Taking place February 4th and 5th at the Albany Marriott Hotel in Albany, NY, the 2020 NEAFA Annual Meeting’s theme is managing for our future. From legislative meetings to advocate for agricultural needs to a wide array of seminars and speakers, there are topics and discussions that will benefit all of our members. An annual meeting highlight will be Professor of Animal Science Mike Van Amburgh, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Atkinson Sustainability Fellow at Cornell University. Van Amburgh will be tackling animal agriculture’s carbon footprint along with Chris Noble, the vice president of Noblehurst Farms and Linwood Agriculture.
“I got pretty frustrated when the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) report came out that said cows were killing the planet, because their math was flawed,” said Van Amburgh. While he plans on going into the reasons why in greater detail at the seminar, one major flaw is how people think about cattle in the larger scale of things. “The people that advocate against cattle do not understand the food system and what cattle consume in the process of making milk. At least 30% of the diet of dairy cattle are byproducts of the human food system (soybean meal, canola meal, cottonseed, beet pulp, etc), thus without the cow consuming that our total food costs would be higher, and the environmental impact would be greater.”
Van Amburgh currently leads the development of the Cornell Net Carbohydrate and Protein System (CNCPS). “It’s an old but unique model because we’ve been working off the same framework for 40 years now. I can just about guarantee that NEAFA members use this model or at the very least research derived from it. It’s used to feed 65% of cows in North America. I was in Italy last week for a training session with 83 people from all over the world, including Taiwan and Vietnam. Worldwide, CNCPS is being used to regulate feed by approximately 30% of all cows.”
Looking at the northeast, Van Amburgh sees a lot that agribusiness leaders should be proud of. “We do a really good job in the northeast managing emissions. We have a good industry and of course there’s always room for improvement which we’re doing, but people don’t always realize how sustainable it already is. The hard part is getting that message of environmental responsibility out to the public in an appropriate way. I’m looking forward to the annual meeting and having a chance to get in front of a group of people that work in the field of agriculture and nutrition, so that we can carry on a conversation about all the positive things that we do and the opportunities that we have to improve.”