DAIRY farmer Jamie Blackett was quite right to point out there is much nonsense written about flatulent cows and climate change. It’s a great shame he didn’t use his Telegraph article to dispel it. Rather he amplified and tried to justify the nonsense, while gaslighting those who question the need to feed any synthetic enzymes to cows as promulgating ‘febrile conspiracy theories’. I expected better of him. At least he admits that he has skin in the game because he sells his milk to Arla, who announced they are going to ‘trial’, on 30 British dairy farms, feeding the synthetic enzyme inhibitor Bovaer, 3-nitrooxypropanol, to cows to reduce their methane emissions.
This is but the latest aspect of the lunacy being imposed on an unwilling people to ‘tackle climate change to save the planet’. Feeding unnecessary chemicals to cows is a monstrous scam justified by the ‘drive to net zero’. It needs to be shouted from the rooftops at every opportunity that the whole wicked business has nothing to do with the climate, cows’ health or the production of milk and meat. It’s part of the greatest grab of wealth in history from the mass of ordinary people to a few stupendously rich internationalist oligarchs, aided by our own government, who aim to control – if they don’t already – the whole world. This methane-curbing nonsense is nothing more than a horribly clever protection racket, based on the fantasy of anthropogenic global warming.
How is it a protection racket? Reduced to its essence, it involves farmers being forced to give the stuff to their livestock or else they will suffer the consequences of refusal. The last government (and it is vain to hope this one will be any better) was talking about making it mandatory to give the chemical to all cows by 2030. (What is the magic in 2030? Every repressive measure the state is going to impose on us has a deadline of 2030.)
Let’s consider a few facts that might show this racket for what it is. First, there is no evidence that the natural emission of methane from ruminants (or decomposition of vegetation in marshes or burning oil and gas) has the slightest effect on the temperature of the earth. Methane is a trace gas which comprises roughly 0.000193 per cent of the atmosphere – about 1,930 parts per billion. It breaks down to its constituent parts of carbon and hydrogen over an estimated 7-10 years.
The other bogeyman, CO₂, without which life would not exist, is about 0.04 per cent or 430 parts per million.
It’s interesting to compare the number of cattle in the US in 2024 – 87million – with the number of ruminants that grazed the grasslands of the continent before the white man got going there in the 1800s. The best estimate is that there were 60million bison, 45million antelope, 60million deer and elk, 2million bighorn sheep and a million moose. Roughly speaking, there were twice as many ruminants 250 years ago as there are cattle today. One wonders what happened to all that methane they must have created over centuries, while at the same time their grazing and dung made the plains of the Midwest some of the deepest and most fertile soils in the world.
It is proposed, at least to start with, that only dairy cows in ‘zero grazing’ indoor systems are to be given this synthetic substance, because all their feed is brought to them rationed. Apparently cows that go out to pasture will not be given it – yet – because it has to be fed regularly, in measured amounts. According to DEFRA’s figures for June 2024 there were just under 5million cattle in England, of which 1.1million were dairy cows (down by about 30 per cent in 30 years). It is not clear what proportion of these was kept indoors all year round, but it is estimated that fewer than 20 per cent of dairy cows are housed permanently. The makers of this substance, a Swiss company, dsm-firmenich (they’re so woke they’ve dispensed with capital letters) claim that feeding ¼ teaspoon a day to each cow will reduce its methane emissions by 30 per cent. (Apparently the US sellers of the stuff, Elanco, recommend a tablespoon a day.)
So let’s assume there are roughly 200,000 cows kept inside, in Britain, all year round and they’re all fed Bovaer; methane emissions from the national herd will be reduced by 30 per cent of 4 per cent of the national herd – that is by 1.2 per cent. It’s hard to find out exactly what this chemical will cost, but it’s somewhere between £50 and £100 per cow per year. The makers claim the cost will be reduced by half in 2025 when a new manufacturing plant in Scotland starts making the chemical. If there is no financial benefit from increased milk yield or health of the cows and there are concerns over the testing and safety of the substance, why would a farmer bother with it? And how would it be paid for? Not by selling dairy produce. Rather, farmers will become part of the ‘self-sustaining carbon inset market’. In other words, they will be sucked into a fantasy world trading in ‘carbon credits’. The amount of CO2e – a new catch-all formula for all ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ which includes methane, carbon dioxide and anything else considered to contribute to ‘global warming’ – not produced by the cows will be calculated by a third-party ‘expert’. The expert can’t measure the amount of gas not produced, but will verify the amount of Bovaer being fed, from which the amount of gas not being produced can be estimated and expressed in metric tonnes. This will be sold, through a company operating a ‘carbon insetting marketplace’, to big corporations to allow them to carry on as before. The money (less commission) will be paid to the farmer who has caused his cows not to produce whatever weight of gas the third-party expert certifies they aren’t producing. The rest of the cost of feeding Bovaer is expected to come from state subsidies to the farmer.
Why is the government encouraging – even mandating – the feeding of this chemical to the national herd? Ah, well, apart from the endless profits for the pharmaceutical company that will undoubtedly burgeon down the years, our government has signed up to the 2015 Paris climate agreement and it needs every little help it can get – even making up some fanciful reduction in ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions to bring the UK closer to ‘net zero’ by 2050.
Even if we accept the warmists’ claim that we have to mess about with the digestion of the world’s cows, what’s the point when saving the planet means that much of what makes life worth living will be destroyed to avoid something that might happen a century from now? It makes no sense to anyone capable of thinking. Blackett is wrong to say that everyone wants farmers to feed this chemical to their cows to reduce their flatulence. Increasing numbers of people are waking up to the whole climate scam; the wind is changing, and judging by the public’s reaction to Arla’s announcement, causing sales of their products, particularly Lurpak and Anchor butter, to plummet, farmers would be well advised to resist this enforced medication of their cows.
