Bovaer: milking the risk society

How did some people get so alarmed over a feed additive for cattle?

‘I won't be consuming anything containing Bovaer. I've requested that DEFRA undertakes an urgent review of its use in our food system.’ Reform MP Rupert Lowe is perhaps the most high-profile figure to express concern about a new feed additive for cattle. There has been a wave of social media posts with people declaring that they will be boycotting dairy products like Lurpak butter and Cravendale milk.

Bovaer, or 3-Nitrooxypropanol for the chemistry-minded, is added in small quantities to cattle feed with the aim of inhibiting stomach enzymes that cause the production of methane – a greenhouse gas. Using Bovaer, these emissions can be cut, it is claimed, by 27 per cent.

There has been much handwringing about greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. According to a briefing by Green Alliance, dairy cows are responsible for 15 per cent of UK methane emissions. A drug that can help to reduce these emissions is, therefore, of considerable interest to farmers and the big supermarkets they supply in order to burnish their green credentials. Whether we should be worried about these emissions is a major issue in its own right. But assuming that such reductions are worthwhile, Bovaer is actually a very cheap of achieving this, around £60-£70 per year per cow, says Green Alliance, which wants the government to pay for the additive for farmers to use.

The particular spark for the current controversy is the announcement by Arla, a Danish-Swedish multinational cooperative and the UK’s biggest supplier of dairy products, of a trial of Bovaer on 30 dairy farms in the UK, in cooperation with some of the big supermarkets, like Tesco and Asda. This has hardly come out of the blue: the additive was given UK government safety approval in December 2023 and is available in 68 countries, including EU member states and Australia.

According to the manufacturers, DSM: ‘Just ¼ teaspoon in a cow’s daily feed takes effect in as little as 30 minutes. As it acts, Bovaer is safely broken down into compounds already naturally present in the rumen.’ In a fact sheet responding to ‘misinformation’ about Bovaer, DSM says the additive is used at a ratio of about one gram per 20kg of feed – or one part in 20,000.

The backlash has come because of a bunch of claims about safety. For one thing, safety advice (like many other chemicals, Bovaer could cause some health issues if handled incorrectly) has been elided with concerns about the safety of the milk that is produced and the things made from that milk. In fact, evidence so far suggests that Bovaer doesn’t end up in milk. Then there is the claim that it is being foisted on us by Bill Gates or some other World Economic Forum types. In fact, Gates has invested in an unrelated company called Rumin8, which aims to do develop products to do the same job as Bovaer.

Perhaps more generally, people are asking why we need such chemicals added to the food supply. I have some sympathy with that question when it comes to climate-change policy, but the febrile reaction to Bovaer feels out of all proportion. It is perfectly reasonable to ask if reducing emissions from cattle is really so important. But making what appear to be ill-founded claims about food safety is not the way to go about it.

We have a seemingly endless diet of food scares. We don’t need more. For example, the Guardian’s front page on 15 November declared ‘UK’s unhealthy food habits cost £268bn a year, report finds’. (The report is nonsense, as Christopher Snowdon points out.) For many food campaigners, all the nation’s ills could be solved if Big Food stopped foisting ‘ultra processed’ food on us.

This is tosh, but it does show how little trust there is in certain quarters towards government and industry when it comes to the safety of, well, anything. The same outlook that thinks vaccines are killing us, perhaps even designed to kill us, now turns a feed additive into the next big scare. The truth is our food is safer, cheaper (recent inflation aside) and more varied than it’s ever been. Vaccines have wiped out endemic disease. Safety testing generally works very well.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t be critical of current policies, such as the drive to Net Zero, which to my mind is destructive and irrational – even if you are worried about a warming world. But the rationale for these policies is there in plain sight and it is for us to find effective ways to challenge these policies, not assume there is some hidden agenda behind them.

As Frank Furedi wrote almost 20 years ago: ‘The simplistic worldview of conspiracy thinking helps fuel suspicion and mistrust toward the domain of politics. It displaces a critical engagement with public life with a destructive search for the hidden agenda. It distracts from the clarification of genuine differences and helps turn public life into a theatre where what matters are the private lives and personal interests of mistrusted politicians. A constant search for the story behind the story distracts us from really listening to each other and seeing the world as it really is.’

That’s why public debate is important, so we can challenge dodgy ideas and figure out the best way to move forward. And let’s base that debate on the best available evidence. I seriously doubt that Bovaer is a health risk. Whether we should be spending millions on it to ‘save the planet’ is another matter.