The beginning of the end

What's wrong with this picture? 

It shows a contemporary dairy farm on the Canterbury Plains, a part of New Zealand not previously used for intensive dairy farming because it is one of the driest parts of the country. It still is – and it is predicted to get even drier as climate change impacts on NZ – but in the past ten years it has experienced an explosion of dairy farming, driven by four key factors.  They are:

(1) the investment of millions of dollars by successive NZ governments into achieving bi-lateral and multilateral trade agreements which remove tariff and other barriers to NZ dairy exports, giving dairy products an advantage over other export commodities;
(2) the absence of strong national and regional policies and programmes to protect fresh-water sources from unsustainable levels of extraction and toxic levels of pollution;
(3) local and national government support for major irrigation schemes which effectively subsidise dairy farming while displacing more sustainable cropping farms and non-irrigated cattle and sheep farming;
(4) the application of high-energy water extraction and distribution technologies.

(Ironically, in Canterbury, the hydro-electricity used to run the huge irrigation booms is derived from rivers which are also being used, or targeted, for irrigation water.)

Back to the picture... Hundreds of cows are plodding from the giant milking shed back to their pastures, using an underpass beneath the road so as not to hold up traffic for an hour or more (or destroy the road surface with their urine and faeces). The milk from these cows is most likely destined to end up some 50 km away, at the Clandeboye dairy factory owned by the world's largest dairy company, Fonterra. There it will mingle with milk brought from as far as 500km away, and it will be dried into milk powder – a process which uses around 150,000 tonnes of coal per year in the Clandeboye plant alone, and makes Fonterra the third largest user of coal in NZ.

No wonder New Zealand can't seem to cap its greenhouse gas emissions, which have risen steadily in the past twenty years, despite making international commitments to cut back to 1990 levels. But it's not just (or even) the fossil fuels used by the expanding dairy industry that are causing this - it's the cows themselves. What they eat (see Grass my ass! Climate-changing cow feeding), and what they excrete. Forty-nine per cent of NZ's greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, with the expanding dairy herd (NZ has one million more dairy cows than people) making the biggest contribution to methane and nitrous oxide emissions. The nitrogen sources (cow urine and faeces) also pollute soil and water when the cows herded together in small spaces. The industrial mindset has 'solutions' to these problems, which all involve tinkering with animals, soils and grass (sometimes using genetic engineering) to change the amount of greenhouse gases given off, and/or the nitrogen absorbed.

This very expensive and complicated way of addressing problems which could easily be fixed by reducing herd numbers and stocking rates to what the land can sustainably support, and also using proven organic management techniques, may fall over when (if ever) the dairy industry has to pay the true environmental cost of its activities, including its greenhouse gas emissions. This is supposed to start happening in NZ in 2015, but on past form I expect to see aerial pig emissions first.

Meanwhile, don't blame the cows – they are victims too, who didn't ask to be treated like senseless machines, let alone be forced to endure the brutality of the euphemistically named 'calf inductions' i.e. late-term abortions to bring the cow into milk sooner, while the premature calf is clubbed to death.

There's one more sad thing to note in the picture. Those tiny plants in the bare soil are all native plants, ones which would have grown in this area (which is close to the foothills of the Southern Alps) over one hundred years ago, before the land was cleared for European-style farming. If they succeed in growing to their full height, they will one day mask the most unsustainable form of natural resource use this area has ever seen. It will be interesting to see if their growth rates are positively affected by the warming of the area due to climate change, or negatively affected by this as well as the greater dryness due to climate change.