Good moos: cows could help the climate

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, even on Christmas Eve, we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world. Spain is known for its spring sun and sangria, less so for its budgetary and fiscal acumen. But according to the Economist, it may actually be the best performing rich world economy of 2024. And people often say they long for silence and stillness. Harold Palmer made it his lifetime's pursuit, building himself a home, a chapel and a bell tower in the wilds. The Intelligence remembers the life of a Northumbrian hermit. But first.

I recently traveled to a farm in Kenya.

Robert Guest is a deputy editor of the Economist.

And I met a herdsman there called Philip Sirunka who practices a traditional kind of cattle farming. I said, what do you do for a living? Philip lets his cows graze on communal land and once they've eaten what's in one place, he moves them along. Lots of other herdsmen, particularly in poorer countries, do the same thing. But this kind of free range herding is unsustainable. Climate change is causing more severe droughts. Kenya's just coming out of one. During that drought, Philip had to drive his cows 200km away for them to find fresh pasture. Many of them died of thirst or disease along the way. And others he had to sell to buy feed for the survivors. And he got rock bottom prices for them because everyone else was trying to sell at the same time. In rich countries, cows are unfashionable because they're bad for global warming. And many of us feel we should eat less red meat. But most people don't live in rich countries. And globally cows are becoming more important, not less.

So, Robert, you're telling me that cows are going out of style in the rich world, but you're also telling me that they're becoming more important worldwide. So what's going on?

Well, the starting point in rich countries is people already get plenty of protein in their diet and they care about the climate. And cows are bad for the climate. They account for 7% of man made greenhouse gas emissions, which is much more than any other kind of farm animal. But in poor countries, it's different. They need much more protein in their diet. And so the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization expects global beef and milk consumption to continue to grow, partly because of the growing population, partly because as people get richer, they want more protein rich diet. This gives cattle farmers around the world two challenges to meet the increased demand for protein despite climate change, which is making it harder to raise cows and also to do so in a way that's a bit greener than in the past. And actually these two goals go hand in hand.

So you're saying that we can actually meet growing demand and tackle the climate challenges. How would we do that?

Well, the most important thing is to get more out of each cow.

Here we're looking at a cattle respiration chamber, which it's essentially a big box where you put a cow in.

When I was in Kenya, I spoke with Sonja Leitner, who works at the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi.

Measure the greenhouse gas concentrations at the air going in and going out.

We chatted while she was showing me around some of the ways they're gathering data about cows emissions. And she spelled out the link between productivity and lower emission.

Clearly, to put it in a very simple way, one cow that produces 10 liters of milk produces less methane than two cows that produce 5 liters of milk, because even a cow that's not producing any milk at all will already produce methane.

The Food and Agriculture organization looked at 11 ways to cut future bovine emissions. And raising productivity is by some way the most important. And there's a massive opportunity in poorer countries to raise productivity. The average dairy cow In America produces 30 litres of milk every day. In Africa, it's only 1.6. That's a 19 fold difference. If you could bridge just some of that gap, it could help ease poverty, reduce child hunger at home and cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Robert, why are cows in poorer countries so unproductive in terms of their milk production? And can that be changed?

So yes, it can be changed. You can't just take a sort of super high producing American milk and put them in Africa because they're not used to the heat or the disease and they'd probably die. But the same techniques that made it possible to breed such productive cows in America can be rolled out into poorer countries. A lot of small holder farmers have more cows than they can actually feed on the land that they've got. And you see all these scrawny cows by the side of the road chewing on whatever's lying there and sniffing among the rubbish. And they're not producing any milk because they're not getting enough calories in. The most basic thing a farmer can do is reduce the number of cows that you've got, feed them properly and they'll produce more milk. Then there's more high tech stuff such as really well informed crossbreeding. Now they've been doing that for decades in rich countries in Africa, lots of people have not been keeping records, so they don't really know which cow is related to which one. So you get massive inbreeding and that leads to sickness and low productivity. Now what's become possible just recently is gathering of better genetic information. So ngo, the International Livestock Research Institute, has collected just a hair from 15,000 cows, mostly in East Africa, and gathered together all the DNA, made a database of it, and then they're taking in information on productivity in lots and lots of small farmers. So they're able to tell those farmers, given where you live and the weather there, this is the DNA that you want to breed with your cows to make them higher producing and more resistant to heat and the local bugs.

And did you see these sorts of things being tried out in practice?

Yeah, I spoke to a guy who used to be a truck driver and became a cattle farmer called Daniel Kemboy. And he really embraced the new technology for breeding better cows.

Yeah, I normally select traits by using.

The Internet to Google to get the right traits of the animal so they can get more productivity.

He managed to increase his milk output from 12 to 15 liters per day per cow all the way up to 26. That's really stellar. It gives you a sense of what's possible.

So, Robert, it sounds like people are Aware that they need to make their cows more productive in some way. Are there other things they're trying too?

One big potential shift is away from nomadic farming, where your cows eat on land that nobody really owns. And then if there's a drought and there's not enough to eat, you move them somewhere else. Now this is a really big cause of clashes which can then spiral into ethnic clashes which can then contribute to civil wars throughout Africa. If you can reduce that, you can possibly make the continent more peaceful. And a lot of farmers are discovering that you can reduce that by just bringing the food to, to the cows where they are, rather than keeping on moving them. I met with another herder called Daniel Sinket in a big cowshed that he'd built to give shade to his cows.

The cows that we are looking at are sigh hole breeds and they are also crossed with fleckvi breed genetics and some ash share to improve on milk production.

Daniel also lost a lot of his cows during the drought. So now instead of having them roam freely, he brings the food to them. It's a big cultural wrench for him, but he recognizes that this is going to be better for his family.

I feel there's hope of having cows. If we manage we are able to feed our animals the way we are doing here, we will increase our herd. There's a high potential of us increasing the herd to.

So these ideas are spreading, but they're not spreading fast enough. The global average is that milk yield per cow has gone from six and a half litres to seven and a half litres a day over the past decade. But that fairly modest improvement disguises a massively wide range of different experiences. On farms. In Kenya, we've seen the productivity per dairy cows gone up significantly about from 1.8 to 2.3 litres per day in the past decade. But the farmers I've met showed that they can do a lot better than that.

Okay, so Robert, cows can be made more productive, which will help, particularly in poorer countries. But whether richer or poorer, there's still this question about cows emissions and global warming. What can be done about that?

The first thing to do about emissions is to put some incentives in place. But there are almost no incentives to reduce emissions. One country, Denmark, has put a levy on livestock emissions. It's the only one so far. There's lots of experiments with cows diet, so feeding them things like red seaweed seems to reduce the amount of methane that they burp or fart or emit in various ways. But the science is pretty young. There's attempts to capture the methane, for example, that come from cowshed, you can put it in an anaerobic digester, which is basically an enormous pit of poo with a kind of tarpaulin over the top, and it captures the gas and then you can sell that gas. It's the same gas that you use on your stove. And there are farmers in California, for example, who are doing this on quite a large scale. And it's a fairly simple technology, should be possible to do that on a smaller scale as well. We think of cows as this old technology. It's been around for thousands of years and people imagine that can't change, but actually we can make them better. And if we do, we can do something about poverty, about climate change, about children's developing brains, and maybe even something about peace.

Robert Absolutely fascinating stuff. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Rosie.

Spain used to be a byword for economic failure. Banks were dependent on bailouts, young people were either leaving or protesting at the lack of opportunities. Many homes remained half built and airports abandoned, relics of a construction bubble. What a difference a decade makes. The Economist reckons that Spain is now on course to be the best performing rich world economy of 2024.

We looked at five different economic and financial indicators. GDP growth, stock market performance, core inflation, unemployment and government deficits for 37 mostly rich countries.

Gavin Jackson is our economics and finance correspondent.

And at the top of our table came Spain, which is growing faster than America, which we've put on the COVID as the envy of the world. And it's creating more jobs than America as well, which provides this great rejoinder to the idea that Europe is doomed to stagnation.

So how can other countries emulate Spain? What's it done?

The first lesson that Spain gives the rest of Europe is to focus on services and not fetishized manufacturing. So Europe is very concerned about things like all the Chinese made electric vehicles coming into Europe. Volkswagen is considering closing a factory for the first time in Germany, that kind of thing, looking at how to protect manufacturing. And Spain hasn't done that. Spain's grown quite fast despite industrial production falling. It's not fallen as fast in Spain as in Germany, but it's still stagnated. Instead, growth has come from services. Part of that is tourism bouncing back from pandemic low. But more interestingly, the country seems to be moving up the value chain. It's increasingly exploring consulting services and technological know how rather than sun and sangria. According to the bank BBVA, non tourism services have risen from around 5.5% of GDP before the pandemic to to between 7 to 8%.

Now, thinking back, you used to hear about how young people were leaving Spain in search of new opportunities elsewhere. There wasn't that much to keep them. Has that changed?

It's certainly changing. So Spain's youth unemployment rate is still very high for Europe, but it's come down quite a lot. You know, it was close to 50% a decade ago, now it's much, much lower. But the other thing that's changed is that young people are arriving in Spain from elsewhere. So particularly from Latin America. You've got a lot of people coming in countries. Foreign bond workforce has risen by about 1.2 million people since the pandemic. Now many of those migrants are working in low skilled employment. The economy is maybe 7% bigger overall. Once you adjust for population growth, it's only 3% bigger. So productivity growth hasn't kept up with population growth yet. That still looks quite good when you compare it to some other countries that have seen post pandemic immigration booms, particularly Britain and Canada. GDP per head has actually fallen even though GDP has risen because of this decline in productivity. Spain's done better than that, at least.

Obviously it'd be hard for a lot of countries to replicate Spain's sun and sangria. But I think you are saying that there are other things that Spain has done that are repeatable elsewhere.

Absolutely. A dozen years ago, Spain was seen as this kind of economic basket case. You know, it was recovering from pretty bad financial crisis. Its construction boom had turned to bust. There was abandoned airports, half built homes around the place and so on. And one of the things it's doing better than is it's welcoming investment from Chinese firms. For example, on December 10, Stellantis, whose biggest shareholder, Exxon Part, owns the Economist, they would build a new battery factory in Zaragoza with Catl, a Chinese battery maker. So instead of trying to keep out Chinese electric vehicles, it's saying build them in Europe instead and we can sell them and we can be a manufacturing base for China too.

All of your numbers are very impressive, Gavin, but they don't seem to feel like that in Spain. We've had two episodes of the Weekend Intelligence from different parts of Spain where people were complaining about property prices, they were complaining about how expensive basic services were and food. So what's going on?

Well, some of that is the flip side of growth. If you're bringing in new people, if people want to work, if tourism's booming, then all that puts pressure on housing. These new workers need somewhere to live. These Tourists need somewhere to stay and that's making it feel more expensive.

The housing market is absolutely crazy. It's going to a business market, very expensive.

That's policeman Sergio Mendez. A few weeks ago you heard from him and others in one of those episodes of the Weekend Intelligence you mentioned from tourism hotspot Ibiza.

You have to share room or a flat or a house with three, four, five people in a year. And any owners don't want to rent all the years because they prefer to rent only in winter time and make more money in summertime, maybe 4, 5.

It's not just in Ibiza either. Every weekend you seem to have protests in Spain about some problem with housing affordability. On top of this, you got this unwieldy and fragile coalition government, depending on a few minor parties. That doesn't bode well for the future. These are issues where more reform is needed to boost long term growth. But what Spain does show is no matter how big the challenge, it does seem that European economies can adapt and adjust to these challenges.

Gavin, thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

Sometime in 1970, Brother Harold Palmer received a strange parcel in the post. It contained a mason's trowel, a plumb line and a surveyor's measuring tape.

Ann Roe is the Economist's obituary's editor.

Obviously it was an indication or an omen that he had some building to do. He did have a building project in mind and he'd already seen the site that he thought would be suitable, even though hardly anyone else would think it was. It was on top of a hill in Northumberland with a ruined farm cottage and bits of an arcaded wall that had belonged to a fully. The whole thing had tumbled down and were just sheep and gorse bushes there, nothing to indicate that it could one day become a hermitage. But that was exactly what Brother Harold had in mind. He wanted for a long time to set up a tiny little community like the ones he had seen in Mount Athos in Greece, where two or three acolytes would gather round an elder and there'd be a church there too. And the acolytes would live separately and in solitude much of the time. But for the other parts of the time they would come together to pray and perhaps work in the garden and eat their meals. In 1971, having got his sight and having managed to get a bit of money together, Brother Harold went up to a place called Shepherd's Law and started living in a caravan and hoping that he'd be able to build a house for himself. People soon became rather intrigued by this curious, solitary man who was up there, and they began to help him. Farmers would bring stone and people would come and lend a hand. Quite a lot of his fellow friars came and helped him build it, and he himself, although he was still going through a lot of doubts about what he was trying to do, and though it was very bracing up there, he tried wrapping the caravan in straw bales one winter, but he found that rats got into the straw bales, so that wasn't such a good idea. So even though he was putting up with that sort of thing and having no water and no electricity and so on, he still found it, as he had done when he first saw it, an inspiring place. There was something about it. It had that peace that he'd been wanting to find since Mount Athos. When he put a letterbox at the bottom of his hill, villagers would leave cakes there and offerings for him, and there was soon a society in the village, the Friends of Shepherd's Law, who would help him as much as they could if he needed to see a doctor and that sort of thing. Over his 50 years there, he became quite a character. He was especially fond of wearing a Thomas the Tankage and hat that he'd picked up somewhere. He also had a missing front tooth, and he always looked scruffy, but cheery and full of the joys of life. His purpose there was actually to pray. That was why he'd gone there, because he believed very strongly that prayer was the work of God. Opus Dei, as St. Benedict had called it, and he was determined to recreate that spirit of the early Northumbrian saints, especially St Cuthbert. On the other hand, he didn't have a very good place to pray in at first. He'd built a sort of lean to against one of the ruined walls that was going to be his chapel, and it was lit with a paraffin lamp. It had a corrugated iron roof. But he didn't have enough money to do any better until after his mother died. He could use her legacy and built the most beautiful church, Neo Romanesque, made in Northumbrian stone by two local builders and architects. And there, seven times a day, he would go out and ring a medieval bell which stood in a freestanding wooden belfry, and to call anyone if anyone wanted to come to the Divine Office. Quite a lot of people did come and stay there, but he never managed to get anyone to stay there permanently. Somehow. Perhaps they didn't like the smell of paraffin lamps, because he was still mostly using paraffin lamps, or perhaps they didn't like his idea of a good meal, which often featured cold baked beans. But for some reason, he couldn't really attract anybody. Well, never mind. Perhaps it didn't matter so much if he was making sure that he was in the chapel every day, seven times a day. So there he would sit, and between the verses of the psalms, the sheep would bleat around him. And there he found his perfect stillness.

Ann ro on brother harold palmer, who has died, age 93. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. We'll see you back here on Thursday. Happy Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all who celebr.