Hello and welcome everybody to this afternoon's session of the Virtual Congress 2018 from the webinar vet, in its 6th successive year now, and BVA are absolutely delighted to be part of this and bringing this afternoon session to you. I'm Gudrin Rabbit, senior vice president of the British Veterinary Association. I, I will be chairing this afternoon.
We're looking at Farm to Fork. We've got, an excellent set of speakers, and I think it's, it's really, it's excellent that we're looking at this area. Extremely topical area at the moment that we know that BVA members and veterinary professionals are extremely interested in, particularly and BVA looking at this through their farm assurance and sustainable agriculture forms a part of the BVA's animal welfare strategy.
And with the Theresa May. Announcing the 25 year environment plan and us expecting an agricultural bill coming and soon, hopefully in the spring. It's really important that we hear, these discussions around sustainable future agriculture and livestock, and we do have an excellent line up for you this afternoon.
So, without further ado, I'd like to welcome Judeer, who was giving our first presentation. Jude has a a very impressive biography that I'm not going to read all of it, but it is available for you to read. But Jude is an independent livestock sustainability consultant based in Ox Oxfordshire, with a PhD from Harper Adams and then postdoctoral research at Cornell, and her research focus is very much on modelling the environmental impact of livestock production system.
Specifically within dairy and beef, and she's given an awful lot of presentations. It's extremely well known in this area with a significant amount of publications. So without further ado, I think we're in for an extremely interesting afternoon.
It's over to you, Jude. Thank you, Goodwin, and it's it's an absolute pleasure to talk to all of you this afternoon. This is a topic that I feel really passionately about, to be honest, because I have a background in animal science and ruminant nutrition.
If you'd asked me, you know, 10 or 20 years ago whether I thought I'd be talking about these kind of things, I'd have said no, probably not. But it's interesting where life takes us, and I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to work in this increasingly important area. But also to share with you some some facts and some figures and some data points and some thoughts about how we communicate this better.
We have an awful lot of myths and misperceptions and misconceptions out there, particularly at the moment, and an awful lot of challenges to the whole animal agriculture industry, both on a national and a global basis. So it's really nice to share with you some of this data and some of this information. And there's no doubt that we really do face quite a challenge.
The chart that you should be seeing is global beef for compulsory consumption going out on the left from 1980 to the right to 2050. And as you can see, as we go on a global basis, we're gonna need more meat, basically. At the bottom we've got beef in green, in the middle we've got, pork in a yellowy orange, and at the top we've got broilers in purple, and we'd see the same pattern for dairy as well.
Because globally we are having an ever increasing population. We're at. Just over 7 billion people at the moment, and that's predicted now to go to about 9.8 billion by the year 2050, so about 30% more people.
But per capita, we're also gonna see an increase in income. So in countries like Africa, like India and China, we're gonna see people with an increased income and as people's income increases, they want more milk, more meat and more eggs. But what we also see, if, if you look at the blue line that that shows a downward trend going from 1980 to 2050, is that per person we're gonna have less arable land.
Available. We simply don't have any extra land out there really to grow food crops or to grow feed crops. So we face this real challenge as a global industry to produce more food, whether it's soy or corn or chicken, pork or beef, using fewer resources, less land, less fertilisers, less water every single day.
Now, one of my main messages to you is that ultimately any animal agriculture production system can be sustainable. So whether it's Jersey cows actually on the island of Jersey, I took this picture about two months ago now. Whether it's a dairy cow out on pasture in a field in Norway, whether it's some native type animals in a really large feedlot in South Africa, or whether it's some Charolais cross calves on a large cow calfer operation, that's kind of equivalent to our suckler beefer operations on a ranch in Montana in.
In the states, any dairy or beef production system can be and should be sustainable, but we have to have some metrics in place to assess that. And of course, we need a really good definition. And believe me, there is, there are as many definitions of this S word, as it were, as there are people in the UK.
You know, everybody thinks about it in a slightly different way, and I'll come on to that a little bit later. But generally on the global basis, we do seem to have a consensus that if we want any sustainable system, whether it's in agriculture or industry or car making, let's say, we've got to balance the three factors in the middle of. This triangle.
So we've got to balance social acceptability, economic viability, and environmental responsibility. If we balance all of those three, both in the short term, but more importantly, in the long term, we can have a sustainable system. But what that means is there is no one size fits all.
There is no, if you just do A, B, and C, you will be sustainable. It entirely depends on the farm, on the location, on the type of system, the number of animals, etc. There is no ideal if you just have 200 cows in East Anglia, you will be sustainable, for example.
And obviously for the audience that we have today, we have a really high. Correlation between sustainability and health as well. So we've got this interlinkage with the one health type concept, that is to say, interactions between animal health, ecosystem health and human health as well.
So if we can manage both now and in the future to have systems and practises that encompass all of these concepts, then we can have a sustainable food future. But as I say, we really do face a number of challenges. And as I mentioned earlier, We have as many definitions of sustainable food as we have people in the UK.
And when we ask people generally, when we think about this word, it seems to ring in people's minds relative to environmental impacts. So this was some data that came out in 2016. Now, it was a web survey of over 5000 people across six countries in the EU.
And when people heard this term, most of, most of them thought about seasonal fruit and veg. So if we don't buy. Raspberries in March, let's say that's thought to be more sustainable, but they also thought about food waste, water use, that e-sources use, etc.
I personally found it quite interesting that animal welfare was down there at #6 in the list, with only 29% of people thinking about that as a, as an indicator for whether food was sustainable or not. And again, it was interesting to see that food safety was even lower than that. So generally, when we think about this term, the average person in the street, as it were, tends to think about the environmental side.
But this is where, as I say, we face this huge challenge because when we look at the data, when we look at the demonstrations from the anti-animal agriculture type groups, this is where they focus. So we have 4 pictures here from a Jersey cow. A banner with quite a lot of text at the bottom right.
Bottom left, we have Pamela Anderson in a PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, banner, and at the top right we have a demonstration again from PETA People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. And if we focus on the picture at the top right, that was in a Large city centre, they've had that same message and that same demonstration all over the world. This particular one, as you can see from the units, was in the USA, but they've had it globally.
And in and in this instance, they say 1 pound of meat equals 2,463 gallons of water. So anybody who isn't. Knowledgeable about animal agriculture, that's a really powerful message that basically says if a pound or 454 grammes of meat uses this huge quantity of water, maybe I shouldn't be eating meat.
Maybe I shouldn't have the beef or the pork chop or even the cheese. Perhaps this does have too much of an environmental impact to be sustainable. But when we think about it, and if you look closely, you'll notice that almost all of these pictures are in alphabetical order because I am a complete nerd.
But everything from apples to zucchini, in this case has some environmental impact. So whether you're having an egg or a kiwi fruit or pancakes, every single thing that we eat has some kind of Environmental impact. It isn't as simple as milk and meat are bad and tofu, let's say, must be good.
Everything has some impact on carbon emissions, water use, fossil fuels, biodiversity, all of these things that contribute to ecosystem health. Today I'm generally gonna focus on carbon footprint, simply because that seems to have become the metric by which most people tend to assess environmental impacts. But it's worth bearing in mind there are other impacts as well, and we have to go beyond carbon to look at the whole system impact both on a national and a global basis.
But if we look at meat and we look at dairy, this is some really nice data came out of. And the USA just two years ago now, and it was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, what they looked at was the carbon footprints of different food products. And I want to underline that.
So this isn't liquid milk when you look at the dairy bar, for example. This is Meat products, dairy products, grain products, sweets, etc. Etc.
So in terms of the dairy bar there, where you have a carbon footprint of 3.6 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilo of food, that includes cheese, butter, ice cream, milk, yoghurt, etc. Therefore, it's worth pointing out that if you can imagine a further bar over to the right hand side for liquid milk, liquid milk has a carbon footprint of about 1.2 kg per kilo, so actually lower than the average for fruit and veg.
But not surprisingly, if we are concerned about carbon footprints, you can see why many people therefore go, well, if meat has a carbon footprint of 6.2 kg of carbon per kilo of meat and grains is only 3.2, perhaps we shouldn't eat meat, you know, perhaps we should give it up for the sake of the planet.
Well, if we concentrate on dairy for just a moment. The FAO, the Food and Agricultural organisation of the United Nations, brought out a really nice report. This came out now in 2010, so it's actually fairly old, but we see the same trends now.
And what they did was to do a global life cycle assessment of dairy production all across the world. So those are the orangey yellow bars that you can see, stratified by regions. So, North America is on the far left at about 1.2 kg of carbon per kilo of milk, bearing in mind that's not just the states but also Canada.
And Mexico as well, followed by Western Europe, Oceania, Eastern Europe, and so on and so on as we go across from the left to the right. The world's carbon footprint per kilo of milk is roughly about 2.4 kg of carbon per kilo of milk, on the far right.
But as you can see, if we plot the milk yield per cow on an annual basis against the carbon footprint, we see a very strong trend. I.e., as the milk yield goes down, the carbon footprint goes up.
So a less productive cow tends to have a higher carbon footprint. Now if we look at data just for the UK, this is some data that came out from Dairyo back in 2013 now, and as far as I know there aren't any more up. To date numbers.
In this instance, it was an analysis of 415 dairy units. Those with the lowest carbon footprints tended to be about 0.8 kg of carbon or 800 grammes of carbon per litre of 4% fat corrected milk.
And those with the highest were round at about 2.2 kg of carbon. So as you can see, there is a huge range, even within the British dairy industry.
As a mean, it came out, as I said earlier, at about 1.2 kg of carbon per kilo of 4% fat corrected milk. But we do see quite a range.
Now this graph again, the data comes from Dairyo and it's, it's a little bit difficult to interpret at first cos in, in, in this case, the top 10%, so the green bars, are the farms with the lowest carbon footprint. So obviously with carbon, low is good, high is bad, as it were. So the green bars are the best carbon farmers, as it were, and the yellow bars are the worst carbon farmers, as it were.
And the blue bars are again the mean. But as you can see, if we look at herd size, the average herd had about 182 cows. Both the best and the worst herds in terms of carbon footprint were higher than the average, so there's no clear trend there.
And we see the same in terms of milk sold, both the best and worst. As it were, in terms of the carbon footprint, sold more milk than the average. But where we do see a trend that fits in with the FAO data that I showed earlier in this, the best carbon farmers, as it were, i.e.
The green bar, had a higher milky per cow per year than the worst carbon farmers. So we do see this trend that seems to fit as cows are more productive, as they have a higher yield per cow, they tend to have overall a lower carbon footprint. However, huge caveat that does not mean we should all breed for high milk yields per cow.
It is simply not that simple. Please don't go away saying we should push for yield, yield, yield, yield. But if we're looking at carbon, we do seem to see this trend.
Now, overall, absolutely anything that we do on farm that incurs some kind of efficiency loss is therefore going to reduce productivity and increase carbon footprint. And generally, we see a, a positive correlation between carbon footprint, water use, fuel use, fertile fertiliser use, etc. So if we don't feed our cows well, if, if they don't get in calf, if they're lame, if they had.
Issues with disease. If we have a long age at first carving, any of these. Netflix, which we can benchmark fairly easily if we have issues in any of these areas, such that our operation loses efficiency, loses productivity compared to where it perhaps should be, it's going to increase that carbon footprint, and again, the other metrics as well.
So, so to use a fairly simple example, if we simply lose 4.5 kg or litres of milk per day. So, If you look at the dark green bars, that's the control, and the lighter green bars are if we lose milky per cow per day through whatever reason, poor diets, low, reproductive capacity, mastitis, lameness, poor cow comfort, overstocking, anything that doesn't allow those cows to perform in the way that they should.
If we lose that 4.5 kg of milk per cow per day, we need 11% more animals just to make the same amount of milk, and I should point out that this, Was based on cows yielding about 9500 kg of milk per year. So we need a greater number of total animals in the herd, both cows, heifers, and, where appropriate bulls.
We need 8% more feed to make the same amount of milk, 11% more water, 7% more land, and we see an 8% increase in the total car. Carbon footprint to make the same amount of milk. So any area on any operation, we have to look at it on a whole system basis and say what could we do to improve efficiency all the way through.
As I say, milk yield is important, but all the other factors come in as well. So to give you a couple of examples here, quite honestly, I find it frightening almost that we lose so many heifers. And of course these losses can occur all the way through from birth until calving.
But if we look at the data, if we have 100 heifers born. In a herd. Only 81 of those heifers actually make it all the way through to calving.
Now, obviously some of that is planned. They do go for beef, but often it isn't. They're lost early, they don't get pregnant, etc.
So 19 of those heifers don't ever enter the herd. Then, and we look at those same potential 100 heifers at 100 days into lactation, we've lost 4 more heifers. So out of every 100 heifers in the UK, only 77 of them make it into the herd past 100 days into lactation.
And from an environmental and resource, resource use point of view, that's really quite frightening because being a complete data nerd, I calculated it, and if we're going to re a heifer from birth. To calving, ideally at about 24 months. That needs 6, excuse me, 6,118 kg of feed dry matter.
That's an awful lot of feed and therefore land, resources, fuel, etc. So those 23 heifers that don't make it, that's an awful efficiency loss in terms of environmental impact. Now I'm well aware that this example I'm going to show you now is not the norm, OK, I'm not saying that many farms calve heifers at 40 months of age.
But I was told by a good friend of mine about sending some vet students out to a farm in the southwest, and one of the issues that they identified on this dairy operation was that they carved at 40 months of age, and quite honestly, I couldn't believe it. You know, I thought, who on earth calves at 40 months of age? But again, if we leave it that long before the heifers calve, yes, they may grow OK, they may look OK, they may be healthy, but, but those extra months, those extra 16 months at an increased weight, of course, means that the total feed to rear those heifers to calving.
Goes from 6 118 kg, as I said earlier, a feed dry matter for 24 month age at first carving to 12,100 kg at 40 months. It's almost doubled. So as I say, if we have any efficient inefficiencies in the system, we really have problems.
Now, what we have to understand, of course, is that there are interlinkages between systems and between metrics of sustainability. Quite honestly, there are some things that we do on farms that we cannot justify from an environmental point of view, from an economic point of view, but particularly from a social point of view. This is an article from my very favourite paper, The Daily Mail.
Quite honestly, I cannot tell you how much I loathe this newspaper. I just find it unbelievably awful because they hate everybody in the world. But This was talking about a programme that was on Channel 4.
It's back in 2012 now, where day old calves were lined up and shot dead, capitals because they're male. And we really have no justification whatsoever to the consumer to kill bull calves. You know, they, it, it, it is unacceptable and we shouldn't try to justify it.
So, from a social acceptability point of view. It absolutely doesn't work. From an economic point of view, I can understand why it occurs, but the economics of it, again, are very difficult to justify to the consumer, but also from an environmental point of view.
Now, please don't think I'm bashing beef for you. I'm absolutely not. It is amazing that we have the ability to have suckler herds turning low quality grassland into high quality protein.
But thinking about it in a little bit more detail about 3 months ago now, I suddenly thought, well, if we lose a bull calf for any reason, if it's killed or if it just died, that's a bull calf that that potentially could have gone into beef. And if we want to maintain national beef production in the UK. Then if we don't have those male calves from the dairy industry, then we have to have a bigger suckler herd.
So for every dairy calf that's culled, we basically need another suckler cow. Again, suckler cows are fabulous, but if we have more animals to make the same amount of beef, that means greater resources. So for every beef, sorry, every dairy calf that we lose that would otherwise go into beef, we need one more suckler cow at an annual cost of almost 4000 kg of feed dry matter.
20,000 litres of water and nearly 2500 kg of carbon dioxide, i.e., carbon foot.
So we have to be more efficient on a whole scale basis, not just in dairy, but in beef, pork, and poultry as well. Now, as I say, in this example, culling bull cast, we see that, we see that clear correlation between social acceptability and environmental responsibility. And if you look on Twitter, I have to admit I spent too much time on Twitter, particularly in the last 2 or 3 days, Twitter has gone absolutely crazy.
But if you search on Twitter, for example, and I search for dairy and carbon, you get an awful lot of people saying don't eat meat, don't drink dairy, don't eat cheese or eggs or honey even, go vegan, save the planet. Now, as I showed earlier, every single food that we eat has some environmental impact, you know, soy and tofu just as much of an impact in some ways as other foods as well. But there is a perception out there, and we have the campaign of, of eganuary, according, appealing at the moment, there seems to be a campaign out there that if we cut our meat consumption, we can make a huge difference in terms of environmental impact.
So can we, well, it depends whether we look at the signs or not. From an anecdotal point of view, it seems to make an awful lot of sense to an awful lot of people. But if we look at the science, data from the Department of Energy and Climate Change for 2016 now shows that UK meat and dairy production accounts for about 6% of our total UK carbon footprint on an annual basis.
So 94% comes from everything else. And this does include a proportion of our crops growing, crops grown, sorry, going into animal feed. So as I say, on a Monday, if you look on, you know, Facebook, Twitter, and the papers, there are all these ideas and tips and hints how to go meatless.
Don't eat dairy, go vegan for the day and in terms of meat free or meatless Mondays. Well, if we assume that we all did that, if everybody in the UK went meat and dairy free every Monday for a whole year, yes, it would cut our national carbon footprint. But because meat and dairy only account for about 6% of our annual carbon footprint, even if we all did it every Monday, our carbon footprint as a country would come down, but by less than 1%.
So we have to think about it on a better basis, on a way to cut carbon for everybody that doesn't just denigrate particular dietary choices. But unfortunately, as an industry, and these are the type of images that people like to trot out who are opposed to animal agriculture, we have an image problem. And I'm not defending any of the practises that we see here necessarily, except to point out that the picture at the bottom right, which looks very much like some kind of.
You know, prison almost, is of course the back of lots and lots and lots of car hatches. So it doesn't show that at the front, those cars have straw and water and food and room to move and interact and so on and so on. The one at the bottom right is a particularly good example of an image that looks really to be a big problem until we look at the actual front of the image, as it were.
But because all it takes is one farm to do something wrong, we see these images put forth over and over and over again from the anti-animal outgroups. And to be honest, it's not always helped by the food industry. I saw this picture in a shopping centre in Glasgow, this was back in August now.
And there's all these happy pictures, and if I do a bit more of a close up, there's this picture of this old poultry barn traced from farm to chicken. You have a picture of a hen in the middle at the top that doesn't look like any kind of broiler type pen that I've ever seen that appears to be outside. And this was all an advert for a new KFC restaurant.
Now KFC is fabulous and it tastes very nice, particularly if you've got a bit of a hangover, you know, it's wonderful stuff. But it's not what the consumer thinks of as kind of extensive natural free-range type systems. So when we use this very bucolic, touchy-feely happy in this imagery, and then people go, well, what chickens actually go into KFC?
Oh I see, factory type chickens or intensive factory farms type chickens, we don't do ourselves any good whatsoever. Now if we could talk to consumers. We see the same dichotomy that we see throughout food.
When we ask people, do you make the effort to buy sustainable products? If we just ask them, most people say yes, it's really important. So 2/3 of people say I would pay more for sustainable food.
But if we actually ask them as they come out of the grocery store and say so, did you buy them? 17% say yes, and we see the same pattern with people buying, let's say, battery eggs or organic meat, so on and so on. So what people say and what they do is often really quite different when we look at the data.
But what does seem to be clear on a global basis is that people don't have time. They can't read every single article, every single paper, every single bit of information. I have to admit I, I had a conversation.
With my mother yesterday and she says, well, milk has hormones, antibiotics from the feed that the farmers give the cows, and so that could make you ill. And I nearly hit the roof. You know, people see little bits of information and and they don't have the time to read and understand all the data or the lack of data behind that.
So this is a quote from a very good friend of mine. This was back almost about 10 years ago now. She's a lawyer and she has two kids who are now about 12 and 14, so back then they were about 2 and 4, highly educated, highly intelligent.
She said, I don't have time. I just want somebody to tell me what I should feed my family. And that's great, depending who you ask, because of course different sources of information will tell you different things.
And as people, to be honest, we're a little bit like sheep. We have all these biases that influence how we make decisions. So we have bad news bias, bounded rationality, confirmation bias, and cultural cognition, all of which I'll give you examples of in a minute.
If we begin with bad news bias, this is where we hear bad things, so we think they must be true because we hear them over and over again. And we are predisposed, unfortunately, to believe bad news, hence the phrase bad news sells. And the science shows that we need 5 pieces of positive information to outweigh 1 negative.
So we have this tweet on the left hand side from a lady who's worked very closely with the founder of Compassion in World Farming. She says, how about we stop squandering an antibiotics on farm animals? If we didn't rear animals on grotesque factory farms, then they wouldn't get so sick.
So we have here squandering antibiotics, we have grotesque factory farms, they wouldn't get so sick. Very emotive, powerful terms to show the animal agriculture industry in a very bad light without actually any data or numbers or citations there, but a very negative message. Well, this graph was part of a journal paper that came out back in 2016 now, and I really like it because quite honestly, it's a very good illustration of confirmation bias, I I think something is good or bad, therefore that colours my experience and thoughts about it in the future, but it also shows again how much like sheep we actually are.
So in this paper, they took identical samples of beef jerky, absolutely the same, same meat, same process, same packaging, everything was exactly the same. Apart from the ones with the green bars, they labelled as humane, and the ones with the yellow bars, they labelled as factory. And across the board when tasted by a consumer panel, the ones labelled factory, even though they were absolutely identical in taste, appearance, smell, etc.
Across the board, people thought they looked worse, they smelled worse, they tasted worse, and they had a lower level of enjoyment from them, simply because of the factory label on there. So terms like factory farm can be really damaging in. In that they actually make us think that what should be an independent assessment of how things taste turns it turns completely on its head.
So we've gone through bad news bias, we've gone from confirmation bias. The next one that I want to talk to is bounded. Rationality, and as I say, this is the, as far as I understand it type concept.
So I saw a headline, it said A was bad or B was good. I don't have the time to really research it, to really understand, and even if I did. You know, to most people, finding a paper from Journal of Animal Science or cord or anything else, they go, well, I understood the first two paragraphs, but after that I got a little bit lost.
You know, people don't have the time, they don't have the understanding, and that's absolutely not their fault. None of us have the time to research every decision that we make. But unfortunately, this is where the activist type groups have real power because they can make infographics.
So the one on the right hand side again comes from the anti-animal agriculture group and there's lots of data there, you know, data in the percent of beef, where they found. Bacteria, some were tainted with antibiotic resistant E. Coli, so on and so on, lots and lots and lots of data there.
Interestingly, all the data was from different sources and doesn't actually all come from the same place and doesn't actually all add up. But if you look at it, you basically go, wow, these bacteria cause millions of cases of food poisoning. Most animals seem to have it.
It's resistant to antibiotics. Oh my goodness, you know, we're all gonna die, eat some tofu quickly, you know, it, it is, it's, it's very, very, very clever, but it's also very dangerous to us as an industry. And I'm not going to.
Linger on the antibiotic issue because I'm sure that Gwen, who's talking later is going to do a fabulous job of talking about it. But I think it's really important to understand, particularly for most of us on the webinar who are involved either with animal agriculture or indeed with animal health. This was some data that came out of Eurobarometer two years ago now, 2016.
And they ask people, should sick animals be treated with antibiotics if this is the most appropriate treatment? Again, I should underline this is European data, not global data. But if we look at the bottom two segments of that pie chart, the 19% that agree and the 37% that tend to agree, that means 56% of the people asked.
This is a huge survey. 27,959 people said, yes, we should use antibiotics for animals if it is the most appropriate treatment. And that's in contrast to 75% who agreed in the UK.
So although antibiotics have been flagged and are being used as an argument against animal. Agriculture. It seems that generally people still understand, or at least agree to the extent that they say animal health is important, animal welfare is important, and these pharmaceuticals should be used for animals if it's the best choice.
So more confirmation bias here, and this is possibly my favourite infographic infographic ever. It's so, so, so clever. So again, this comes from a Vegan group, Simple Happy kitchen, and it's advertising almond milk.
Can I really have an issue with this? Almonds don't have mammary glands, you know, it's almond juice, plant-based juice, and honestly, I don't understand why if one was opposed to milk, one would want to drink anything labelled milk. But if we look here at this almond milk infographic, and if I just make one part of it a little bit bigger.
Two terms here. Almonds are not forcibly raped. Now I don't have the data on that.
I'm pretty sure that's true. You know, if anyone's tried to rape an almond, well, good luck to them, you know. But two issues with that.
OK, it's funny as it were, we don't rape farm animals. AI in cattle is not rape. Rape is incredibly serious, traumatic, I imagine painful.
I can see how it could be the most awful thing any person could ever endure. This should not be a term by which all the rape sufferers in the world are demeaned, as it were. By comparing a normal painless procedure in cattle to a very traumatic experience for people.
People who use the word rape for AI in cows, honestly, I, I really have very little time for that whatsoever. But if we look at the other one, almond milk is healthy and doesn't contain antibiotics and pus. Well, the healthy bit isn't unhealthy, so that's fine.
It doesn't contain antibiotics and pus. Well, no, again, it's, it's a plant-based juice, you know, we don't give antibiotics to almonds. But neither does the milk that we buy from the supermarket, or indeed the milk person contain antibiotics.
It's tested over and over again, and we have withdrawal periods in place to ensure that the milk from the UK and indeed all global dairy industries doesn't contain antibiotics. Does it contain puss? Well, all milk from any animal will of course contain white blood cells.
You know, it is, it's absolutely true, it's breast milk, cow's milk, you know, cat's milk, dog's milk. Is it? Well, if we want to talk about it in those terms, we can do, but again, this is using very emotive terms to try and turn the consumer away from dairy.
But why this is so clever is there are actually no claims. There about cows at all. This is all supposition.
This is, well, if we don't rape almonds, perhaps that is what people do to cows. And if almond milk doesn't have A, B, and C, perhaps cow's milk does. So again, very, very clever advertising.
But here, earlier on I talked about the carbon footprint, but we've actually got to look at it more, particularly when we compare to other types of beverage, for example, in terms of not just the carbon, but the nutrient density as well. I almost how much bang do you get for your carbon buck, as it were? So in this instance, it was a really nice paper.
It came out in 2010 now, they looked at different drinks. So they have milk, orange juice, soy drink, oat juice drink, red wine, etc. And in the first column, they looked at the nutrient density, either protein, the vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, etc.
In this instance, they didn't include energy. And you can see by that by the fact that beer at the bottom has a nutrient density value of 0. So milk looks pretty good, you know, 53.8 compared to orange juice at 17.2.
Red wine is even in there with a nutrient density of 1.2, presumably because of the antioxidants in it. And then in the right hand column, they looked at the greenhouse gas emissions.
In terms of grammes of carbon per gramme of products, so 99, so equivalent to about 1 kg of carbon per kilo of milk, that's about right. We've got soy drink at 61, water at at 1001, and that's because this is bottled trucked water as opposed to water from the tap. And then again, beer at tap.
So the ideal here is to have drinks that have the highest value overall when we have a ratio between the nutrients and the greenhouse gases. And when we look at it again, milk looks the best. In this instance, higher values are.
So yes, milk has a carbon footprint roughly equivalent in this instance to trucked water, but it gives us protein, vitamins, minerals, etc. Orange juice is OK. Soy is about the same as orange juice, oats drink, as you can see.
Almost as bad as soda, beer and water in terms of the nutrients. So it's not sufficient even just to look at carbon anymore, we've also got to look at what that food or that drink gives us. So coming on to the last bias here, and that's cultural cognition and, and as I say, believe me, I love sheep.
I did my PhD in sheep back now, you know, many years ago, sheep are fabulous, but we are rather like sheep in that we tend to follow the flock, as it were. So these are some Twitter numbers, they're a little bit out of date now because these are back from October 2017, but these were the number of followers in the big blue boxes various entities or groups had on Twitter. So DEFRA had 115.7 000 followers, the BBA at this time.
It's almost certainly far more now, had just under 17,000 followers. The BCBA, which is Cattle Veterinary Association at that point, only had 1000 followers, but that Twitter page, I believe, had only been set up about 4 months beforehand. So again, I believe they probably have far more now.
HDB Dairy, 8.6,000, the Food Standards Agency, 42.5,000, and Michael Gove, 37.8,000.
Now, I would like to think as a scientist, that if I had a question on, you know, cattle health, let's say I'd go to the experts, I'd go to vets, I'd go to farmers. But again, looking on Twitter, the people who have the most followers, not surprisingly, are the famous people. So here we have Jamie Oliver, 6.8 million, Nigella Lawson, 2.4 million, Paul McCartney, 3.5 million, and so on.
Now the reason I've chosen these particular people is they are potentially either positive or negative towards animal agriculture. For example, Paul McCartney has been a vegan for many years. He's the UK face of Meat Free Mondays.
Leonardo DiCaprio at the bottom left brought out a film, 1 or 2 years ago now saying that basically we shouldn't eat meat. Jamie Oliver has done some really positive things and some slightly negative things, which I'll talk about in just a second. Nigella Lawson, if she says put cream in your, you know, cakes, let's say 2.4 million people say, OK, that sounds like a good idea, you know, so we have a huge potential here, not just to reach out with information to the consumer.
But if we get these type of people on board with meat is good, dairy is good, they have a huge reach, they have huge influence. And obviously this is also where the activist groups tend to act as well. They get famous people on board and then use that.
Well, very quickly to move on to an initiative that, as I say, Jamie Oliver bought in just last year, and he has this Friday night feast programme and it's. Entertaining anyway, certainly. He posted the tweet on the left hand side with this beef, and yes, there's a lot of fat and that's that beef is particularly well marbled, it does look really, really nice.
And his plan was to put more fat onto cull dairy cows. Now, that's an amazing thing, you know, AHDB dairy and beef have been saying that for years and years. It's a good idea for any farmer.
But in this instance, coal dairy cows were retired and grazed on pasture for 4 years before they went for beef. And I looked at that and as I say, I, I'm a complete data nerd and I went 4 years before you slaughter them. That's really, really long time.
So I did the analysis and I ran the numbers. Yes, we can have one cull cow on grass, and in 4 years she's gonna eat just under 20,000 kg of dry matter grass. And when we slaughter her, she may have put on some fat, but bearing in mind most of the fat gets rendered into tallow, she's gonna have a carcass weight of about 345 kg, ie a dress weight.
On the other hand, on the same amount of dry matter grass, 19,856 kg, and over the same time, we can raise 5.15 beef steers. Basically from birth to slaughter.
And from those animals, we get 1,931 kg of carcass white, almost 6 times more than from one cull cow. So while from a kind of idyllic touchy feely point of view, retiring cows on to pasture for 4 years ticks. All the social acceptability boxes from a resource use point of view, it makes far more sense to put some beef steers on that land to grow them up into beef.
So we often have this conflict between what seems extensive and happy and actually doing good for the planet. As I say, on the Twitter picture earlier, I had an image of Joe Mala down at the right hand side, and he's an English rugby player. He broke his leg back last year now, and he credited the fact that 3 weeks later he was playing in the Six Nations to drinking 2 pints of milk per day.
Now I am the clumsiest person in the world. I've broken legs and arms. In none of them did I recover, even.
When I was far, far younger in less than 3 weeks, but we need this type of publicity. We need these types of articles out there every single day, particularly to the millions of young athletes and people out there who are in the gym, running 4 times a week. We have a huge potential to reach out to many people saying, you know what, meat and dairy, high quality protein, good for athletes and good for sport.
So what do we need to do? As I say, at the beginning, I said that sustainability was a balance between social acceptability and environmental responsibility and economic viability. The social aspect, as I think I've shown, has become the really crucial component, because if we don't have social acceptability in the future, we don't have a market and quite frankly, we don't have an industry.
So we need to go for the values in on the right hand side in green versus those on the left-hand side in red. We need to share our values. We need to show that we care about the animals, the community, and the planet.
We need to use realistic images of beef production, dairy, pork. Poultry, not the idealised life is good. We need to have clear, succinct answers, not on and on and on and on and on, and another thing.
Short, simple, let people ask questions that we can answer. Don't bore them with lots of technical detail. And we need to be transparent.
If we're transparent about what happens on farm, we can't have exposes and shock horror. This happens because we've been transparent, because people understand what we do. Most people, to be honest, don't have a fixed image of agriculture or of meat or of milk.
So they're the vast majority in the middle. We'll always have the very angry people on the left and the very happy people on the right, but we need to focus on those in the middle who just say, I don't really understand agriculture, tell me more. Help me to feel better about my dietary choices.
And ultimately, as I say, we've got to share our values. We have to share that we all care about all of these components. We do care about animal health and animal welfare.
We care about the environment, the social aspects, and everybody having safe, affordable food. And just to finish, I posted this picture on Facebook almost exactly 4 years ago now, because it was when my daughter was 2 months old. There's no data there, there's no numbers, no stats.
It simply says thanks to dairy farmers, my mummy gets enough calcium vitamins to make milk to feed me, plus, because I was a really useless heifer, formula for when I need a top up. I got milk. And this got shared by over 300 people in 24 hours.
Therefore, it was potentially seen by over 75,000 people in 24 hours because the average Facebook person at the time had about 250 friends. We have huge opportunities and huge reach to put out positive messages every single day to the consumer, and we really need to do that more. With that, thank you so much.
I think we have a few minutes for questions, very happy to answer anything at all. You have my email address here. There's a copy of this presentation as a PDF that second link down.
I'm on Twitter as Boy Diva. I apologise if you tweet and I don't get back to you soon, it's because I made the mistake of promoting a campaign called Febu Dairy, I F E B R U dairy. And some very angry people who don't like dairy have taken over and asked me a lot of rather nasty questions, but I will tweet back to you.
I'm on Instagram as Bobie Diva, and I have a blog at the bottom, which I should update more often than I do, but, life gets busy sometimes. So with that, thanks so much for listening and happy to answer any questions at all. Thank you very much, Jude.
It's good and again, absolutely fascinating and interesting topic, and one that is very much in the news at the moment. We do have, just a couple of minutes for some questions, if people do want to post questions. Can I ask that you put them through the, the Q&A section, rather than through the chat section, please?
Somebody has put, yeah, I'm going to drink more beer. So, somebody's gonna have some good, good weekend there. Just while we wait for the questions to come through, I just wanted to ask you, Duke, because often, you're, you're absolutely right.
I think that's have a role to play, no matter what species we're dealing with in the, in the education forum. And often, perhaps those in companion animal or you're at a dinner party, friends, family, etc. Will ask you what, what they should be doing, what they should be buying to sustainable.
I was just wondering if you had any sort of top three tips that vets can tell clients or friends, family, what, how they can be sustainable and, and perhaps do the right thing? Oh, good question. And again, it's difficult because everyone has a different image of this.
So for some, it means free range or organic or local, or cheapest or tastes the best. I think the first thing is define what you think it should be. Are you particularly concerned about animal welfare?
Do you particularly want to buy food with lower fertiliser use? There is no kind of right answer as to the definition. And then I know I said that people don't have time, but try to do the research, try to learn more and look beyond the 1st 10 links.
My mom, Googled up whether milk was good for you today. And there's link after link after link saying, no, don't drink it, it's bad, it's terrible, it's bad, it's terrible. But of course, from the anti dairy organisations, we do need to do.
Our research. And I know that sounds a bit of a cop out, but that's where we fall down, because all of us see a headline and go, oh, OK, dairy is good, or beef is bad or eggs are dangerous, you know? And we don't read further than that than that.
Now, having said that, animal welfare is a really big issue for almost all consumers, and I think, particularly as a vet community, we really need to be Promoting high animal welfare. And again, that doesn't mean particular systems, that doesn't just mean small farms, that doesn't just mean extensive, that doesn't just mean on pasture, but it means high welfare in all systems. And if we can help consumers to understand welfare and health is really important things, I think we'd be doing well.
Thank you. And, I think, you're absolutely right, and at, at BVA we've been looking at farm assurance schemes and, and actually our starting point was people need to make the ethical, their ethical choices first, and then look for the evidence because somebody's ethical choice may well be different than mine. Right, we're, getting some.
Questions in. Thanks for a really interesting webinar. Do you know if any dairy or beef industry bodies have graphic designers or social medias working, so that these things can go viral because we need to compete with animal rights groups of people's attentions.
It's a good question, actually. We, we concentrate, you know, broadly speaking, on the, the evidence and the research, but perhaps our communication isn't getting out there. I was wondering if you know of anybody, any groups that actually do this really well.
Yeah, that, that is a really good question, and I actually had this conversation with somebody yesterday as well, and it is nice to see that most of the organisations now have a social media person. I'm not entirely sure, and it makes me sad to say that so that I can think of an organisation that that really does good stuff. The FAO actually, which is of course global and has far more money than our national organisations, they have some really nice Infographics and tweets and things, but I, I rarely see things that really excite me and frankly, from a kind of budget point of view, that should be where we should be putting some of our resources because they, as they say, a picture.
Paints 1000 words, and it really does far more than lots and lots of text does. So yeah, great question. I wish we had some better examples of people doing good things.
Maybe that's a call for us all working in this industry that part of our our budget needs to go towards that. Another one coming in. Your thoughts, please, and what we should be doing with bull calves, particularly Jersey bull calves.
We'd like to sell them on for meat, but there's no market in the area. Is their growth rate, stroke, meat quality, stroke car cause weight really equivalent to a beef suckler calf, and is it a sustainable option? Great question.
I think, particularly from the social acceptability point of view, there's no doubt that it's not sustainable to knock them on the head. I mean, it just, it's just, it just isn't. Now, this is both anecdotal and biassed.
You will notice I've had some jersey pictures in the presentation. I've done quite a lot of work with jerseys. They take very nice pictures, or rather, if you take a photo of a jersey, they're very cute.
And I've heard from a lot of Jersey people that the meat is really, really good. Now that is anecdotal and of course, as I say, subject to a little bit of bias. I know at least one Jersey farmer, for example, who's who's crossing with, and I think it's Angus, Angus, Angus and Waggu to improve the carcass confirmation.
I believe he's not slaughtering any bull calves but has found some kind of market. I really think it has to be done, even if it means going to retailers or restaurants and saying, look, this is an issue, we don't want to be doing this practise that isn't good anymore. The beef is really good, you know, help us be more efficient because.
Every restaurant out there also cares about animal welfare, but they also care about both meat, meat quality and having a lower carbon footprint. So if every bull calf can be reared, I think that is eminently sustainable. As you say, it, it isn't easy, but we need to find ways to do it.
Great. Thank you very much, Jude. Again, some good questions coming in, and I think it's, a lot of us, and it's just showing that actually out there, we need to be getting some of this evidence across and putting the case for animal agriculture.
We've run out of time for questions now, but, as Judith said, all her details are up there, and I believe that the webinar will be available, through the webinar vet after the congress.
