I don't know much about Environment Report, a non-profit producer of radio reports about, uh, the environment.
But I can't say I'm impressed by its recent piece on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), the genetically modified "feed enhancer" for dairy cows that Monsanto recently sold to Eli Lilly.
In it (transcript here), reporter Shawn Allee sets up a contrast between a Chicago health-food store owner and a Cornell scientist. The health food guy cites the precautionary principle for his opposition to rBGH:
People have been drinking milk for thousands of years from animals that didn't have have rgbh in them, so, I think I'm a little more comfortable drinking milk from a cow that didn't have rBGH than I am from something that is a very, very new technology.
By contrast, the Cornell scientists makes a case for rBGH . To do so, she cites her own recent team-authored, peer-reviewed study [PDF] extolling the environmental benefits of the controversial synthetic growth hormone.
So we get the "well-meaning" hippy dunderhead against the hyper-rational scientist. In the report, the scientist tramples the hippy's logic, and we thoughtful environmentalists are left veritably thirsty for milk from rBGH-treated cows. Except ...
... it's really the reporter here who's being naive, not the health-nut.
She never mentions that the peer-reviewed study, which for her seems to settle the question of rBGH's environmental value, is shot through with Monsanto's fingerprints. Right on the front page, the report contains a "Conflict of interest statement" revealing the following about two of the study's four authors:
[Roger A. Cady] 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. [Dale E. Bauman] consults for Monsanto in areas outside the environmental impact area and owns no Monsanto stock.
POSILAC, of course, was the company division that marketed rBGH. Oh yeah, and the peer reviewer who approved the study? That would be David H. Baker, an animal-health scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Baker's corporate affiliations go back decades. From this bio:
Dr. Baker held the position of senior scientist at Eli Lilly and Co. from 1965 to 1967 ... He also received two national-international awards from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences: the Borden Award in 1986 and the Dannon Award in 2003 ... He has consulted for several companies in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and food industries ...
Now, corporate affiliations don't automatically nullify research findings, but they surely restrict the questions that get asked. I read through the report, and found no accounting for the fact the rBGH-fed cows burn-out faster than their artificial-hormone-free peers. That fact seems to call into question the finding that rBGH-based systems require fewer cows.
Moreover, spent dairy cows typically end up getting slaughtered for meat. Which would you rather eat -- burgers from a cow that's spent its short life cranking out maximal amounts of milk, jacked up on corn and rGBH, or one that's spent its days grazing on grass and producing milk according to its own biological rhythms?
In general, the report completely neglects the quality of both the resulting milk and meat.
Rather than jacking up cows on synthetic growth hormones, I can think of another way lower dairy's carbon footprint: simply consume less of it. But that message doesn't won't generate more cash for the corporate interests that fund so much of the agriculture-related research that goes on these days.
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Comments
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katesisco Posted 1:37 am
02 Oct 2008
Does it make a difference if the cow is fed fermented exhausted mash?
Wasn't it common then for the poor people to breast feed and the wealthy to use other choices?
Wasn't it at that time common to see hogs in the streets and this was before Fredrick Law Omstead received his commission to create Central Park from the slum where the Irish lived?
New York City sent oysters to France packed in ice. The Hudson valley was lined with ice houses.
Was the difference that the milk was skimmed of its cream?
Babies need milk with fat. Take the fat, damage the infant.
Typhoid ran amok during the summer months when water was more polluted; the rich left for the sea shore and came back after summer.
If 50% of the new generation died; how many were poor? How many lived to be 1, or 2, or 3, when many babies began to be water drinkers like their parents?
Brewing may have been the original way to purify their water supply that had been polluted; remember any congregation of humans would have located next to water.
Our belief in domestication of plants, for example the sunflower, has been genetically determined to be, of all places, not central Mexico, but Siberia. The oldest domesticated sunflower comes from Siberia.
And the oldest domesticated us now is projected to be far older than imagined. First, they were lots of us on the seashore, then we traveled inland, and then there were so many of us we began to occupy a single place just to make sure it wasn't occupied by somebody else when we went back. Agriculture begins. How long before water became polluted?
One of the big questions now is what caused the glacial icing on Greenland, which, until 2 million years ago had a small glacier (think Alpine) and was a heaven on Earth. Scientists wonder.
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sallee4 Posted 2:33 pm
05 Oct 2008
We were aware of the conflict of interest cited in the PNAS study. I had Ms. Capper and others explain how the research was conducted, who drove it and what roles they played in shaping the outcome. I defer to the PNAS editors on the issue of whether standards were met for publication.
I expect there'll be more scientific salvos fired on the issue, and we'll certainly cover those at The Environment Report as well. In the meantime, I'd invite readers to see what other views we've made available on the subject at http://www.environmentreport.org. And while you're there, search the word "milk" to get a better idea of how we've covered this issue overall.
Sincerely,
Shawn Allee
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