Economics – Bovidiva

An op-ed in the Times titled “Time to Cut Our Greedy Farmers Down to Size” (full article here) has my Twitter feed venting bile like a dyspeptic volcano. According to Ms Duncan, Brexit and consequent independence from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) means that “The vast majority of British people will benefit. That’s not just because the money that now goes into farmers pockets (in terms of subsidies) can go into the NHS instead, but also because Britons will pay lower food prices.” Cutting subsidies is seen as a positive because “…farming will shrink and land prices will fall” allowing housing to be provided where it’s desperately required. As one Twitter friend commented, I bet there’s millions longing to have the opportunity to move to a new housing estate halfway up a Welsh mountain.

It’s relatively easy to sit at a desk and earn a living using nothing but your brain and a laptop. Waitrose is fully-stocked with quinoa; the barista at your local Starbucks starts your skinny vanilla latte as soon as you walk in; and if your op-ed doesn’t get picked up by the broadsheets, well, there’s always another day. The maintenance costs for your business are low, there’s no need for specialised housing, feed, veterinary care or staff for your laptop, and a single unproductive day doesn’t have an immediate and knock-on effect on the viability of your business. Compare that to farming, where missing a difficult calving; not being able to harvest due to torrential rain or having two staff off sick could wipe out a week’s potential (potential being the operative word) profits and it’s less easy to sit and mock.

Do inefficient farms, propped up by subsidies exist? Yes. Could British agriculture exist without them? Absolutely. However, these don’t represent the majority of producers. Milk prices dropped by 15.1% in the past year – an average 3.64 pence per litre decrease. At present, costs of producing milk (25-33 pence per litre) outweigh the returns for most producers. Not surprisingly perhaps, AHDB data shows that the number of dairy producers in the UK has fallen from ~14,600 in 2005 to 9,538 in 2016 – a 35% decrease. A proportion of that can be allocated to natural wastage conferred by a combination of an aging farmer population and herds being consolidated into larger operations, but the frequency with which herd dispersal sales are advertised in the farming press is frightening. In an industry where farms are often supported or kept in existence by one or more owners having off-farm employment, the hackneyed image of rich farmers spending all their time shooting pheasants and barrelling around country lanes in brand-new 4x4s needs a sharp shock from a cattle prod.

Nobody yet can predict the full economic impacts of Brexit, though I predict we’ll going to have an even greater drop in dairy farm numbers by next year. However, the implication that we’re going to be returned to a sunny bucolic Britain where poppies bloom amongst the wheat, maize is forgone in favour of rewilding and farmers only graze one ewe per 50 acres is arrant nonsense. Yes, the countryside looked very different hundreds of years ago, but in 1900, when there were only 38 million people in the UK and the average lifespan was 47 years, it was easy to feed everybody (or rather those who had the income to buy food rather than poaching from estates) from an extensive, inefficient system.

Want cheaper food and don’t give a damn about British farmers? Be careful what you wish for, Ms Duncan. An island nation with an agricultural industry in decline is utterly reliant on food imports from overseas – is this really the (CAP) “independent” future that we want for our children?

Can we really afford to lose the sustainability advantages that productivity-enhancing tools provide?

Beta agonists have been a hotly debated topic in the media recently, after it was suggested that the use of Zilmax™ might be related to welfare issues in supplemented cattle (see note 1), and Tyson announced that they would not purchase cattle produced using the feed supplement.

As the global population increases and consumer interest in food production sustainability continues to grow, we know that to maintain the continuous improvements in beef sustainability that we’ve seen over the past half-century, we need to ensure that economic viability, environmental responsibility and social acceptability are all in place. All cattle producers obviously have the choice as to what tools and practices are used within their operation, but what are the big picture environmental and economic implications of removing technology use from beef production? Let’s look at two tools – beta agonists and implants (see note 2 below for an explanation of these tools).

In a traditional beef production system using both tools, we’d need 85 million total cattle (see note 3) to maintain the U.S. annual production of 26 billion lbs of beef (see note 4). If we removed beta-agonists from U.S. beef production we’d need an extra 3.5 million total cattle to support beef production; losing access to implants would require an extra 9.9 million cattle; and removing both tools would increase total cattle numbers to 100 million (a 15 million head increase) to maintain the current beef supply (see note 5).

If we need more cattle to maintain beef supply, we use more resources and have a greater carbon footprint.

If we removed beta-agonists, we would need more natural resources to maintain U.S. beef production:

More water, equivalent to supplying 1.9 million U.S. households annually (195 billion gallons)
More land, equivalent to an area just bigger than Maryland (14.0 thousand sq-miles)
More fossil fuels, equivalent to heating 38 thousand U.S. households for a year (3,123 billion BTU)

If we removed implants, we would need more natural resources to maintain U.S. beef production:

More water, equivalent to supplying 4.5 million U.S. households annually (457 billion gallons)
More land, equivalent to the area of South Carolina (31.6 thousand sq-miles)
More fossil fuels, equivalent to heating 45 thousand U.S. households for a year (3,703 billion BTU)

If we removed both beta-agonists and implants, we would need more natural resources to maintain U.S. beef production:

More water, equivalent to supplying 7.3 million U.S. households annually (741 billion gallons)
More land, equivalent to the area of Louisiana (51.9 thousand sq-miles)
More fossil fuels, equivalent to heating 98 thousand U.S. households for a year (8,047 billion BTU)

Beef production costs would also increase if these tools weren’t used. Feed costs would increase by 4.0% without beta-agonists, 8.1% without implants and 11.0% without both tools. These costs ultimately would be passed on through every segment of the beef supply chain (including the retailer or food service segment) and ultimately onto the consumer, making beef a less-affordable protein choice.

In a world where one in seven children currently do not have enough food, keeping food affordable is key to improving their health and well-being. If we use productivity-enhancing tools in one single animal, the extra beef produced is sufficient to supply seven schoolchildren with their beef-containing school meals for an entire year. Is that a social sustainability advantage that we can afford to lose?

Although animal welfare is paramount for all beef production stakeholders from the cow-calf operator to the retailer, it is possible that the consumer perception of productivity-enhancing tools may be harmed by negative comments on media articles relating to Zilmax™. There is no doubt that we will need to use technologies within food production in order to feed the growing global population, yet we need consumer acceptance of both the technologies that we use, and the reasons why we use them, in order to continue to secure market access for U.S. beef.

Consumer acceptance therefore needs to be a key component of our mission to continuously improve beef sustainability. That does not mean giving in to the uninformed whims of those who blithely assert that we could feed the world by returning to the production systems of the 1940’s or ’50s, but does offer an opportunity to reach out, listen to and engage in a dialogue with our friends, family, customers and colleagues about the advantages that technology offers. We have a bright future ahead, but only if we keep the torch alight.

To read more conversation about the use of technologies within beef production (including the real-life experiences of feedyard operators who use these tools) and for facts and figures relating to beef production, please check out the following websites: Feedyard Foodie, Ask a Farmer, Facts About Beef, and the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance.

Footnotes

1) Merck Animal Health have since pledged to conduct a thorough investigation into the issue and have temporarily suspended Zilmax™ sales in the U.S. and Canada.

2) Beta agonists are animal feed ingredients that help cattle maintain their natural muscle-building ability and add about 20-30 pounds of additional lean muscle instead of fat. Implants (sometimes called growth promotants or growth hormones), are placed into the ear and release hormones slowly, helping cattle maintain natural muscle-building ability while also decreasing the amount of fat gained.

3) Includes beef cows, calves, bulls, replacement animals, stockers and feedlot cattle plus calves and cull cows from the dairy system.

4) Although this is a considerable amount of beef, it’s still not enough to fulfill current demand for beef in the USA and overseas.

5) This work was presented as a poster at the Joint Annual Meeting of the American Dairy Science Association and American Society of Animal Science in Indianapolis, IN in July 2013. The poster is available for download here.