Why the agricultural expert Onno Poppinga wants to save the honor of the ruminants
It used to be said: “Milk perks up tired men.” And: “Milk does it.” Or: “Milk against maroditis.” Those days are over. Nowadays, there are more sparkling advertising slogans for oat drinks and other milk alternatives. “Like milk, but for people”, for example, posters the manufacturer Oatly. Anyone who reads the information on their packaging as a (still) milk fan gets a guilty conscience. The CO2 footprint is only 0.5 kilograms per liter. In the case of milk, it is around three times as much on average, namely 1.5.
The fact is: the milk – and thus the cow – has an image problem. More and more consumers: they turn inside out, instead they drink soy, oat or almond drinks with their coffee. Sales of milk alternatives are increasing, consumption of cow’s milk is falling, at least slightly. The climate debate is changing consumer behavior.
Onno Poppinga annoys this, in this particular case. “The cow is not the problem. But how to deal with it today, ”says the former professor of agriculture from North Hesse. He wants to help save the honor of those livestock that “wrongly has been blamed for the main responsibility for the climate misery of today’s agriculture”, as he says.
Poppinga grew up on a farm in East Friesland, he was Professor of Regional Agricultural Policy at the University of Kassel-Witzenhausen until 2009 and is now, at the age of 77, still a part-time farmer with ten hectares of grassland. In a study he analyzed the changes in cattle farming in Europe over the past two centuries. From this he concludes: “The problem is not the cow, but the industrialization of agriculture, which no longer operates in cycles.”
Of course, he says, as ruminants – with up to 30,000 chewing movements per day – the cows give off a lot of methane and other gases, mainly through their breath. To German: They burp and fart as much as they can. Methane is far more effective as a greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, even if it has the advantage of disappearing from the atmosphere after twelve years, while CO2 remains there for up to 1000 years. “Without ruminating, the cows would not be able to digest grass and clover and convert them into milk and meat,” explains Poppinga. But: They have been doing this for thousands of years, and at least in Europe in large numbers – without destabilizing the world climate.
Back to the cycles
Poppinga’s main argument: The number of cows in Germany and comparable countries has decreased significantly since the middle of the 20th century – and with it the amount of methane they cause. In Germany (FRG and GDR) around 1950 there were around 7.4 million dairy cows, today there are fewer than four million. “Even if the amount of methane per cow has increased significantly due to the intensification of feeding, the methane output for all cows together has decreased,” explains the expert. Namely from around 615,000 to 484,000 tons.
Interesting detail: industrialization started about a century later in agriculture than in industry and transport. “Around 1950 there were hardly any tractors in Germany, no combine harvesters, no milking machines, hardly any mineral nitrogen fertilizers, no systemic pesticides – but over a million work cows and oxen.” At that time, 80 percent of the pulling work was done by horses and cows.
Of course, Poppinga does not deny that agriculture is contributing to the climate crisis and that changes are needed. In Germany, their share in greenhouse gas emissions is around seven percent. “The real need for change in agriculture with a view to the climate is primarily in terms of nitrous oxide emissions, ammonia and the consumption of plastics such as in asparagus cultivation,” he says. Nitrous oxide is created through the use of artificial fertilizers and too much liquid manure from factory farming in the fields.
In addition, the previously existing link between the number of animals and the available area – for feed and for taking up excrement – has been abandoned. “We import huge quantities of soy as concentrate feed, especially for intensive pig and poultry farming, from the USA and Brazil, and we are thus breaking the loop,” criticizes Poppinga. The transition to an agriculture that concentrates on the resources of one’s own farm without importing animal feed in these dimensions is the right answer here. The expert sees organic farming as the main approach, and the ruminant cows, sheep and goats are particularly important for the circular economy aimed at by organic farms.
In Poppinga’s ideal world, some changes are in store for the cows and dairy farmers. He advocates keeping no more animals than the available agricultural land allows. Mass stalls with hundreds of cows, as is sometimes common today and financially supported by agricultural policy, would then no longer exist. “And you should only feed a small amount of concentrated feed, because the concentrated feed increases the amount of methane per cow.” The cows would then give less milk, but would be healthier and live longer. In addition, Germany could reduce its self-sufficiency level of 120 percent and thus its exports. There are dairy farms that already work this way today, organic and conventional. Poppinga analyzed them. “On average, they are even more profitable.” However, this is overlooked in the political discussion and by many agricultural experts.
Grass as a CO2 storage
However: Poppinga cannot ignore the fact that milk produced extensively and in the “feed-cow-dung cycle” actually produces greenhouse gases. “But that’s also the case with the milk alternatives,” he says. This means that in any case, for a “net zero” in greenhouse gases, which should be reached in 2045, compensatory measures must be put in place that absorb and store CO2 from the atmosphere. And here, says Poppinga, the cow has an advantage. Because the grassland from which their feed comes is a very good CO2 store. In one hectare of arable land, an average of 100 tons of organic (carbonaceous) material are bound, in one hectare of grassland around twice as much. Poppinga: “Anyone who turns arable land into grassland and lets cows graze on it, relieves the climate balance.”
So would you prefer to buy milk instead of oat drink? In any case, Poppinga drinks milk, half a liter to a liter a day, and he eats cheese almost every day – without a guilty conscience. Up until ten years ago he even had cows of his own, that was best. The professor is convinced: “The cow is not a climate killer.” It is more like “the eighth wonder of the world”. This is how Poppinga’s Swiss colleague Alfred Haiger put it years ago – because of her ability to make grass usable for human nutrition through milk.
