Increases in dairy herd and milk output are a formula for disaster

THE fundamentals are sound. When we wave goodbye to milk quotas, we can increase our dairy herd by a quarter and still feed them on the same amount of grass, writes Victoria White

The rivers and lakes will stay clean, the grass will stay green, no cow will go hungry and, despite all those extra poos and farts, our methane emissions will flatline, as Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney, declared on RTE’s Primetime.

This will all be achieved by a magic called ‘efficiency’. Each cow will produce more milk and fewer greenhouse gases, so more cows will still mean the same emissions.