Green Cows Produce More White Milk

Earlier this week, I put up a blog post entitled Inbreeding and the Axis of Production, detailing how famers are very careful to keep coefficients of inbreeding low in their dairy cow herds.

Why do farm managers work to keep inbreeding values low? Simple: the higher the inbreeding score, the less milk produced. Inbreeding is bad for dairy production.

So how are today's dairies doing, in terms of production?

Extremely well! In fact, modern dairies produce far more milk per cow than their analogs did 25, 50 or 100 years ago.

Consider these numbers from Cornell University's Journal of Animal Science, and what they mean for a greener, cleaner world:

[T]he carbon footprint for a gallon of milk produced in 2007 was only 37 percent of that produced in 1944. Improved efficiency has enabled the U.S. dairy industry to produce 186 billion pounds of milk from 9.2 million cows in 2007, compared to only 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows in 1944. This has resulted in a 41 percent decrease in the total carbon footprint for U.S. milk production.

Efficiency also resulted in reductions in resource use and waste output. Modern dairy systems only use 10 percent of the land, 23 percent of the feedstuffs and 35 percent of the water required to produce the same amount of milk in 1944. Similarly, 2007 dairy farming produced only 24 percent of the manure and 43 percent of the methane output per gallon of milk compared to farming in 1944.

Which beggars the question: If famers can make better cows without inbreeding them to death, how come the Kennel Clubs cannot do the same for dogs?

And the answer is quite simple: They can!

But to do so, they are going to be have to abandon 19th century eugenics theories that put a premium on breed and race purity.
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