With supermarket milk cheaper than spring water, it's time to rethink the modern dairy industry. It's not just the milk that's become a throwaway product - the high-octane Holstein cows that produce it are also in the knackers yard after just two or three lactations, the living waste of a loss-making, environment-trashing industry.
With supermarket milk cheaper than spring water, it's time to rethink the modern dairy industry. It's not just the milk that's become a throwaway product - the high-octane Holstein cows that produce it are also in the knackers yard after just two or three lactations, the living waste of a loss-making, environment-trashing industry.
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Milk, a precious resource in many parts of the world, has become a throwaway commodity in wealthy countries. For example, in the UK, an estimated 4.2m tonnes of foodstuffs wasted per year are wasted, of which milk is in the top three.
In 2012, the country disposed of 420,000 tonnes of avoidable dairy and egg waste, costing £780m. Perhaps that's no surprise as supermarkets retail milk for as little as 44p per litre. Bottled water can be two to three times the price.
Such extreme market forces lead to vanishing profit margins, so the dairy industry has had to become super-efficient: fewer, larger herds typically with several hundred, high-yielding Holstein cows capable of producing 10,000 litres per annual lactation cycle, milked by a single dairyman.
These remarkable cattle are the result of highly selective breeding over many generations using a very small pool of elite bulls capable of producing over a million offspring by artificial insemination.
The wonders of modern technology?
A marvelous exemplar of sustainable intensification and food security though application of modern science and technology ... perhaps?
From another perspective, the industry has boxed itself into a tight and uncomfortable corner. Modern Holstein dairy cows only last for two to three lactations, rather than the five to eight (or more) of more traditional systems.
These animals carry a heavy burden of nutritional and metabolic diseases and poor fertility, often with adverse consequences for welfare that require routine treatment with antibiotics and hormones - all justifiably of concern to the consumer.
An average of 37% of Holstein cattle suffer from painful lameness, significantly more so than other breeds.
The Holstein cow is arguably the world's least fertile farm animal. Around 60% require hormonal treatments for successful pregnancy, an obvious prerequisite to the annual calving and lactation cycle.
These treatments may not be harmful to consumers, but routine use of hormones for growth promotion in farm animals was banned in the EU in 1988, and consumers are ill-informed about the risks involved.
Continue reading at ENN affiliate The Ecologist.
Cow and milk image via Shutterstock.
