During the 2020 NEAFA Annual Meeting, at the Albany Marriott in Albany, NY on Feb. 5th, Cornell professor Mike Van Amburgh addressed the environmental stigma that the dairy industry has faced recently, and why it’s unfounded given the evidence that he and other professionals have documented. “New York agriculture is moving in the right direction,” said Van Amburgh. “We’ve seen a 15 to 30 percent decrease in carbon emissions during the last 10 years. When you look at analyzed forages and other cattle related information, we’ve decreased nitrogen excretion between 5 to 20 percent. Because we can’t talk about carbon dioxide and methane independent from nitrogen and phosphorus. Looking at income compared to feed cost, that’s increased as well. These tools that we keep developing, when we get them applied, they work really, really well.”
These achievements have been helped immensely by the Cornell Net Carbohydrate Protein System (CNCPS), which according to Cornell “was developed to predict requirements, feed utilization, animal performance and nutrient excretion for dairy and beef cattle using accumulated knowledge about feed composition, digestion, and metabolism in supplying nutrients to meet requirements.” (http://blogs.cornell.edu/cncps/) “Any nutritionist using the model can tell you the carbon balance at the cow level,” said Van Amburgh. “Nobody cared until recently about CO2 and methane. And yes, as a cow does more work, more co2 is emitted. But if you look at it from CO2 per unit of milk basis, the more milk a cow makes, the more efficient we are. Overall, CO2 emissions decrease. The focus in the media has been on the cow, but that’s not the right metric. The data tells us we need to be more productive, and that cows that make more milk are happy cows. We see the same thing for methane. Yes, it goes up with the work done by the cow, but overall it’s lower when you look at overall milk production.”
Van Amburgh also took the time to tackle the myth that milk is more environmentally damaging than a beverage derived of soy or almond. “We have to talk about byproducts, and where they go,” said Van Amburgh. “Cows eat a lot of plant byproducts. Canola meal, soybeans, and at least 30% of the corn used is corn rejected for human consumption, and that corn is a byproduct as well. When you look at soybean byproducts, it’s five times less CO2 when fed to a cow. When you look at almonds, there were 2.2 million tons of hulls produced in 2018. Cattle consumed 70% of those hulls. So ff you like your almond beverage, thank a cow for making it affordable and possible. That part of the food chain isn’t well described, and often gets ignored.”
Beyond the consumption of byproducts, Van Amburgh looked at how nutrient density and greenhouse gas emissions are related. “From a nutrient density to greenhouse gas emissions standpoint,” said Van Amburgh, “milk is almost double orange juice, and is more than double soy. On a nutrient basis, dairy is the best. We need to keep in mind that everyone has an environmental impact, no industry is neutral.”
Going forward, Van Amburgh had suggestions for the industry to help illustrate the positive environmental aspects for those unfamiliar with agriculture. “Record and report the amount of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients sold to the dairy industry or other businesses every year so they can document what was supplied to them. It helps in two ways. It provides documents about the tons of nutrients coming onto the farm, and it provides an opportunity to understand how efficient the nutrients are being used.”