Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Dairy industry is creating a super cow

Walt Moore’s 850 cows lounge on beds of soft sand. They are cooled by spritzes of water and breezes generated by fans. They eat a custom-blended diet of gourmet grains that a computer tells Moore will suit them best. Moore orders sophisticated analyses of their rations and manure, getting the results on his iPhone, synced to his watch. Each cow wears a collar with a computer chip that keeps track of her milk production, nearly four times that of the cows his father once tended, not to mention those his great-grandfather started the family farm with in 1909. Moore’s Chester County, Pa., farm is so markedly different from the operation he took over from his father, Bill, that the elder Moore jokes: “Oh, my goodness, I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to learn how to farm or not.” All this is not so much to coddle the cows as it is to make them better citizens of the planet. Cows have long been castigated for their methane-belching, manure-producing ways, one of agriculture’s top contributors to climate change...After analyzing the dairy production chain, farm to fridge—or, as some like to say, grass to glass—they zeroed in on the cow’s gut, launching a massive effort involving farms and universities. They call it the Cow of the Future project. The aim is a super-cow, a star athlete of the bovine world that produces far less methane and, while she’s at it, far more milk. “We want it to be more productive. We want it to be healthier. We want it to be a problem-free cow,” said Juan Tricarico, director of the project...As of 2007, the nation had about a third of the dairy cows it had in 1944, yet they produced more than half again as much milk. And they did it using 90 percent less cropland and 65 percent less water. They also made 75 percent less manure and 63 percent less emissions, a Cornell University study found. There’s still room for improvement...more

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