Thursday, March 28, 2024

PULPIT: Milk produced in lose-lose cycle

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Cow urine is what’s causing our nitrogen leaching problems.
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That learned find was announced several years ago, which, of course, took the pressure off farmers to find ways to reduce the nitrogen with which their systems were polluting our waterways.

Since then we’ve read endless articles about how cow pee dumps nitrogen on the ground at 1000 times higher concentration than anything else.

Very little has been heard about how this concentration might be reduced.

And then I read a media release from AgResearch about the great new gadgets to hang on cow tails with sensors that can tell how much nitrogen is in the urine at different times. 

Another article in Dairy Exporter had CRV Ambreed saying it is breeding bulls producing lower nitrogen and also telling farmers they can calculate the nitrogen figure in milk and in urine by using that MU figure that now appears on all the milk dockets.

What didn’t appear in either article was a mention of the fact that what the cows had been eating had any impact on what was coming out of the udders or in the urine.

AgResearch said the sensors hadn’t actually been designed to measure MU but that their measurements to date had noted a diurnal difference in what was appearing.

During the night, with no sun, the amount of sugar in pasture plants drops considerably and the amount of crude protein rises.

Now, since 1959 scientists have known that crude protein is actually an ensemble of diverse organic combinations of nitrogen and later research has shown most of it to be nitrate.  

So, the morning pasture produces huge amounts of ammonia and lots of rumbly tums and more goes into MU and more into urine.

Later in the day the sun raises the sugar levels in pasture and things return to more peaceful times and lower nitrogen levels.

From material supplied by Open Country Dairy in its monthly reports, levels can range from 11 to 51 in any one day.

Fonterra and DairyNZ have decided not to make things too scary or clear so they have opted to calculate the MU levels on the dockets on a three- day rolling average, which can regularly produce a figure of 30 or so.

OCD initially looked at that system but then decided it gave farmers no idea of what effect different feeds would be have on their MU so it gives daily results, which allow its clients to see what changes, such as introducing millet into the diet, grazing the effluent paddock or having too short a round to allow the last spreading of urea to stop affecting grass levels, can have.

Now, our dairy companies produce a lot of baby formula from their milk.

It has been found products from other countries, where cows are on feedlots and eat carefully mixed rations, have much lower levels of MU. 

To match our products to theirs, when MU levels here are high the plants add imported lactose to the product to increase the sugar/protein ratio.

To date farmers are not getting any higher price for their milk if the MU levels are low so buying molasses or other sugars to rev up the sugar bugs in the rumen is just an added cost, as is the cost of the lactose to the milk plants.  

Sounds like lose/lose to me.

DairyNZ is doing much-touted work with different pasture plants such as plantain and even plant mixtures.

But nobody is suggesting the 800,000 tonnes of urea now being spread each year to grow enough pasture might be the basic cause. 

Nor is anyone, seemingly, noting that it is becoming accepted that 10-15t/ha of pasture growth is adequate to make a profit when in the 1980s MAF figures showed 15-18t/ha was the average growth, anywhere in Waikato at least.

So, more urea, less pasture, more dirty water and continuing carbon reductions from a lack of humus.

Recently I bought a book published in 1962 by renowned British food scientist Magnus Pyke called The Science Myth, in which he debunks a number of aspects of what he calls the Technological Age.  

By this, man has been encouraged to conform to a unanimity of ideas, expressed in skilfully psychological advertising and mass production of foods, machinery and attitudes to work.  

I can but guess that the selling of chemical fertilisers and the rubbishing of Nature’s creatures and systems has had a fair degree of success 55 years later.

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