Saturday 23 February 2019

ABC : What milk should we be drinking for the planet?


Soy, almond, cow's, none? What milk should we be drinking for the planet?

By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
                                    
Have you ever looked at an almond-milk latte and just thought: "Why?"

Dairy milk produces more emissions on the farm
Water and transport costs for alternatives should be factored in
Diversity of food sources reduces strain on individual resources
Why trade the smooth, creamy, protein-rich bounty of a cow's mammary glands for nut water?
For some, intolerance to lactose or certain proteins means avoiding dairy milk is a dietary necessity.
For others, it's an ethical choice aimed at easing the subjugation and suffering of animals.
But increasingly, avoiding dairy is seen as a way to reduce our dietary impact on the environment.
After all, cattle belch methane, and land-clearing for grazing is one of the biggest drivers of deforestation globally.

So, is it time we all we all made the switch to a milk alternative like almond or soy, or is there a dark horse — or camel — on the horizon?

Soybeans don't burp, but they do linger

Research from the University of Wisconsin last year analysed the comparative energy costs of dairy milk, and soy and almond milk substitutes.

They looked at the entire life cycle of each product, from production on a farm, through transport to market, and time spent on the supermarket shelf.

For their source farms, they picked the biggest dairy, almond and soy producing regions in the US: Wisconsin, California and Illinois respectively.

And for their retail outlet, they chose a supermarket in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, dairy milk faired poorly in the "cradle-to-gate" phase — as in, before the product made it off the farm.

had higher greenhouse-gas emissions than almonds and soy, and cows caused more eutrophication — the runoff of nutrients into waterways that contribute to algal blooms like those responsible for the mass fish deaths at Menindee recently.

But by the time consumers were plucking their preferred cereal salve from the supermarket shelf, those carbon footprints had been turned on their heads.

00 kilometres to the supermarket in Chicago.

The supermarket was running its refrigeration on Chicago's electricity grid, with a mix of 74 per cent coal, 20 per cent nuclear.

Dairy milk spent an average 2.6 days in the supermarket fridge, compared with 5.9 and 7.8 days for fresh almond and fresh soy respectively.

After fossil fuel costs were calculated for the longer distance to market and longer refrigeration time, both soy and almond drinks had a higher global warming potential than the dairy, according to researcher Courtney Grant.
"It's important to consider the full life-cycle of a product when evaluating its environmental impacts," she said.
"I was surprised to see that the transportation of the products had such a large influence on the results."
OK, back up - some clarifications are needed here.

Now, this is one very specific study and is not representative of all markets and market parameters.
Also, the emissions from the soy and almond products don't come from the crops themselves.

This study is probably more an indictment on fossil-fuel-dependent transportation and electricity systems than soy- or almond-based products.

But it does highlight the complexity of our food production systems, and the danger of making assumptions and generalisations when it comes to buying environmentally friendly products.
An environmentally friendly option in one location, may be the exact opposite in another, according to sustainability researcher Michalis Hadjikakou from Deakin University.

"Every country is unique, every continent is unique, and the thing [we] find very hard to understand is that, even if you look at one thing in isolation like milk, you can have very, very different degrees of efficiency of production," he said.

But, if you grab a carton of dairy, almond and soy milk at random off the shelf in Australia, chances are the latter will have significantly smaller carbon footprints than the cow juice.


According to the Water Footprint Network, it takes roughly 3,400 litres of water to produce a kilogram of rice, and about 4,142 litres of water for a kilogram of almonds.

That doesn't translate exactly to almond milk, as almond milk often contains as little as 3 per cent almonds.

But the point is, almonds like water. They also like warm weather.

As the world's appetite for almonds has grown, California has taken up the brunt of production, doubling its land area devoted to almond growing in 20 years.

While it has the reliable warm weather, the region's water supply is less predictable.

In 2014, California was experiencing one of its worst droughts on record. Snowmelt-fed rivers normally used to irrigate crops were running on empty.

To get water, large-scale irrigators were locked in an arms race. Multinational farming companies were dropping bores into groundwater reserves, emptying aquifers faster than they were being replenished.

As far back as 2011, researchers were warning that the water reserves under California's Central Valley were being rapidly depleted by irrigators with "potentially dire consequences for the economic and food security of the United States".

Almond crops certainly weren't solely to blame, but California's tug-of-war between environmental flows and crop irrigation mirror Australia's own recent struggles.

Almonds here are grown almost exclusively on the mid and lower reaches of the Murray River.
Soy on the other hand is grown up and down the east coast, and in limited parts of the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia.

he best alternative to cow's milk from a nutrition perspective.

According to Roy Morgan data from 2016, about 5 per cent of Australians had consumed at least one soy drink in a given seven-day period that year.

That's versus our daily dairy milk consumption of around a quarter of a litre per person every day.
Soy production would need to be massively ramped up to plug that gap.

According to The Lancet's Planetary Diet, the optimal daily dairy target for planetary and human health is 250 grams. Australians consume about 350 grams per day now, according to Dairy Australia.

Both soy and almond can undoubtedly play a role in replacing some of our dairy excesses.
But, especially as climate change makes rainfall and temperatures more erratic, we'll want more options to feed ourselves, not fewer.

Diversifying the products we consume stops us from hammering one particular resource or growing region to meet demand, according to Dr Hadjikakou.

"When you're eating a more flexitarian diet with a reduced percentage of animal products and diversified around different plant based proteins and some animal protein, you're spreading out the impact," he said.

So, in the interests of diversity, what do climate-change resistance, milk and vodka have in common?
The future: one hump or two?

Have you ever looked at a camel-milk latte and just thought: "Why?"

No. Probably not. But it may soon be coming to a cafe near you.

Camels are adapted to arid conditions and are capable of converting dry, nutrient-poor feed into energy.

In a practical sense, that means they can be grazed on more marginal pasture, and may show resilience in the face of climate change.

And many farms including Summerland Camels in southeast Queensland catch wild camels, meaning they're taking pests out of the environment, according to its director Paul Martin.

"We catch them in the wild, train them and domesticate them to become dairy animals," he said.
There's also some evidence that camels aren't as methane heavy as cows.

A small study in 2014 analysed the emissions from five Bactrian (two-humped) camels, five alpacas, and six llamas (both species of camelid).

While the camels produced the same amount of methane per unit of fibre as cows, when the data was standardised for body weight, the camels emitted around half the amount of methane over a 24-hour period.

That's because they consume smaller quantities of food and are more efficient at converting that to energy.

While camel's milk may be one in a smorgasbord of milk options we should embrace in future, it's not likely to be a big player.

Camels produce less than half the milk of a dairy cow, and Mr Martin says making camel's milk economically viable is a challenge.

But there is a silver lining. Camel dairies like Mr Martin's have been forced to experiment and diversify to be profitable.

Among the camel-milk-based products they've come up with are gelato, cheese, and vodka, made from whey.

Cheers to diversity.


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