NZ cows eat … palm oil?
For those of you who have followed the farming practices in the USA, and in particular the stories about cattle that are made to eat feed supplements rather than their genetic preference for grass, may have taken some comfort that New Zealand cows are renowned for being grass fed.
Except, as it turns out, they are not exclusively grass fed, as Russel exposed this morning. Our cows ate 455,000 tonnes of imported palm oil cake last year. Virtually no palm oil cake was eaten in 1999 but this year as industrial dairy continues to expand across our countryside cows could eat an estimated 700,000 tonnes.
“Consumers in this country and overseas have an advertising image of cows grazing on pure New Zealand grass, but industrial dairying is gradually turning farms into feedlots,” says Greens Co-Leader Russel Norman.
“Increases in consumption of palm kernel mixtures or ‘cakes’ by New Zealand agriculture over the last seven years, excluding this year, would need up to 900,000 hectares of rainforest to be cleared for palm oil to meet the increased demand if new plantations were required,” Dr Norman says.
“The palm oil industry is knocking down rainforests and burning peat across Indonesia and Malaysia to expand production to meet the increased demand. This is resulting in the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases and the destruction of the habitat of endangered animals such as the orang-utan.”
Here’s the figures:
2000 - 1,554,475 kgs
2001 - 25,876,818 kgs
2002 - 23,258,239 kgs
2003 - 43,322,490 kgs
2004 - 95,920,594 kgs
2005 - 188,261,717 kgs
2006 - 318,324,189 kgs
2007 - 455,313,609 kgs
April 30th, 2008 at 11:08 am
it gets better and better- not only is dairy expansion destroying our rivers it’s also wrecking tropical forests and the climate we all depend on. how much more of this has to go on before Labour or National is prepared to admit there’s a problem worth acting on? GO RUSSEL
May 1st, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Bad Milk, bad. I had no idea, was busy being all smug about our grass fed cows. Yuck.
May 2nd, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Just to clarify, the cows do not eat palm oil. They eat ‘palm oil cake’, which consists of what is left from the oil palm seed once the oil has been removed. I don’t know if this is good or bad for cows, but it is largely cellulose, like grass, so I doubt it’s as bad for their health as the North American practice of feeding them on corn.
The environmemtal concerns are genuine and serious - I’m just casting doubt on the animal welfare concerns that the headline might have raised.
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Will farmers use mossanto maize here to bulk there cow feed for the winter?
My cousin grows maize for feed to sell to other farmers what if you get all the farmers growing half for feed and the rest for grazing,mossanto maize will look really good since it’s already round resistant.