crossposted from unbossed
Let me see. How many ways has Monsanto used front groups, fake "astroturf" groups, and fake science to get people to (a) stop worrying about the effects of using rBST / rBGH / Posilac / recombinant bovine growth hormone to produce milk and (b) buy more milk produced? And now there's a new one that is a real hoot!
Did you know that injecting dairy cows with Monsanto's recombinant hormones will save the planet for global warming?
Well, if Monsanto says so and uses one of its bought and paid for "scientists" and a Monsanto chemist to do the "study", well, it must be true!
You can just imagine the Monsanto closed, smoke-filled meeting that led to this unbelievable claim.
OK, what are we gonna do to get more Posilac sold? That labeling fight hasn't gone so well. People in many states still have the right to know that rBST / rBGH / Posilac is not used in producing their milk.
Well, I think we ought to get on the enviro band wagon.
That'll be a tough, tough sell, won't it? I mean our products . . . well, sheesh, they are pretty hard on the environment, what with poisoning land and water, and all . . . Maybe we'd be better off not reminding people of that?
The public are sheep. All we have to do is gin up our army of Ag School scientists on our payroll and get a "study" or two claiming that our products are green. Then we issue press releases promoting our "studies" and then the lap dog media will just print whatever we claim.
I get it. How about this? We claim that Posilac produces more milk per cow, and that because it produces more milk per cow we must thus need fewer cows. Fewer cows less impact on the environment.
Inspired thinking!
Well, I am borrowing a bit from our revered Reagan who claimed that cow burps and farts created global warming.
And there you have it - Monsanto's new campaign for Posilac coming to a newspaper or blog near you.
I'm not certain that it happened exactly in this cynical way, so here is the real situation.
Background on Monsanto's Campaign for Posilac
Last year, in state after state, Monsanto - via its agents - set up stealth committees and demands for taking away our rights to know how our milk is produced. Most people are concerned about how their milk is produced. We care that the use of additives like rBST might result in milk that is not healthy for us, especially for children. We care that the use of rBST is harmful to the cows themselves, resulting, as it does in higher rates of udder infections (mastitis) that requires constantly dosing the cows with antibiotics, hoof injury, and other problems.
And that's just for starters.
But for months now, Monsanto has been coming up with ways to take away our right to know. This issue is quiet now because many state legislatures are on vacation, but it will certainly come back.
Monsanto's campaign this past year claimed that the public was confused by labels that told them that their milk was not produced with recombinant growth hormones. Those who use it have never wanted to boast that they do use it. They want it kept quiet. Nice of Monsanto to claim it cares about confusing us, but, come on! We weren't born in a barn, and most of us do want to know.
That campaign has fared well in some states, less well in others.
The new, improved, Monsanto campaign
So in preparation for the coming year's new push to silence critics, we have the new Monsanto campaign for why we must demand, insist, lobby for our dairy farmers to use Monsanto's Posilac in producing milk.
Did you know that using recombinant growth hormones, produced by Monsanto, will . . . save the planet by stopping global warming?
Yes, according to Monsanto - and according to the lap dog press stenographers (which here even includes science journals!) - this is true! Amazing! Too amazing to be true, you say?
Here is a "news" story about the study:
Carbon hoofprint: Cows supplemented with rbST reduce agriculture's environmental impact
Milk goes green: Cows that receive recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rbST) make more milk, all the while easing natural resource pressure and substantially reducing environmental impact, according to a Cornell University study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 30, 2008.)
Producing milk uses large quantities of land, energy and feed, but rbST – the first biotech product used on American farms — has been in agricultural use for nearly 15 years. Now it is found to reduce the carbon hoofprint by easing energy, land and nutritional inputs necessary to sustain milk production at levels sufficient to meet demand.
This research found that, compared to a non-supplemented population, giving rbST to one million cows would enable the same amount of milk to be produced using 157,000 fewer cows. The nutrient savings would be 491,000 metric tons of corn, 158,000 metric tons of soybeans, and total feedstuffs would be reduced by 2,300,000 metric tons. Producers could reduce cropland use by 219,000 hectares and reduce 2.3 million tons of soil erosion annually.
In 2007, there were 9.2 million cows in the United States. For every one million cows supplemented with rbST, the world would see an environmental saving of 824 million kilograms of carbon dioxide, 41 million kilograms of methane and 96,000 kilograms of nitrous oxide. For every one million cows supplemented with rbST, the reduction in the carbon footprint is equivalent to removing approximately 400,000 family cars from the road or planting 300 million trees.
"Supplementing cows with rbST on an industry-wide scale would improve sustainability and reduce the dairy industry's contribution to water acidification, algal growth, and global warming," says Judith L. Capper, Cornell post-doctoral researcher, and the lead author of "The Environmental Impact of Recombinant Bovine Somatotropin (rbST) Use in Dairy Production," PNAS.
Joining Capper on the paper: Dale E. Bauman, Cornell professor of animal science and the corresponding author; Euridice Castaneda-Gutierrez, former Cornell post-doctoral researcher; and Roger A. Cady, of Monsanto, St. Louis. Cornell funded the research.
"Sustainability is important in agricultural production, with an emphasis placed upon meeting human food requirements while mitigating environmental impact," said Bauman. "This study demonstrates that use of rbST markedly improves the efficiency of milk production, mitigates environmental impact including greenhouse gas emissions and reduces natural resource requirements such as fossil fuel, water and land use."
link
Now who would have ever thought that a study written by a post-doc student, a wholly owned subsidiary of Monsanto "scientist" like Dale Bauman, and . . . a Monsanto "scientist" would conclude that using a Monsanto product would be the answer to global warming!?
I will give them this, they did include a conflict of interest statement with their PNAS article:
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT:
Conflict of interest statement: R.A.C. is a full-time employee of Monsanto, holding the position of Technical Project Manager for POSILAC rbST with the primary responsibility of ensuring the scientific integrity of Monsanto publications about POSILAC; he also owns Monsanto stock. D.E.B. consults for Monsanto in areas outside the environmental impact area and owns no Monsanto stock. J.L.C. and E.C.-G. have no conflict of interest.
Real Science: Compare with just grass
Say, for the sake of argument that we really are getting more milk for a much much larger population these days, using fewer cows, a proposition that I think needs more investigation given the extent of bias by these "researchers", their study fails to consider the ecosystem of who milk gets produced.
To really do the science would mean considering the basic state of cows eating grass, something they were born to do.
You put the cows into the pasture. You let them eat.
In other words, they harvest their own food, so the costs of transportation and harvest are based on a grass-fueled transporation system. Sort of raw bio-fuel.
I have empirical evidence of this process, because I grew up on a small dairy farm, and my chores often included herding the cows to the milk barn and herding them back to their pasture. Actually, the dog did the work, and the cows knew the drill. My job really was to open and close gates.
Now consider the impact on cows using Posilac.
Milk is not made from air, and Posilac does not make cows more productive without more food. Rather than giving the cows more pasturage, they are fed corn.
There are a lot of problems with a corn diet for cows, animals that are ruminants. But, first lets just consider the process of getting them corn and its costs. Cows cannot just be put into the corn field to harvest their own corn as they do grass.
So getting the corn to the cows means the ecological costs of harvesting that corn, the cost of petrol transporting that corn to the cows.
More gastric distress producing more methane from feeding cows corn. Some of this distress kills cows. More costs for treating this problem created by feeding the cows corn.
More mastitis, more antibiotics needed to treat the mastitis and to treat the medical problems created by feeding cows corn.
More environmental costs for creating rBST, advertising it, distributing it, and sending Monsanto's sales force and stalking horses out to promote its use, more petrol to to do all of the above.
And, again, compare that to just grass, which was what dairy cows 15 years ago were more likely to have been eating.
Real Science: Do not Let them eat corn!
Cows' natural feed is just grass.
The use of rBST in cows makes them hungrier, much hungrier.
The response of farmers is to have to get more food for those cows. Often it now takes the form of corn, a product that is not only not part of a cow's normal diet, it actually causes them serious harm, killing a good percentage of them. You can find a detailed description of the use of corn to feed cows in Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
For example,
Grain-fed cattle provide nicely marbled beef. Yet, low-fiber diets can make cattle sick, while allowing harmful bacteria to proliferate, a paper in the 11 May 2001 issue of Science reports.
. . .
Low-fiber rations "can be very stressful for the animal," however, because they allow fermentation acids to accumulate within a digestive compartment called the "rumen," Russell added. In ruminant animals, he noted, fiber digestion depends on fiber-degrading microorganisms, which supply the cattle with useful protein, vitamins and short-chain organic acids. Without fiber, these acids are not absorbed as efficiently, as the animal's physiological mechanisms can be disturbed.
Acid buildup can cause ulcers in animals consuming too much grain: "Then what happens is that infectious bacteria come from the rumen through the ulcers, into blood, and finally into the liver, where they cause abscesses," Russell said. Feed additives such as antibiotics can counteract such ailments, but they further alter the ruminal microbial ecosystem, he added.
Grains can accumulate in an animal's intestines because they lack starch-digesting enzymes. Thus, a high-grain diet can promote an overgrowth of Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium associated with sudden death in feedlot cattle, Russell's article suggests.
Finally, grain-based diets can promote Escherichia coli (E. coli) within the digestive tract of cattle, and these E. coli are more likely to survive acid shocks that mimic the human gastric stomach. This discovery, first reported by Russell and colleagues in 1998 (Science, 11 September), has now been confirmed. Other USDA scientists have likewise shown that cattle switched from grain-based diets to hay were less likely to shed harmful E. coli 0157:H7 in feces.
It is no surprise that Monsanto "scientists" are a bit wobbly on the science of global warming and, as a result, fail to really understand the ecology of the use of their product.
But we, the public, do not need to be taken in by this. And we should demand that the lapdogs of the press give us real news and not just print Monsanto's talking points.