(Originally published by Sentient Media in their Newsletter Series ‘100 Voices - Day 13, 17, 23’)

At any given moment, there are approximately 264 million dairy cows living on dairy farms around the world. Those cows produce an average of 600 million tons of milk for human consumption. To keep up with demand, industrialized dairy production requires large amounts of land and resources—while producing emissions like methane and carbon dioxide.*

To understand the scope of the environmental footprint we break down the issue using four maps to show impact on: Land use; water use; GHG emissions; and biodiversity loss.

Land use

Dairy production is land-use intensive, not necessarily in terms of housing the animals that the milk is derived from—they are often concentrated together in confined spaces because doing so is more profitable than allowing the animals to graze on pastures.

A great deal of land is needed, however, to produce feed for the animals to consume. And the conversion of land for feed production often contributes to deforestation.

A 2018 Science study found that every litre of cow’s milk uses 8.9 square meters of land per year, compared to 0.8 for oat, 0.7 for soy, 0.5 for almond, and 0.3 for rice milk.*

Water

There are two main impacts of dairy production on water: water use and water degradation. Just as the use of land to produce meat and dairy for human consumption is less efficient than using the land directly to produce crops for human consumption, the same can be true of the use of water.

Researchers who have conducted analyses of the water footprint of animal products conclude “The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value…  it is more water-efficient to obtain calories, protein and fat through crop products than animal products”. As with land use, most of the water use comes from the production of animal feed. 

To put it into numbers: production of cows' milk requires 13 times more water than oat milk, and it is estimated that 1 litre of cow's milk requires around 628 litres of water—some sources say it could even be over 1,000 litres of water. Meanwhile, producing 1 litre of oat milk requires only 48 litres of water. According to this estimate, BiH’s 2019 production of dairy (643 million litres) required over 400 billion litres of water.* 

Since milk consists of almost 87% water, water intake has a big impact on milk production in cows. High-yielding cows need more than 150 litres of freshwater per day. This amount can be even higher in warmer regions.*

Green House Gas Emission

Globally, while there have been reductions in GHG emissions per unit of production, absolute emissions levels increased approximately 18% from 2005 to 2015. During this same period, there has been a 14% increase in the number of cows in dairy production and a 15% increase in production per cow. The result is that the amount of milk produced globally increased by 30% across those ten years (FAO, 2019; also see Sharma, 2020).

The dairy sector, like other livestock sectors, faces a real challenge in trying to reduce its emissions (while trying not to worsen its other environmental impacts) because a lot of its emissions come from the physiological processes of the animals and therefore are inherent to producing animal-derived products. Digestion and manure in particular are responsible for a significant share of emissions in the livestock commodity chain.

Though there are fewer dairy cows than there are humans, dairy farms produce more waste than humans do.

Waste from a dairy farm of 2,500 cows has a similar waste load to a city of over 400,000 people. According to this estimate, the waste of one cow is equivalent to the waste of 165 people.*

Biodiversity Loss

Deforestation is not the only way that the dairy industry threatens biodiversity. The land that is converted to feed production attracts rodents, particularly because the crops grown are nutritious.

The dairy industry—like the industrial animal agriculture sector more generally—is linked to zoonotic illness transmission in a couple of other ways. First, working in close proximity with animals inherently increases the risk of zoonotic illness transmission. Second, because it contributes to deforestation, dairy production also facilitates closer contact between wildlife and people, which can contribute to zoonotic spillover. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, zoonotic illnesses can harm both humans and other animal species.

In conclusion, dairy is an extremely inefficient food source. Organic or otherwise, it takes 100 calories of cattle feed to produce just 40 calories of milk. It is simply inefficient and wasteful to funnel such vast amounts of resources into food that offers so little return on investment.**

Sentient Media’s ‘100 Voices’ Newsletter is a creation of their Social Media Fellowship program sponsored by VEGFUND.

*Sentient Media in their Newsletter Series ‘100 Voices - Day 13, 17, 23’

** https://switch4good.org/dairy-and-the-environment-faq/

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