Beef and dairy cattle have been demonised by many as one of the main causes of increased green house gas emissions but nothing could be further from the truth according to Ffinlo Costain, who believes the cow could be the answer to the climate change emergency.
Mr Costain, chief executive of Farmwel and founder of the Food and Global Security Network, says the world faces two concurrent crises in nature – climate change and loss of biodiversity with both threatening the availability of food and water whilst also endangering global supply chains.
"Human access to affordable nutrition and potable water are critical in maintaining peace and security. Global warming, biodiversity loss, food and water – they are connected, above all else, by soil health," said Mr Costain who has worked in politics and with non government organisations for 25 years.
He added that soil health directly impacts a society’s resilience to extreme weather events, such as drought and flooding. Good soil management helps to ensure safe, continuous access to fresh water, and reduces the likelihood of population displacement due to the flooding of homes and population centres.
The old approach to food security he said, based around volume, supply and calorific intake, has to change due to its devastating impacts on the environment, rural resilience, and animal health and welfare.
"Farm systems focused primarily on volume, or volume and emissions reduction, should be considered wasteful as they fail to unlock the ecological potential of the livestock they are rearing, while at the same time loading ecological debt onto the world around them.
"Healthy ecology: rich functioning natural capital, integrated with food and fibre production – is an efficient system, with a cascade of components that can be monetised by farmers, rather than just one. These are the systems that company contracts are already beginning to demand – and these are the systems that the public and the natural capital market place are prepared to reward."
Bill Gates and lab-produced protein
According to Mr Constain, there is the industrialised, land sparing, emissions-centric future promoted by Bill Gates and George Monbiot – with lab-produced protein, cellular meat, and with farming squeezed into ever smaller parcels of land.
In this future, he said land is divided up to deliver conifer forests, clothing fibres and hyper-rewilding units. Such industrialisation would rely on human-edible food produced in what’s left over, with corporate-owned food factories replacing farms to grow petri-dish protein for the masses, with little if any space left for grazing cows.
As a result, the cow becomes the villain by emissions-centric life cycle analyses – which are obsessed-over by many scientists and by the policy-makers and mainstream media that follow them.
On a much more optimistic note there is the situation where the cow is the hero/heroine, where food is produced in partnership with nature, rather than despite it and where land delivers multiple outcomes – food, fibre, forestry and natural capital together. In this scenario, nations become more independent and resilient. They achieve ecological security and ecological efficiency and begin to turn back the most dangerous aspects of an accelerating climate crisis.
Hence, the grazing cow – ideally reared in adaptive multi-paddock systems – is the hero; the beating heart of that multi-function land use, that enables continual regeneration.
Regenerative agriculture
At the heart of the regenerative future, is the knowledge that climate change is only part of the ecological crisis. However, a regenerative future cannot address the climate emergency while continuing to burn the fossil fuels that have previously enabled industries to thrive and grow. Instead, it envisions a new world that thrives on diversity, innovation, localism and community.
"This is not about going back to the 1970s – it’s about reconnecting with nature and applying the knowledge, data, science and monitoring technology we have now to create the sweet spot that delivers excellent productivity for the farmer and for nature.
"Climate change is driving and driven by desertification and poor soil health. Fossil fuels have to be eliminated from farm systems, but we must accept that a significant level of warming is now baked into the system and adapt to cope with the extreme weather that may come every season and every year," said Mr Constain
"If we see a 1.5 and then a 2-degree average rise in global temperatures, we should expect to see substantial disruption to harvests and to global food supply chains.
Climate crisis impacts
"The climate crisis – that we’re only just beginning to experience – is already affecting global food production, forcing migration and fuelling violence and terrorism. These impacts will only increase. This strain on global food supply chains and international trading relationships will lead to greater national protectionism, military adventurism, conflict arising from migration, rapid price rises and supply chain instability."
Instead he stressed that more emphasis has to be placed on soil health and regeneration to bolster food security on a worldwide scale.
He added that a cow in a regenerative adaptive multi-paddock system eats herbs and legumes and leaves which it transforms into compost within a matter of hours to come out of its back end, fall on the ground and gets trampled into the ground by other animals. This in turn moves the nutrients around and into the soil.
The cow and her herd mates in an adaptive multi-paddock system – after three or four days of pretty concerted grazing – are moved on to another paddock don't return to the paddock for three or four months during which time the ground is left to rest and recover.
Such nutrients in the soil make the sward grow taller which makes the roots grow deeper – breaking up the earth and creating life beneath the ground.
"This high-functioning grassland, stimulated by regenerative managed cows, is astonishing stuff. Now, when it rains, all that tall grass slows the flow of the rainfall towards the ground.
Hydroxyl ions
This grassland, because its sward, its biomass is greater, delivers faster transpiration – the transfer of water from liquid into gas – and this transpiration produces hydroxyl ions, which are the laundry process of the sky.
Mr Costain said: "High-functioning grassland can produce many, many times the hydroxyl clean-up capacity needed to break down the biological methane that our regenerative grazing cows have been producing but these hydroxyls also clean and filter other pollutants and gases, such as particulate carbon and carbon monoxide, from the atmosphere as well.
Soils in the ground
He pointed out that this high-performing pasture stimulated by grazing cows protects the soil when the sun shines as the ground is so well covered that the earth inside the sward stays at about 20 degrees C even in a heatwave. Furthermore, because the ground is cooler – it re-radiates much less heat back out into the atmosphere. Hence by keeping the earth covered well, the cow has delivered a cooling effect.
Dunging and trampling of the herd unlocks nutrients and other processes in the soil. Seeds that may have been dormant for decades are newly awakened. The sward becomes more diverse, growing dozens of different plants, which attract a greater diversity of insects… more butterflies and bees… and then more birds… Life attracts life, biodiversity thrives and cascades upwards through the soil, and outwards across the fields and hedgerows.
Because the sward is tall, the roots go deep – penetrating the earth – and as these roots thrive and die and thrive again, they create millions of tiny pathways. Mycorrhizal fungi spreads – arthropods and bacteria work away below ground creating invisible cities – bustling and bursting with ecology – and all this leads to a great acceleration in the production of soil organic matter as these creatures live out their life cycles, predating on each other, excreting, reproducing, moving, tunnelling deep and shallow beneath the earth’s surface. Nature’s complexity and resilience is gradually restored.
Sequestration
"As soil organic matter grows – as the sward’s biomass builds – this captures carbon from the air, and then sequesters it, locking it inside the ground. All these processes – because of the cow. Our cow… an ecosystem engineer… helps to tie nature’s processes back together."
While such practices would reduce yields, the environmentalist said profit is more important than production.
"Regenerative farmers have been able to slash input costs, adapt herd genetics and deliver highly robust, healthy animals that boost farm profitability. While the food yield is lower than in highly industrialised systems, it’s usually comparable and often better than the yield in conventional seasonal systems.
"The world already produces more than enough food for 10bn people – but we waste so much of it. A third is simply thrown away – and then if you factor in obesity and over weightness as unnecessary calorie consumption – often linked to the over-consumption of ultra-processed foods – then around half of all food produced on the planet is wasted."
He said that breeding is as important to regenerative agriculture as it is to mainstream farming – but regenerative outcomes and values are different.
"Instead of low methane cows, rapid growth and high production – regenerative farmers look for resilience, intelligence, good nurturing and mothering skills. They need stock that are easy to handle, are robust and healthy, can self-medicate from diverse leys and hedgerows. They need cows that can thrive on rougher forage and in out wintering systems – smaller-framed animals that produce lower volume but higher nutritional quality and remarkable natural capital functioning."
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