France's butter shortage due to climate change?

butter
fat
shortages
climatechange

(Cheryl Meyers) #1

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The Great Butter Meltdown
By ELAINE KHOSROVA
NOV. 21, 2017

In recent weeks, supermarket shelves in parts of France have been bereft of the butter that sustains French cooking and baking, not to mention the quintessential Gallic pleasure of a baguette au beurre. Empty food shelves are a pitiable sight anywhere, but a butter shortage shakes the foundation of France’s cultural identity.

A miraculous ingredient that can emulsify a velvety sauce, spread luxuriously between gâteau layers, or build the delicate flour-fat scaffolding of mille-feuille pastry, butter has not only fed the French appetite for centuries, but also fueled its gastronomic invention. In France, butter is a birthright.

What’s behind the shortage? Some analysts are blaming consumers since, not surprisingly, warnings of an impending shortfall and rising prices caused a run on butter in the stores, particularly in the north and west of France. “Like everyone else, I rushed to stock up,” Armelle Boucheron, a journalist who lives just outside Paris, told me. “Which is why the shelves were suddenly empty.”

Ms. Boucheron said that the butter section at her supermarket last month was about half-full and that the shortage was mostly affecting the big industrial brands. This month, her neighborhood cheesemonger said prices for the artisan butter he sells were up by 40 percent.

Even if supermarket supplies do begin to stabilize, the French will probably pay dearly. With increasing global demand for butter, prices have soared, rising to nearly $8,000 a ton in September of this year from roughly $2,800 in April 2016.

For their part, consumers put the blame for the shortage on suppliers that, lured by higher profits in the global butter market, are not honoring their contracts with domestic retailers. “It’s just manipulation by the suppliers,” complained Dany Pichard, a retiree in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in Provence.

In their turn, butter makers and suppliers are calling on farmers to increase their dairy herds to meet demand. But Magda Tjerks, who operates a farm with her husband in the Hautes-Pyrénées region of southwestern France, says that’s impossible because the higher profits in the butter trade are not being passed to farmers who provide the cream for making butter. “Farmers don’t have the money for cows,” she said. “And even if they did, they have no guarantee of getting a higher price for their milk.”

With all this finger-pointing, it would be easy to conclude that the shortage is a result of price wars and milk shortages created by dairy industry maneuvers, including the slaughter of more than a million cows in Europe last year when milk prices bottomed out.

But look below this surface explanation and you find another more intractable — and universal — trigger for the dairy shortfall: climate change. France may be the casualty now, but all butter-loving countries are vulnerable to the climate catastrophes that can wreak havoc on the supply and quality of crops needed to feed milk-making animals.

Last summer’s heat waves devastated France’s grass-fed dairy regions. Given less and poorer-quality grass, the cows made less milk, and that milk’s fat content also declined, making less raw material available for butter making. According to Laura Hernandez, an animal lactation expert at the University of Wisconsin, heat stress, caused by the prolonged high summer temperatures associated with climate change, suppresses a cow’s appetite, causing it to eat less and give less milk.

At the same time high heat and droughts were plaguing European dairy lands, in Australia and New Zealand, where herds typically would have filled the milk gap, sizzling weather lingered. In short, climate change created perfect conditions for a meltdown in butter production.

Modern dairy farmers face the problem of climate change from both sides: as victim and perpetrator. Of course this is true for all of us to varying degrees, but for those who operate large dairy farms the paradox is built into their business model. That’s because cows need crops or grass to feed on, yet are four-legged factories of the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, which endanger those crops by raising global temperatures. Moreover, conventional dairy farms rely on shipped-in animal feed, such as corn and alfalfa, which is produced using tons of pesticides and fertilizers and transported using carbon-polluting fossil fuels.

So when industry experts declare, as they have in Europe, that the way to restore butter market stability is simply to add more cows, they’re not connecting all the dots. Their solution may seem logical, but it’s not ecological. Without reducing the contribution of conventional dairy farming to climate catastrophes, the industry helps promote more of the same.

To be clear, the entire agricultural world, not just dairy farms, plays a role in global warming through its vast fossil-fuel-fed transportation network, high energy consumption, and use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But while livestock production accounts for just 4.2 percent of American greenhouse gas emissions, its effect on climate change can be disproportionately higher: methane, one of the gases that livestock produce in the normal course of digestion, is more than 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

So most efforts by the dairy industry at reducing greenhouse gas emissions aim at methane. According to Michel Wattiaux, professor of dairy systems management at the University of Wisconsin, there have been encouraging results in Europe and Canada in efforts to reduce cows’ production of methane through nutrition, though the search for a long-term, cost-effective strategy has been elusive.

Professor Wattiaux’s colleague Dan Schaefer says an experimental chemical additive in feed reduced methane emissions by 30 percent in test cows without any apparent harm to the animals or their milk production.

In the United States, the dairy industry is “focused on breeding dairy cows that produce the same amount of milk, or more, using less feed,” Professor Wattiaux said. This approach is not without controversy: Intensive genetic selection to breed today’s mega-yielding milk cows has reduced their fertility and made calving more difficult.

As the dairy world continues to work toward making production more environmentally friendly, butter lovers can do their part. Steffen Schneider, head of the Institute for Mindful Agriculture in the Hudson Valley, and a farmer who managed the biodynamic Hawthorne Valley Farm for more than 20 years, suggests that consumers choose dairy products from sustainable sources. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of trustees for Hawthorne Valley Farm.)

“Farms that keep grass-fed livestock in numbers that reflect the carrying capacity of the land base help mitigate the effect of dairy on climate change,” he said. What’s more, he added, fertilizing with composted manure from such cows instead of manufactured fertilizer “sequesters” carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere.

In choosing an eco-healthier butter, you’ll pay more than for a conventional brand. But in the big picture of dairy desires versus climate care, a steady supply of butter in the future is liable to cost us one way or the other.

Elaine Khosrova is the author of “Butter: A Rich History.”


(Ronald Weaver) #2

I’m glad I wasn’t around in the Mesozoic Era. Can you imagine the amount of farting done by 100 tonne dinosaurs ? Thank goodness they were wiped out…probably by their own bottoms.
But todays cows, surely we shouldn’t be feeding them chemicals to stop them farting. They’re not the smartest of animals but they’re not dumb. I think it would help save the world if farmers just concentrated on teaching cows good manners. Promiscuous farting is not at all polite, if we don’t do it, neither should well brought up cows !


(Richard Hanson) #3

Butter Shortage? Sad.

Now a true tragedy is that this year Saint-Émilion got hammered by hale so likely no 2017 Château de Valandraud. Mrs. Hanson will not be happy so I bought her a few more 2016 futures which are going to be excellent sometime around 2028. Domestic bliss requires a bit of foresight and more then a dribble of decent wine.

Keto for Life!

Richard


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #4

On the other hand, if they were eating a well-formulated ketogenic diet, as seems likely, then they probably weren’t generating much gas. I certainly generate a lot less since I went keto!


(Ronald Weaver) #5

Apart from being somewhat facetious about the original article, which by the way, has been in more or less all of the editorials in our local press…food for thought, that perhaps a tame journalist might shed some light on ?, I was most likely thinking about gangs of Argentinosauruses roaming around. These buggers got to 100 tons and were totaly vegetatian. Although I suppose while they were devouring whole forests for an aperitif they wouldn’t actually be spitting out any tree dwelling animals that were there. You know that there is a theory that the largest Pterosaurs would actually fly right round the world ? My theory is that these poor birdbrains were actually caught in the blast of a Argentinosaurus group fart-in and fired straight into the stratosphere.


(Ronald Weaver) #6

Good thinking ! Life’s too short to be drinking crap wine.

Sante !


(bulkbiker) #7

Interesting article but having lived in France for a few years and having eaten quite a lot there! I wonder where the “baguette au buerre” idea comes from?
I have never ever once been offered butter with bread in any restaurant in France and if you ask for it then you get that Gallic look heavenwards as if to so “Mon dieu un autre Rosbif”


(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #8

I wonder how much of a difference in methane and carbon dioxide levels it would make if we stopped dairy farming. It’s not the cows producing the methane, it’s bacteria in their gut and those bacteria are everywhere else too. So if the methane isn’t being produced in the cows’ guts it’s produced outside of it when the cellulose they would otherwise eat rots.

The carbon cows produce is already part of the carbon cycle. It’s taken up from the air by plants, eaten by animals and microbes and farted back into the air. The carbon releases this way is not a problem because it’s only going to add as much carbon to the air as was pulled out. The problem is the carbon we’re digging out of the ground where it’s been lying inert for hundreds of millions of years.

Methane breaks down fairly easy into carbon dioxide, so while it is a stronger greenhouse gas there’s also much less of it. Despite increased cattle farming the increase in atmospheric methane levels have slowed down and the current level is stable. The slowing down is pretty clearly connected to better processing of gas byproducts in oil extraction.


(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #9

They omitted to mention in the article that the reason cows produce so much methane is that these days they are mostly fed grain, when they evolved to eat grass. I assume the same is true of their gut bacteria, as well. The simplest solution, and one which would solve a lot of the other ecological problems of factory farming, would be to return to local agriculture, in which the cows fertilize the fields in which they graze, meaning that (a) they are eating grass, (b) no grain needs to be shipped to them, thus saving on fuel and related air pollution, © they fertilize the field as they graze, thus eliminating the need for manufactured fertilizer and the need to ship it all over the place, and also (d) eliminating the need to deal with the mass quantities of manure that factory farms produce.

But that makes too much sense. Instead, researchers are looking for ways to reduce the bovine production of methane by trying to get the cows to consume ammonia.


(Jacob Wagner) #10

Where did anyone ever get the idea that cows should eat corn and grains.

Here is a fact for you:

Anything a human can eat is not what a cow’s digestive system was created for.

–Jacob


(Sjur Gjøstein Karevoll) #11

Cows that eat grain actually produce less methane than cows that eat grass. This is because methane is produced when cellulose is broken down, and grain has much less cellulose and much more starch than grass, which is why it’s so energy dense which again is why it’s used so much in all types of agriculture. Cellulose can only be broken down by certain species of bacteria and the process inevitably produces methane.

I absolutely agree that industrial farming needs to change. Today’s practice of mono-cropping and turning meat production into a secondary sector industry is not good for the environment, not good for our health and not good for the animals’ welfare. I think we should be looking towards older more holistic systems of farming to solve those issues, and I think that modern digital technology enables us to do so and still maintain productivity that’s similar to the industrial method. However, reduced methane emissions is not an argument you could use in that regard. Nor is it an argument against increased cattle production either, because it really has very little effect on atmospheric levels.