Bovaer: at wet dream for capitalists

"Fixing" methane emissions from cows is just another step in the industrialization of farming.

There has been a lot of controversy about Bovaer lately. The product is a feed additive to cows with the purpose to reduce methane emissions, in particular from dairy cows. Well, it can reduce emissions from all cows, but it is only in intensive dairy that you might have the money to pay for it. Because it is really expensive. Some conspiracy theorists, especially, but not only, on the right, have put Bovaer into a general master conspiracy called the Great reset. If you haven’t heard about it never mind (I don’t make a link). Because of that many self-righteous liberals and socialists have rallied in support of the use, which has been deemed safe by relevant authorities.

I have no strong opinion about the safety of Bovaer, but I remain sceptical to the assessments made regarding its safety, based on the long track record of products introduced as safe and later prohibited. Heard about the mad cow disease? It was caused by feeding cows with ”meal” from dead animals. It was also deemed totally safe for a long time and killed 178 people, in the CJD-disease, in the UK. Sweden banned the use of meat meal to cows, not based on science but on popular opinion, and had no cases of CJD. Hormones fed to dairy cows in the US is still deemed safe by the authorities, but banned in the EU. The inclusion of antibiotics in feed has been deemed safe in the EU until it was banned 2022. Not to speak about all sorts of pesticides and medicines deemed safe which later is deemed toxic. Well, you get it. After all, most medicines or pesticides have side effects, which is probably inevitable. But Bovaer is not administered for a short time to treat a critical condition, a situation which merits that you accept some risk in exchange for the desired effect. No, Bovaer is a product that should be included in the feed for cattle all the time, for eternity.

My main objection to Bovaer is that it can’t be sound to try to manipulate a decisive function of the digestive system of ruminant, almost the function that defines ruminants. Ruminants are able to acquire nutrients from coarse plant-based food by fermenting it in a specialized stomach prior to digestion, principally through microbial actions. In that process, methane is produced by archaea and this methane is released to the atmosphere. Methane emissions are at the same time a result of that the carbohydrates are not fully utilized by the animals, i.e. there is a certain energetic loss in the process. For some reason all ruminants have these archaea in their rumen. Because it is an energy loss to emanate methane (as opposed to carbon dioxide) a cow without methanogen microbes would be more fit for survival and would gradually squeeze out cows with methanogens. But apparently that has not been the case over million years. There must be some reason, some evolutionary advantage, for that.

But also from a climate policy perspective the use of Bovaer is highly questionable.

The methane from ruminants will be broken down in the atmosphere in average within 10 years (these figures are constantly revised). When broken down, the carbon in methane will be found in carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is fixed into cellulose or other carbohydrates through the photosynthesis, and then ruminants, other herbivores or omnivores can eat the plants. The methane is thus not artificial but it as natural as the methane emitted by wetlands, by far the largest methane emission source.

Methane from cows is not less natural than methane from wetlands

But for some reason I have never seen credibly explained, methane from ruminants was classified as anthropogenic and not natural when climate change science took shape. And this makes all the change. That is why methane from cattle is considered a problem to be fixed while methane from wetlands is not considered a problem. On the contrary, wetland restoration, which entails considerable increase in methane emissions, is all the rage. Meanwhile, the IPCC does not count the carbon dioxide that cattle and all other living beings emits as anthropogenic and thus something to reduce, despite the fact that the total natural carbon dioxide emissions are more than 20 times bigger than the emissions from fossil fuels (a fact that is often referred to by those seeing fossil fuels induced climate change as a scam). There is simply no logic in this.

Methane is, at the same time a powerful greenhouse gas which is the reason for why somebody could want to reduce emissions. The debate about methane from ruminants is, however, based on a weak scientific basis and lack of baselines apart from the flawed classification of methane from cattle as “anthropogenic” as opposed to “natural”. You can read more about all the flaws in methane accounting here.

A particular relevant aspect of the use of methane supressing feed additives is that they will have to be used forever. Because of the short lifespan of methane in the atmosphere the climate effect of methane reduction is rapid, but at the same time, not lasting. Assuming the same number of cows the climate effect of Bovaer (if any) will be gained the first 10-20 years, After that, the emission game is back to square one. The beauty, from the perspective of the company selling it, is that all those cows will have to continue eating it for eternity. If the use is suspended, say after 30 years, methane emissions and methane levels in the atmosphere will go up to the same level as before, with no effect whatsoever of the 30 years of Bovaer use.

To sum up so far: 1. Bovaer might be harmful for cows or for the consumers, even if it is deemed safe at the moment. 2. There must be some evolutionary advantage for ruminants to have a symbiosis with methane-producing microbes in the rumen. 3. The methane emissions from ruminants is not really a “problem” that need to be solved. 4. The climate effect of Bovaer is a one off, but will necessitate the constant use of the product for eternity.

I see no reason to cook up a conspiracy to explain why Bovaer happens. I believe it is enough with a flawed analysis of methane from ruminants as a climate problem and capitalism to explain it.

Calves in industrial dairy operation, Kaluga (Russia), photo: Ann-Helen Meyer von Bremen

Bovaer is a wet dream for capitalist

The industrial dairy industry is already enmeshed in capitalism both for all the various inputs used in production as well as support services and on the marketing side. Traditional dairy was based on local resources all the way from the cows themselves to the sale. Very little was bought in and the cows had multiple roles as producers of milk, meat, calves, drought power, manure, landscape, storage of food and capital and company. Industrial dairy is the opposite, where almost everything is bought into the farms. Even the cows themselves are often of proprietary origin, or at least the semen, milking is done by employed labour (in Sweden, where I live, a lot of the people milking cows are migrant workers, a lot of feed is bought in, manure is produced in quantities bigger than the land can absorb (a major reason for why the Dutch government buy out dairy farmers to reduce production), well the list can be made a lot longer.

In a report I made some years ago, I calculated that around half of the value of the production of a typical dairy cow in Sweden is used to purchase inputs to the farm. This is how dairy farms (the same goes for other commercial farms) are entangled in capitalism, even if most of the farms are not capitalist operations as such. With this follows a monoculture of the cow, where everything is about producing as much as milk as possible with as low costs as possible. The role of the cow is reduced to a milk producing unit, and all other roles are supressed. The cows are not even allowed to take care of their own offspring, calves are taken away at birth and shipped off or just killed. The discussion of the cows methane emissions also reflects this industrial, productivist, perspective on the sentient beings in our food producing system. The use of methane reducing feed additives is also only applicable in intensive livestock systems. They can’t be used for cattle that are grazig and the cost is far too high for any use by extensive lievestock system. The use of Bovaer is obviously just another step in this industrialization process and it is of course a wet dream to be able to sell this to millions of farms that have to buy it forever.