial to the soil and helps hold water in damp areas here, and helps stop desertification in many parts of the world. The Savory Institute is pioneering mob grazing to take back desert areas.

Feed

The biggest environmental concern is the switch of feed from home grown grass to grain crops, particularly wheat, maize and soy. Wheat is usually the main feed, and the UK provides around 900,000 tons of it for animal feed a month. This comes mainly from the East of the country, where we are losing over a million tons of our best soil (grade 1&2) a year, in erosion ending up in the North Sea. I have not heard anybody raise concerns about this monumental loss of biodiversity and life.

Around £1.5billion worth of cattle feed is also imported per annum. The two main types of feed are maize and soy. Some £800mn worth of each comes into the UK every year mostly to feed these cows and cattle. Maize usually comes from the USA, while most soy comes from Brazil. The UK directly imports nearly half a million tonnes of soy from Brazil a year, based on 2018 figures from TRASE (www.trase.earth) and that 78% of total exports of soy from Brazil to the UK (predominantly by Cargill) originated from the Cerrado and Amazon biomes – ‘where deforestation and clearance risks are highest’

The balance of imports of maize is changing as a result of the war in the Ukraine, where a quarter of our cattle feed used to came from. Now more comes from USA. The government ‘took advantage of its new-found Brexit freedom’ of being able to cut tariffs (import taxes) on maize imported from US in June 2023 - about a year after the EU did. In 2022, the UK imported $585M in corn (what we call maize) becoming the 29th largest importer, primarily from: France ($123M) and Canada ($117M) and now Brazil ($36.5M). These feeds come in as compounds or ’concentrates’. You can get an idea of the quantities when you see a lorry unloading into the feed hopper.

Maize is grown on some UK farms, where it is also damaging to the soil, especially in the wetter west and further north. Harvesting usually has to wait till the ground is wet, and thus prone to compaction, leading to runoff and erosion. As an example, I looked at a local maize field in autumn with a ‘cover crop’ growing. I asked the farmer for details and he said they are part of a Tesco sustainability chain who told him where he could obtain advice - at a cost. Clearly the cover crop was not covering much, so rain can impact on soil runoff. Many fields are left completely bare over winter, again causing runoff.

The big indictment of this new capital intensive meat production is that it is more reliant on plant crops grown here and elsewhere. Grazed pasture has about twice as much life in its soil than arable land growing crops. Measured in all sorts of ways by all sorts of markers, soil under grass has twice the biodiversity, number of microbes, and numbers of small soil animals. as arable land growing grain. (Countryside Survey 2007), That means pasture soil functions twice as well in terms of structure , holding water and providing nutrients.

This may be a surprise to many people, but not to civilisation. Erosion caused by regular ploughing in order to grow crops as monocultures, started wrecking the land the in Greek empire. Just read Plato. And what did the Romans ever do for us - other than turn North Africa and Middle East into a desert by growing grain to feed Rome? And the Mayan civilisation also collapsed with erosion as they tried to grow grain up the hillsides. For much more of this read ‘Dirt: Erosion of Civilisation’ Montgomery. Our civilisation depends on its soil too, only we don’t seem to notice its erosion and desertification. There is also work to do calculating how much contribution bare brown soil, where temperatures can be double green grass, makes to global warming. So my greatest concern with capital-intensive cattle is that they are not grazing and growing that soil, but degrading much more of it. The emerging regenerative farming, for which I wrote the first Masters in this country, tries to address just this.

Yet, any beef or milk produced like this can be sold as ‘British’, attracting many people to buy it, without declaring how much maize and soy is being imported. Nor is this required to get approval from the Red Tractor scheme . There seems to be little concern about the cows’ welfare, not attracting as much as chickens, despite being a lot more sentient. There is a government code on welfare, but it is quite vague and refers only to ‘enough space’ for cattle to do this and that, nothing about being able to go outdoors. There is no ‘grass-fed only’ label.

Bigger and better?

Going from grass to grain feeds into the hands of the global Merchants of Grain, called by many the ABCD group, standing for ADM,Bunge,Cargill & Dreyfus. A total of $323.3 billion in shareholdings and bond holdings are held by private financial institutions in the world’s largest 55 big livestock companies.. “This finance-fuelled growth in the livestock industry is driving a global crisis. An average $76.9 billion per year was poured into the world’s 55 largest big livestock companies between 2015-22 – whilst the global livestock sector as a whole causes an estimated $8.5 trillion annually in externalised health and climate costs” And I bet they were not calculating the cost to soil in terms of erosion and global warming.

UK banks are bankrolling this capital; intensive farming. “As one of the world’s leading financial centres, the United Kingdom and the international banks headquartered here, have played a central role in facilitating the expansion of giant livestock companies and feed processors at the expense of smaller-scale farmers.” Barclays is the largest global creditor to JBS, Morgan Stanley is the largest global creditor to Tyson Foods, and the French BNP Paribas is the largest global creditor to Cargill. Still butchering the planet 2024)

Farmers are in trouble too …

Yet we shouldn’t blame the farmers. Farmers are being forced to become ever more ‘efficient’ and need the extra capital to invest to do so. No matter how efficient they become, it is never enough. They are under ever increasing pressure from the supermarkets. Ever since the 1980s the cry has been to ‘leave it to the supermarkets’ to set prices to regulate supply and demand. Their response is to keep turning the screw on suppliers.

Reports in the last few months say half of UK dairy farmers are struggling to recruit staff and a third are thinking of quitting altogether, continuing the decline of 5% last year.

We have to support our traditional farmers, and to make the distinction much stronger between environmentally friendly methods of grazing animals and the capital-intensive production of beef and milk – ruinous to the environment in so many ways

Let’s leave the last words to Bob Dylan “Businessmen, they drink my wine, Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth” (‘All along the Watchtower’)

Let’s leave the last words to Bob Dylan “Businessmen, they drink my wine,

Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”

(‘All along the Watchtower’)

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse