n By Mark Metcalf
working hours. Perhaps they don’t like working inside all day? Clearly, they need a union.
The environmental impacts of these changes are not understood and don’t appear to be well studied. One big issue are excessive phosphates going into rivers, causing ‘nutrient growth’ of algae taking oxygen and killing other river life. Half comes from slurry in the fields, rich in phosphates.
It may also be that the slurry soil works more anaerobically, so it’s not as efficient as old-fashioned aerobic cow manure in holding the phosphate. I cannot find any UK research looking into this issue.
The government announced in August this year that £280m is going to be invested directly to rivers to improve slurry damage, with 4,000 farm inspections being carried out by 50 new inspectors.
There is also a £25m innovative research programme to improve nutrient (phosphate) holding in soil.
Are the supermarkets going to fund these government costs, rather than coming out of taxpayer’s money, to make up for their cheap milk policy?
The really big environmental issue concerns global warming. Cows are often blamed for their methane burps, yet the cow contribution to this major problem is much more complex.
Cows in fields burp across the grass, where chemicals called ‘hydroxyl radicals’ (charged OH molecules), produced in sunlight by water on grass, break the methane up into less harmful water and carbon dioxide. In the barns there are no radicals keeping things the methane down.
Also, there are all those imported feed concentrates – £1.5bn in imports from land that would be better left for trees or ranching. The two dairy footprints, one from grazing and the other from barns are wildly different. Our food carbon footprint makes its impression all over the world, when we could be using our grass better.
27 uniteLANDWORKER Winter 2023/24
Imagine if we used the £1.5bn worth of cattle feed going to people abroad to regenerate our soils, move the cows more easily, pay dairy workers living wages, and utilise our land to grow grass without polluting the rivers. And we’d have cows back in the fields to show off our countryside.
Ex-PM Johnson promised in June 2016 at Gisburn market that the existing farming subsidies would stay. He lied. They are going. Dairy farms will be hit by the losses. Yet new ‘environmentally friendly’ farm subsidies are doing little to address the environmental issues of barn- bred cattle. Money is going to consultants on unworkable schemes to attract inward investors, rather than the farmers themselves.
Over 2,000 farmers signed up to the sustainable farming incentive (SFI) scheme. By August this year, it had paid out £10,692,415– less than 0.5 per cent of the overall £2.4bn farming budget. Clearly someone has to be ‘milking it’.
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