"We’ve had some people ask us about the Bovaer feed trials that have made headlines this week. Our cows are NOT being fed any strange new additives into their diet and the Bovaer trial is not something we are participating in. So there is no risk to any changes making their way into our milk. Our cows are fed a natural diet of food mostly grown by us on our farm. By switching to a summer and autumn block calving system, we rely even more on grass than we used to. And it means we now use even less concentrate, and also less fuel to mix and feed the cows in our sheds.
We are really not a fan of the idea that we should change what comes out of an animal by feeding them chemically engineered additives. Like humans, animals should be fed natural diets, not chemical synthetics.
Methane produced by cows seems to be an easy target for diverting the blame for climate change from fossil fuel burning industries. Methane is dissolved into the atmosphere again after 10-12 years and is part of a natural cycle. So if the cattle numbers in the world stay constant, there’s no impact on global warming, because the methane is disappearing as fast as it is being created. Whereas the carbon created from burning fossil fuels as being added to the atmosphere as it has been extracted from its storage in the ground.
An additive may reduce the amount of methane coming out of a cow directly when burping or farting, but it’s not going to impact the amount seeping out of its droppings. So the net effect is surely going to be a negligible minimum, and the energy that goes into producing and transporting these additives will probably outweigh this negligible benefit. It seems to us to be an another gimmick and get another cost for farmers to endure without any additional financial contribution towards our produce from customers.
Global warming is caused by digging fossil fuels out of the ground in a way that is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is not caused by the natural biological processes of animals, which make use of carbon that is already in the environmental cycle.
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