Are large-scale dairy farms necessarily bad? That was the question I was asked earlier this week when presenting at the New Year Seminar of the Royal Veterinary College in London. It was accompanied by the example of a dairy farm in Malta with only a handful of cows, kept permanently indoors. My answer? That large-scale per se may not be the issue; however, it often indicates a serious underlying threat to animal welfare. Overly large ‘mega-dairies’ indicate a direction of travel that has seriously damaging implications for cow welfare and the future of many dairy farmers themselves.
So, to expand, we have to ask ourselves why anyone would want to take thousands of cows out of fields and house them indoors, as with the proposed Nocton ‘mega-dairy’ in Lincolnshire, UK. How did we get here? The answer lies in a trend toward breeding cows for ever higher milk yield.
Thirty years ago, the average UK dairy cow was producing 5,000 litres of milk a year. No mean feat when you consider that today’s beef cow, milking at a more natural level, will produce about a thousand litres. However, the dairy cow of today is often yielding more like 7,000 litres a year. As production levels increase, the cow’s body begins to struggle to keep up with her over-working udder. If she is to avoid milking off her own back and becoming unwell, she is ‘topped up’ with higher energy concentrates. But it doesn’t stop there. Today’s higher yielding cows are producing an incredible 10,000 litres a year. And it has been suggested that the proposed Nocton cows may achieve even more! At this level, the simple truth is that a cow cannot survive on grass. She cannot physically graze enough to keep up with the demands of her heavy lactation. Her diet is heavily geared toward higher energy forage and concentrates. At this point, it often becomes uneconomic to keep the animals outdoors.
As dairy cow expert, Professor John Webster, put it recently, it becomes “unprofitable to turn cows out to pasture where they simply cannot take in nutrients fast enough. This then leads to the practice of zero grazing, whereby cows are confined through most or all of lactation and may be allowed out to pasture (if at all) during a period of about two months at the end of lactation and before the birth of their next calf.”
Once the cows are confined permanently indoors, all their food is brought to them and the system disconnected from the land. If the herd size then increases from the UK average of about 100 animals to ‘mega-dairy’ proportions of thousands, this takes things beyond the carrying capacity of the land. And from there, there’s no way back.
But is heavy lactation such a problem for the dairy cow? After all, isn’t she designed to produce lots of milk? A recent report by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) concluded that “Long term genetic selection for high milk yield… is the major factor causing poor welfare, in particular health problems, in dairy cows”.
Professor Webster believes that no animal works harder than the high yielding dairy cow. Producing so much milk (e.g. 50 litres per day) “drives the digestive system to its limits and can seriously compromise the need to rest and sleep.” To give an idea of how hard she works, in peak lactation, it’s equivalent to a human jogging a marathon every day! The highest yielding dairy cows are producing enough milk to feed 10 calves. Any breast-feeding mother will know how physically draining it is to feed one infant. Imagine producing enough to feed 10! No wonder, then, that their lives are so short. The average high-yielder often only lives for three lactations before being culled.
So, it’s not the size that is bad, but the direction of travel that it represents. At a time in history when pigs and poultry are now increasingly being kept in more extensive ways, often outdoors, it is ironic that dairy cows potentially face the opposite direction of travel.
So, the size of a ‘mega-dairy’ of thousands of cows is symptomatic of a system that has become divorced from the land and is pushing the dairy cow to her physical limits. It also plays into the hands of those who see milk as a low quality commodity with little value. Devaluing the dairy industry seems to me to be the road to ruin, not sustainability.
Trying to solve a systemic problem of the marketplace by tweaking the mechanics of production isn’t the way forward. Instead, it is a cul-de-sac that will see many dairy farmers go out of business to the detriment of a sustainable food system. In my view, there is an urgent need for key stakeholders to work together; dairy farmers, retailers, milk processors and government, to work out how to bring about a market environment that supports the sustainable, human-scale dairying that we otherwise face losing. The welfare of our cows, the future of many dairy farmers and the integrity of milk is depending on it. A different direction of travel is now essential.
[...] industrialised farming is a huge concern on a number of levels. On animal welfare, as I’ve said before large-scale per se may not be the issue; however, it often indicates a serious underlying threat to [...]
[...] I don’t believe that big always means bad; intensification is the real crux of the issue. Britain’s biggest breeding pig farm, for example, is run along extensive lines with the sows kept outdoors. But highly intensive farming methods often go hand-in-hand with scale, as is the case with mega-dairies and meat chicken farms. Some in government seem to have fallen in love with the term, ‘sustainable intensification’. It’s an oxymoron, gobbledygook, a contradiction in terms. Increased intensification is the route to diminished sustainability and to yet more animal welfare problems. [...]