On this special episode of Let’s Chat Dairy, Alyssa Badger sits down with UK dairy expert Chris Walkland to unpack the controversy surrounding Bovaer, a feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions from dairy cows. While it’s being hailed as a major step forward for sustainability, the story has sparked significant consumer backlash. The podcast can be found here on our dashboard, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe so that you never miss an episode!
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Transcript:
(0:14) Alyssa Badger:
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Let’s Chat Dairy, your favorite weekly market podcast powered by HighGround Dairy. I’m your host, Alyssa Badger, and today we’re tackling a story that’s not just big – it’s being called one of the most significant dairy developments to hit the UK in decades. Joining me today is Chris Walkland, a very respected UK dairy industry expert who’s been all over this story. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
(0:42) Chris Walkland:
Thank you, and yeah, it’s great to be on again. I think I did one a fair few months ago now, but it’s great to be on from this side of the pond.
Alyssa:
Yeah, it’s been way too long. Let’s not wait this long next time. We are very excited to have you, and I’ve got to say you’ve hyped this up as an incredible and unbelievable story. But before you kick off that conversation with me, you haven’t been on here in a while, so if you wouldn’t mind, just take a moment to introduce yourself to our listeners.
(1:12) Chris:
Well, I work for myself. I’ve been a journalist specializing in the dairy industry for the last 30 years, and I’m in the industry, and I did quite a lot of market work. I don’t do the sort of stuff that you do with hedging and things like that. So I basically report on what you guys are saying from your side of the pond and what other people are doing here, and really try and communicate with farmers in the main and processors as to what this crazy world, this crazy world, this dairy world that we’re all involved in is doing and might do going forward.
(1:48) Alyssa:
Yeah, there’s certainly no shortage of anything to talk about, especially lately with all the volatility. So Bovaer is clearly making waves, but I have to ask, why is it making waves now? We’ve seen it pop up in the news over the last few years, but not like this.
(2:15) Chris:
Well, first of all, I think let’s just have a recap on what Bovaer is. Bovaer is a feed additive which has been developed over the last couple of decades, and small amounts are fed to cows, and it basically suppresses the amount of methane that a cow emits. So its use is for the race to get to net zero, and it’s been trialed over here and used over here by a major supermarket since April, and it’s gathering a bit of momentum, I think, all over the world, really. But Arla announced a couple of weeks ago that it was going to trial the product on just 30 of its 2,000 farmers, just 30 of them. And it wasn’t a clinical trial, it wasn’t to see if the product worked because all of those clinical trials have been done, and the product has been deemed to be safe for use all over the world in 60-odd countries, including the States. The trial was to see how farmers could best use it, because it’s an expensive product, and the only benefit is to reduce methane. There are no production benefits. So Arla put the press release out saying they’re going to trial it with 30 farmers, and social media went mad. It went crazy. And it is an abject lesson, I think, for any company, any brand holder, that you can put the most innocent-looking story out on the web, but if somebody gets the wrong end of the stick, it can go wild. And this was a firestorm. This was a social media firestorm I’ve never seen the likes of before, which then spread from, say, the Mavericks and the Hotheads on X to families and people who were genuinely concerned about what it meant for them and their dairy products. And they were concerned, and that led to what looks like a boycott of Arla brands. And Arla is one of the biggest dairy brand names in the UK.
(4:50) Alyssa:
Yeah, well, it sounds like it could be a big step forward for sustainability, but obviously that excitement isn’t universal. Is this mainly a consumer perception issue?
(5:02) Chris:
It’s totally a consumer perception issue because, you know, the product is fed to cows. I think some people on social media thought that they were going to tip it in the milk. And there’s only a tiny amount, say, a quarter of a teaspoon per cow per day of Bovaer is used, so tiny amounts. But I don’t know how much the consumers thought were going to be used. And the fact that it had passed consumer trials and was fully authorized for use in 60 countries didn’t matter. The consumers or those Hotheads, if you like, on X, they didn’t care. They just slated this product. They just gave it the biggest kicking I’ve ever seen a product on X being kicked. And all sorts of conspiracy theories and theorists had a field day on it, which is one of the reasons I think it went viral.
(6:06) Alyssa:
So what about the farmers? What kind of feedback are you hearing from them? There’s clearly been pioneers on the farm that accepted the role of taking on this additive. They trust their co-op. Has the farm perception in all of this been wholly positive or not really? Are they concerned?
(6:23) Chris:
No, what happened is dairy companies and farmers were very, very quick to distance themselves from the use of this product. So what could be a really good, useful product to help us reduce methane, a lot of dairy companies have distanced themselves from it and they won’t touch it with—we have an expression: we won’t touch it with a barge pole. I don’t know whether you have that in the States, do you?
Alyssa:
Something similar.
(6:51) Chris:
Yeah. So they wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. And now there is huge division in the industry from farmers and other processes. Some who say we need to use it, we want to use it. Others who say no way, we’re not touching that. How that will develop going forward, whether calm and sense will prevail, I don’t know. But I have to say that the manufacturers of the product DSM have been pretty useless in the crisis management and handling of the situation.
(7:32) Alyssa:
You kind of talked about this already, but Bovaer has no impact on milk production volume or quality in any way?
(7:40) Chris:
No. And I think that’s one of the challenges. And I think that’s why it’s taken a long time to get traction. Some products you can feed, it costs you maybe a dollar to feed it and you get a dollar 50 back or something. With Bovaer, it’s just a cost. The benefit is reduced methane, but you can’t measure that. Now this might, this might cost a centiliter, I think it is, to feed. It doesn’t take long with some of your big units for huge bills to rack up on a product that actually doesn’t give them any more milk.
(8:20) Alyssa:
I could see the disconnect there. So are there other dairy companies or co-ops that are showing interest? I know you said there’s a lot of them backing away and they don’t want to touch it with the barge pole, but are there any companies that you’re aware of that are wanting to adopt this technology or is it mostly Arla leading the charge right now?
(8:37) Chris:
Well, Arla have led the charge on this trial, but we have an elite supermarket over here to cater for the top echelons of the consumer profile called Marks & Spencer, M&S. And they’ve been using the product across all of its farms for all of its liquid milk since April. Now, they only have about 50 farms, so they don’t sell a lot of milk.
Alyssa:
I see.
(9:05) Chris:
But they announced in April that they were going to be using this product. And the Daily Mail—one of our mainstream newspapers and serves middle England—had 26 responses on their website to the news that M&S were going to use this product. And yet Arla does a trial for 30 farmers, it goes on X and there are tens of thousands of responses, 13,000 comments, 95% negative in the first 24 hours and millions subsequently. Now, I don’t know any company anywhere that is ready for that sort of reaction. And when I say reaction, it was venomous. It was the mischievous, the malevolent were just linking anything they could link to this product in order to whip up this firestorm.
Even dear old Bill Gates was involved. He got involved, well, not him personally, but the conspiracy theorists got him involved because he’s linked to a rival product called Rumin8 and Rumin8, I think is also going to be a methane suppressant, but he seems to be despised on X and the conspiracy theories there thought that the product he was developing was one of his products to reduce the population in order to save the climate by killing people off. So that’s the equation. And other people who think that their food is being poisoned. They had their own stab at their conspiracy. And so, so it went on.
(11:05) Alyssa:
What are some of the challenges that farmers might face then in integrating Bovaer into their feeding practice that, you know—I’ve only been in the dairy industry for 12 years now— I’ve seen many times where new technologies end up burdening the farmer with more costs, additional labor. Will farmers face anything like that long term here, or is that something they don’t need to worry about because of the backlash?
(11:31) Chris:
Well, I think what’s happened over here serves as a warning to companies in America in case the same thing happens. So if anybody thinks that this might just be a little UK situation, then I would say, well, be on your guard, it could happen anywhere. In terms of labor, I don’t think there’s any extra labor for using the product because it would just come in a mineral pack. And the main challenge is actually how is a farmer going to make money from this unless he is paid by somebody to use it. Now, I don’t know about your retailers, your processes, but our retailers don’t want to pay for anything when it comes to sustainability. They want all of the benefits, they don’t want any of the costs. And our farmers are fed up to the back teeth of having to do all of this sustainability and then expected to pay for it or at least get nothing for it.
(12:30) Alyssa:
Yeah, that’s awful.
So let’s talk about the UK government’s role in all of this. How have, or maybe they haven’t, but how have regulatory bodies responded? And I guess you already alluded to this, but there’s no incentives, no programs to support the adoption, not only of Bovaer, but other technologies that, again, like you said, will just add more costs to the farmer.
(12:54) Chris:
Well, we have our regulatory bodies called the Food Standards Agency and they regulate the products. They were very slow to come out and say this stuff is safe. You know, the firestorm on X had been raging for three or four days before they came out and said, it’s OK, don’t worry about it. That said, I don’t think by that time you could afford that social media frenzy through facts. And again, I think it’s a lesson for brand holders. How do you fight an emotional argument when the people making that argument don’t listen to the facts? They don’t trust the scientists, they don’t trust government, and they don’t know what a regulator is, let alone what a regulator does. So they see people on X that they follow, celebrities or whoever, nutritionists or they think they’re nutritionists, they follow them on X and they make a judgment from them. Over here, they don’t seem to trust the science, the scientists, the regulators, the politicians.
(14:11) Alyssa:
Yeah, well, that sounds familiar. Well, I guess looking ahead, are there any other similar technologies or innovations on the horizon that could complement these efforts? Or is this just a massive step back for sustainability overall? Is there anything else in the works to kind of get that end goal?
(14:35) Chris:
There’s a lot of work going into methane suppressants, there’s this Rumin8, which I don’t know a lot about. I do hear talk about seaweed extracts that are being used in diets, but I’ve also heard that some seaweed extracts, and I don’t know which ones, have caused ulceration inside cows. So that might be half a step forward on that front, but three steps back. I think such is the need to reduce methane that there will be a lot of money put into the development of such products. And there’s no doubt about it. When you get a giant like Elanco teaming up with the manufacturers of Bovaer, which is DSM, they wouldn’t be doing that. Elanco wouldn’t be doing that in the States if they didn’t see massive potential. But as I said earlier, somebody has to pay.
(15:32) Alyssa:
Yeah, that’s the hard part, unfortunately. Well, hopefully this doesn’t all fall on the farmer like it typically does. Well, since we’re already talking about the farmer and you’re my UK expert, I have to ask you what is going on outside of this Bovaer drama. What’s going on with milk production in the UK, Chris? We look at weekly milk production and obviously the monthly numbers too, but it just looks so strong versus the lackluster figures that we’re seeing from Germany and France. I would love any insight that you can provide on what’s going on there.
(16:07) Chris:
Well, weather-wise, we’ve had a pretty good back end to the year. So this time last year, we had an awful lot of water, awful lot of rain, and it was a pretty grim time for the farms. We’ve not had that at all this year. Milk prices are actually pretty good. And that, twinned with the milk price-feed price ratio, is resulting in some really good profit margins for the farmers at the moment. The milk price-feed price ratio is exceptional. I don’t think it’s been higher in many, many years. And they’ve got an opportunity now to really push on.
Now, one of the areas of the UK which has seen spectacular rises is Northern Ireland. 10% to 12% increases on last year. So obviously that contributes to the UK’s overall volume. But they’ve had some pretty rubbish prices over the last few months. It’s only recently that their prices have picked up. So they’re making hay while the sun shines. They’re filling their boots. They’re filling their bulk tanks because they’ve got a big gap to fill. They’ve got that deficit from probably January to September to make up while prices are good. But now, of course, coming into December and January, things aren’t looking as good. I think we’re going to dip in Q2 next year. So they might not have that much time in which to recoup those losses.
(17:49) Alyssa:
Interesting. And then I think the last thing I want to talk about, because there’s no shortage of trade headlines for us here in the US with the new administration coming into office in 2025. What we are seeing is that the rest of the world seems to be getting more aggressive on creating more opportunities for global trade, the EU and Latin America? And it looks like Britain met with the Middle East, is that right, in the past few weeks?
(18:19) Chris:
Yeah, I don’t know where that’s going to get to, what the opportunities for trade are. As far as dairy is concerned, quite a lot of our curd has been going to the Middle East and our milk powders over the last few months anyway. So that might be one to watch. I think from a UK point of view, the big one is the UK-US trade deal. That’s the one that everybody wants. Whether we’ll get one, who knows. But at the moment, I think we’re keeping our head down because we don’t want your new president’s tariffs, thank you very much. We don’t like the look of those. So how all of that global trade plays out is going to be extremely interesting. And the world’s so dynamic, isn’t it? For instance, China over the last few months, years, hasn’t been taking much product from New Zealand. You know all that, your listeners all know all that. So Fonterra has been trying to send product into the UK under the UK-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement. So there’s been a lot of work going on in the background, moving, for instance, cheese and butter to the UK. And shipments were arriving in Q4 and they’ll arrive in Q1. But Trump’s crowning has completely screwed up the currency to make that trade. It’s not cost-effective now. So you can no longer cost-effectively bring product from New Zealand into the UK. So that changes the dynamics again, doesn’t it? So how that plays out, I mean, we’re not talking big volumes, especially not on a US scale. But for instance, you know, a typical cheese plant over here could be 30,000 tons. So 15,000 from New Zealand is half the annual capacity of a cheese plant. So that would make a difference. And of course, the traders get to hear about the prices and then they start bidding down on the other cheese that comes out of the UK. So how the currency will play out, how the trade plays out. It’s a really dynamic environment, isn’t it?
(20:47) Alyssa:
Yeah. Those are two of the biggest things on our top five things to watch, that’s for sure, into 2025. Along with China, you kind of hit all of them there.
(20:57) Chris:
Is Trump going to be good for the farmers?
(21:01) Alyssa:
Oh, you know, someone had asked me this the other day, and the initial response, obviously, to the tariffs the last time he was in office was negative. We saw a sell-off on many commodities, but in the end, he knew that the farmers were part of his voter base, and he went out of his way to create supplemental income for farmers through some of the Food Box Program that we did with the USDA on ways to use excess inventories that we had sitting here. And he certainly found ways to get extra money into their hands through supplementing the losses that were created because of the tariffs. So I think if it does have a negative impact on-farm, he would probably go that route again, if I had to guess. But I don’t want to create too much chaos because we know how volatile those years were, but that also had a bit to do with the pandemic. So let’s cross our fingers we don’t have one of those again.
Chris:
Yes.
(21:57) Alyssa:
So to close out this conversation, do you have any last comments or thoughts?
(22:04) Chris:
I think I’m always impressed as to how resilient farmers are. Whatever country they’re in, they seem to be incredibly resilient people, don’t they? And it doesn’t matter what’s thrown at them. They always seem to buckle on down and get on with it. And the next crop goes in, and the next crop of silage and maize is taken, and the next batch of heifers are born and reared and come through. And so it goes on. They’re incredibly resilient so I’m sure that in five years’ time, we’ll be having the same conversation about equally wacky stories that we’ve just talked about in a different capacity. Or maybe you’ll have the story of the day.
Alyssa:
Yeah, we’ll see. Jeez, Chris, you’re making me emotional over here.
Chris:
Hats off to all the resilient farmers.
(22:58) Alyssa:
That’s what I would say. I echo that sentiment. That was beautiful. And I guess this was just really an eye-opening conversation for me. So thank you for sharing your expertise on what really does sound like a very important story for the UK dairy industry.
(23:14) Chris:
Yeah, well, as I said, I don’t think it’s just the UK. I think every company can get caught up by this maelstrom, this whirlwind on social media that just floors them.
Alyssa:
Cows need their own PR agency!
(23:29) Chris:
Oh, they’ve been under the weather. All of us have been under the weather a lot. But yeah, be one for the textbooks.
(23:35) Alyssa:
That’s for sure. Well, thank you so much, Chris. And to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in to Let’s Chat Dairy. If you found today’s episode insightful, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with others who might enjoy it. We’ll see you next time with more stories that matter. Cheers.
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