Tomoko NumataDairy food production in Japan
In Japan, the consumption of red meat and dairy products has gradually increased over time as the diet has become westernized. At the same time, the consumption and production of rice, which is Japan’s traditional staple food, has decreased. Increasingly, too, feed for livestock has relied more and more on imports. Consequently, Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate, which stood at 72% in 1965, by 2020 had dropped to almost half, at 37%.
How dairy food production hurts the environment
Recently, milk and other dairy products have gained a reputation as major contributors to climate change due to the burden that their manufacture places on the environment. The meat, fish and dairy industries use up to 83% of the world’s farmland but provide only 37% of our protein and 18% of our calories. Greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy cattle industry increased by 18% between 2005 and 2015 due to greater demand for milk, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In 2015, those emissions reached more than 1,700 million tons of carbon dioxide, which was 3.4% of the global total. That’s roughly equivalent to the ratio of emissions caused by aviation and shipping combined.
Need for change by the industry, for the industry
While contributing to climate change, the dairy industry is also threatened by that change. A paper by Paola Guzmán-Luna and others spells out these threats: “the dairy sector will face opportunities but also threats such as significant cows’ heat stress, crop cultivation variability, on-farm water availability, cows’ diseases, crop pests’ pressure and product safety risk” in some regions. This will cause product loss and waste. Clearly, to protect itself, as well as the wider world, the sector needs to change its ways.
Increased sustainability of dairy production
Dairy production has been changing, and studies show that the dairy sector is more environmentally friendly than ever. It requires remarkably less resources than it did back in 1944. Compared with that era, modern dairy production needs just 21% of the animals (which leads us to wonder about animal welfare), 23% of the feed, 35% of the water, and 10% of the land to produce the same amount of milk. Dairy production waste has decreased significantly as well, with 24% of the manure, 43% of methane, and 56% of nitrous oxide per billion kilogram of milk compared with the same amount of milk produced 80 years ago. Moreover, the carbon footprint per billion kilogram of milk in 2007 was 37% of that in 1944.
However, despite these increases in production efficiency, because the total output of dairy goods is growing along with global demand, overall total GHG emissions keep increasing. That means that more needs to be done.
The Food and Agriculture Organization has some suggestions to make the sector more sustainable:
1) Continue to improve production efficiency and reduce the emissions intensity of milk
How? → The dairy sector needs to cut GHG emissions by improving farming practices and its use of technology
2) Adopt new production practices that protect carbon sinks, such as grasslands and forests
How? → Address factors driving the degradation of natural ecosystems, such as agricultural expansion and deforestation
3) Integrate livestock into the circular bio-economy
How? → Recycle and recover nutrients and energy from animal waste, or integrate livestock with crops and agro-industries to take advantage of low value and low-emission biomass.
Our choices directly affect our environmental footprint
While the dairy industry works to minimize its environmental footprint, what can we do as a consumer of the products? A growing awareness of climate change is leading to an increase in the number of people who are interested in shifting consumption from dairy goods to plant-based products. Plant-based milk has much less impact on the environment than cow’s milk. Rice milk, for instance, creates less than half the GHG emissions and requires 26 times less land than dairy milk.
OK. I can hear some of you complaining that plant-based drinks are not as rich in calcium as cow’s milk. I know. And it takes me back to my elementary school days, when my teachers all but forced pupils to drink the daily serving of milk in their school lunches, saying that it was essential for building strong bones. Dairy food is rich in calcium, but there are many alternative sources of calcium, including kale, okra, and even bread. Given that shifting to plant-based milk doesn’t have to hurt the healthy balance of your diet, which milk are you going to choose from now on?
