Today, dairy farming is a highly technological enterprise and it continues to evolve and improve.
Milking machines developed with the ingenuity of AI and computers, ensure a high-quality end product, further improved by modern cooling systems. This is the 4th Industrial Revolution in practice.
“On farm” technology is also contributing to maintaining healthy herds, which in turn increases and improves milk quality, milk output and renders it free of harmful germs.
Methane emissions, the ‘black sheep’ of our global environment, is, through these advanced technologies, converted into electricity via biogas digesters and solar panels. Thus, modern-day methods provide an ideal system of sustainability, especially for intense, high-volume dairy farming.
A corollary to this, is the age-old practice of small herds of livestock, namely cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens on extensive and quasi-inexhaustible tracks of land, where the small amount of excrement simply and naturally absorbs into the ground, with the able assistance of natural elements of nature – wind, rain, animals themselves pounding it away and, finally, the assistance of beetles, bugs and ants that break it down and take it down, below surface.
The offending methane patty then works its magic in the cycle of life and gives rise to new seeds and new grass, which in turn feeds the animals, which then feed us.
Whichever way one analyses this matter, livestock is vital to life on earth, including methane emissions, without which grasslands would not exist, or be near depleted.
