The take home messages for me were that it is not just the organic movement that talks about cover crops, soil organic matters, mob grazing and that the pastoral farming group are alive and growing with increasing demand for high quality grass fed beef which is not confined to London. Three interesting case studies from micro dairies show that it is possible for new entrants to get into the dairy sector as long as one is prepared to process the milk and sell it directly to the consumer. Even with less than 15 cows, a fair living can be made.
The Organic Producers Conference provided it usual mix of heavy weight speakers and farmer led workshops under the Banner of “Intensive Sustainability or Sustainable Intensification”. Professor Godrey (of the Foresight Report fame) got the meeting off to a start by admitting that he did not know what Sustainable Intensification looked like and that it certainly did not mean more of the same for the conventional sector. About the only thing the audience agreed upon was that getting more from the same level of non-renewable resources was not a solution and that the organic movement should continue to work on improving its outputs. When one looked at the amount of human useable food produced from mixed organic systems, then organic farming was fairly comparable with the mono cultural conventional sectors and the continued highlighting of the external costs associated with a lot of the conventional sector was important.
An interesting paper by Richard Young highlighted the cost of antibiotic resistance to the Health Service as calculated by the Government at £10bn per year. Whilst inappropriate and over administration of antibiotics was the major cause, it was calculated that agricultural use of antibiotics accounts for 10% (£1bn/year) of this cost. This was mainly from campylobacter from the intensive pig and poultry sectors, but the dairy sector does not escape entirely. The feeding of milk from cows treated with antibiotics to calves is a major issue which not only risks human health but also compromises the immune system of the calves. This raises an interesting problem of how do you ensure calves get all the colostrum they require if you are treating the whole herd with dry cow therapy.
Whilst a small number of conventional producers have reduced their dry cow therapy by not treating those cows with no history of cell count problems, I am unaware of any of these producers freezing the resulting colostrum and then using that to feed other calves. In the same meeting an interesting discussion was had about the effects of pasteurisation on the nutritional quality of milk for calves. Whilst not a widespread activity, there are a number of producers who are pasteurising colostrum as a means of reducing the risk of transmitting Johnnes disease. This might be bit of an own goal if the resulting milk has had all the antibodies destroyed and the immune system of the calf does not develop properly.