Cows & the Environment

Hormone use may make dairy farming greener-US study
Mon Jun 30, 2008 5:24pm EDT
By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO, June 30 (Reuters) - Using bovine growth hormones to boost milk production could help the dairy industry significantly reduce its impact on the environment, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said supplementing 1 million cows with the growth hormone recombinant bovine somatotropin or rbST would have the same effect as removing about 400,000 cars from the road or planting 300 million trees.

"That's a pretty substantial impact," said Dale Bauman of Cornell University, whose research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read More

The same groups that claim that animal agriculture is inefficient also fight and argue against technologies that improve efficiencies at the production level. Why? Because their goal is to eliminate our industry and anything that comes along that will mess with their argument has to be blown off as untrue. The efficiencies that we have gained in agriculture over the last 100 years is phenomenal and that is something that we should be proud of.