Intensifying Agric Production - Should other lives pay the price?

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to visit Marks Farm, a dairy (specifically fresh milk) producing farm at Lowville - New York State, USA. The farm is run with some of the most advanced technologies for producing milk from cattle (cows) that you can think of. There are about 10,000 cattle on the farm with less than 100 employees running activities.

A lot of the work on the farm is mechanized. All the cows are tagged with electronic identification cards with which managers monitor how much feed they consume, how many steps they walk each day, their health conditions, among others. The farm is located on a 10,000 acres land but the cattle do not go grazing on the field. They are kept in enclosed areas and feed is prepared for them to consume on daily basis there. Their only task is to produce fresh milk.

There are no bulls (male cattle) on the farm. So, in order to get the cows pregnant for enhanced milk production, they are artificially inseminated with semen. Once they give birth, the calves (babies) are taken from them and then they get into milk production state. Three times a day, they are marched through metallic cages to a mechanised milk collection point, where their udders (breasts) are sucked with no human intervention.

On Marks Farms’ website, I found that it makes 28 million US dollars every year. That is more than the entire amount of 91.54 million cedis (23 million US Dollars) that the Government of Ghana made available to the Ministry of Agriculture in 2015.

Meanwhile, this is only one of the more than 47,000 dairy farms in the US and Marks Farms is not even one of the largest. Also, Marks Farm produces about 340,000 pounds (40,000 gallons) of milk daily. This translates into more than 600,000 cups of milk each day. We only need three ‘Mark Farms’ to provide enough milk on daily basis for all the 1.6 million kindergarten school pupils in the entire Ghana. One farm. Owned by one family. So, so productive.

Stark contrast

I found the work on this farm particularly interesting because that is not the kind of dairy farming activities you will find on this side of the world. Several centuries after the world moved on from “hunting and gathering” to “domestication” as a sustainable form of agric production, herds of cattle led by ‘fearless’ herdsmen continue to roam bushes in Ghana, threatening the very stability of communities like Agogo in the Ashanti Region.

We are all witnesses to how cattle have destroyed hundreds of farms; herdsmen have allegedly killed farmers who try to protect their farms from the cattle and the demonstrations that have erupted in such communities as a result; as well as the unsuccessful police cum military operations to flush out these guys that have cost millions of cedis.

Farms like the Amrahia Dairy Farm on the Accra – Dodowa Road which was started by former president Dr. Kwame Nkrumah have virtually collapsed. In Ghana’s second biggest city, Kumasi, we have the Boadi Dairy/Cattle Research Station, a research institution run by my alma mater, the prestigious Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. This is a dairy farm with few cows which produces what we all call “fresh yoghurt” for sale on campus as an internally generated fund (IGF) raising means.

The funny part is this; this diary farm imports powdered milk from Europe and other parts of the world and dissolves into fresh milk for sale. When their colleagues dairy farmers and researchers are busy milking cows. Can you imagine? In fact, estimates by the UN Trade Statistics are that as at 2011, Ghana spent more than 80 million US dollars importing milk and milk products annually.

Intensified Dairy Farming

I subsequently sat in a lecture by Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam of the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis who gave some very startling statistics on the intensification of dairy farming in the US you will find interesting. As at 1944, there were 26.6 million cattle producing 53.1 billion kg of milk in the US annually. As at 1997, the number of cattle had reduced to 9.2 million because of closure of lots of the farms. But the amount of milk produced yearly rose to 84.2 billion kg of milk.

The number of cattle over the 60 year period had reduced by about 60 percent, but amount of milk had increased by about 300 percent. This, she attributed mainly to improved genetics as a result of artificial insemination. And you can say without any shred of doubt that intensified and mechanised methods of production made this possible.

Cost of intensive production

I visited Marks Farms with a number of colleagues I’m currently on a training progamme with at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the Cornell University, Ithaca - New York State, USA. It’s called the Cornell Alliance for Science Program. Whilst I fell in love with what I saw at Marks Farms and would love to see dairy farms in Ghana advance to that status, some of my folks were appalled.

“I don’t like places where animals are used and exploited…we have to do things that harm them less…humans using other beings like that, I don’t think it is a good way to live,” Argentine Animal Rights Activist Florence Natalia Gonzalez who works with the NGO, Animal Libre, told me in an interview. Ms Gonzalez added: “In this farm, they are not being harmed but we saw little calves far away from their mother. Some had rings in their mouths so they cannot suck the breast milks and the pinches hurt.”

“I think animals are important. They feel like we feel. They have emotions. They are not plants. They want to be free. They want to experience good things. And being in a place and smelling their own faeces… can you imagine how difficult that could be?” she explained further.

A final quote from Ms Gonzalez: “Do you know what happens when they stop giving good milk, they kill them. So there is only a bad end for all the cows… So I think on this planet, we should also think about the suffering of the animals.”

My thoughts

Every year, about 56 billion farm animals are killed by humans for food. This excludes fishes and other sea creatures which exceeds the number of farm animals. Animal Rights Activism is underlined by the objective that: "Animals have the right to be free from all forms of human exploitation." Animal Right Activists don’t want animals to be killed and used as food; they don’t want animals helping with difficult work on farms and all over the world, they have demonstrated and filed suits in court to push for this. In fact, there is one such protest coming off in my neighbourhood in Downtown – Ithaca next month.

But in a world where one in every 10 persons does not have enough food to eat, according to the World Food Programme; where 12.9 percent of the population is undernourished and in fact in Sub Saharan Africa, its one out of every four persons; where poor nutrition causes 3.1 million deaths in children every year; where one out of every six children is under weight; and where one in every four children are stunted because of lack of proteins and other nutrients; should we really care about animal rights?

Should we really be concerned about animal comfort? Should we really be thinking about keeping animals alive in conducive atmospheres and pamper them? I honestly don’t think so. I think that is what God created animals for; to provide food for men and help keep safely the environment men live in.