Veteran Daily Mail correspondent Robert Hardman has written an illuminating piece about the effort to stop cows farting. Here’s how it begins:
Another week, another car crash in the world of marketing as, once again, a proudly progressive product launch smashes headlong into an awkward but immutable reality: you patronise the British public at your peril.
Last time, you may recall, it actually involved a real car-maker, as Jaguar rebranded itself with a new campaign featuring every colour and letter on the LGBTQ spectrum to show just how much it cares, while omitting to include any actual vehicles. Car fans have not stopped laughing (or crying) ever since.
This week’s self-inflicted disaster comes courtesy of several High Street supermarkets, a major European milk co-operative and a £23 billion Swiss-Dutch food and beauty corporation you have never heard of.
In just a matter of days, their “exciting” new eco-friendly cow snack has gone from a virtuous, planet-saving elixir for British agriculture to a pariah product painted as the new anthrax. Social media is buzzing with videos of people chucking “tainted” milk down the pan while rival milk producers have seen sales shoot up.
And after a 500-mile tour of U.K. farms this week, I have seen how the U.K.’s already beleaguered farming industry has been split down the middle over an innovation it never asked for – but may still have rammed down its throat by the Government.
It’s another case study for proponents of the adage: “go woke, go broke”. Still, one group are feeling very happy. It’s been a good week for vegans.
What a bold and brilliant vision it must have seemed when the consortium behind this latest wheeze gathered round the corporate conference table to brainstorm their new plan for the farmyard. With the blessing of the government, they would not only help slash UK carbon emissions but show a kinder, greener face – and all just by tinkering with the inner workings of the biggest methane generator in the British countryside: the dairy cow.
So, 11 days ago, Arla, the Danish-Swedish dairy co-operative which processes the milk from nearly a quarter of Britain’s 9,000 dairy farms and makes Lurpak butter, announced a new scheme as part of its snappily named “FarmAhead [sic] Customer Partnership initiative”.
It would be using a small number of its farms to roll out trials of Bovaer, a new additive for cow food made by Maastricht-based Dutch giant dsm-firmenich (a company so progressive that it has ditched capital letters).
When added to Daisy’s daily diet, Bovaer is said to cut bovine gas emissions from both ends by up to 30 per cent overall. Since UN boffins attribute up to 14 per cent of global carbon emissions to livestock, that equates to a significant saving – as Ed Miliband and his Department of Energy officials chase every carbon saving they can find.
It was launched with a video of happy farmers waxing evangelical about the Bovaer revolution.
‘We are extremely excited about this new collective way of working alongside our retail partners and the possibilities that feed additives, such as this one, present,’ declared Paul Dover from Arla, which supplies milk to Tesco, Aldi and Morrisons. At the same time, these three supermarket giants proudly issued a joint statement announcing: ‘It is this collective approach that is really going to make a difference.’
All could surely expect a few pats on the back. Yet the congratulatory champagne corks had barely popped at HQ when we saw the first inklings that the pesky public were not quite as ‘excited’ as they were supposed to be. Indeed, some were reaching for the pitchforks.
Worth reading in full.
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