The ‘re-engineering of the cow’ that is sparked a brand new eco-war: There’s much more Bovaer within the meals chain than anybody realised…and it has sparked an epic battle amongst buyers and farmers

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 UK farms this week, I have seen how the UK’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.

They had started poking around the Bovaer smallprint and had spotted ingredients like silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and a compound called 3-nitrooxypropanol (known as ‘3-NOP’) which US and Japanese authorities have linked to reduced male fertility. It also comes with warnings about wearing masks and protective clothing. Within hours, social media was at full froth with assorted conspiracy theories, many of them coming from the same people who campaigned against the Covid vaccine.

Some reported a connection to the US gazillionaire Bill Gates, who has a separate research programme on the perils of bovine belching. Videos started appearing of worried consumers pouring milk down the loo, followed by clamours for a boycott.

On Monday, the issue gained parliamentary traction when the Reform MP Rupert Lowe – who farms 865 acres of sheep and barley – announced that he would not be consuming anything from an animal fed on Bovaer.

At the same time, it emerged that there was even more of the stuff in the food chain. M&S acknowledged that it had been using the very same additive since April in the 40 farms which supply its milk. This was part of a new – and, yes, ‘exciting’ – plan to ‘turbo-charge our drive to be a Net Zero business by 2040’. Its £1 million Bovaer initiative would save 11,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, except that M&S had omitted any use of the word ‘Bovaer’.

As social media has become more fervent by the day, dairy farmers who have had nothing to do with the new compound now feel compelled to denounce the additive. Many have registered on a website listing Bovaer-free suppliers. Some have told me that they are uncomfortable abandoning their fellow farmers, but that they have little choice.

The National Farmers Union now finds itself defending both sides while the editor of Farmers Weekly has lamented that ‘solidarity in farming is a mile wide, but only an inch thick’.

Adding to the sense of panic is the lack of a counter-attack. The supermarkets have all run for cover and decline to comment when I call. Ministers and officials at Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) steer me to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) which states: ‘Bovaer has undergone rigorous safety assessments and is approved for use in Great Britain.’

For now, everyone is leaving a shell-shocked Arla to do the talking. More used to fielding sensible calls about milk yields from Farmers Weekly or The Grocer, this respected 143-year-old co-operative finds itself propelled on to the News at Ten and national headlines. At the same time, it must fend off the massed ranks of the cyber-madhouse.

‘The information spreading online surrounding our link to Bill Gates and the safety of Bovaer is completely false,’ says a spokesman. ‘Arla would never compromise on the quality or high standards of the milk we produce.’

Meanwhile, a statement has landed from dms-firmenich attacking ‘mistruths and misinformation’ in Britain. ‘We would like to bring you the facts,’ it continues, making the point that Bovaer is served up in tiny amounts, has been 15 years in the making over 150 trials, has been approved for sale in 68 countries and is ‘fully metabolised’ by the cow, which means it never makes it into the milk. As for protective clothing, it says, that is standard when handling this sort of thing in bulk.

The debate has now become a new front in the culture wars, breaking down on predictable lines. Look at Twitter, now known as X, and you will be inundated with claims that Bovaer is ‘poison’ as hysterical fingers point to all the usual suspects (from ‘Davos’ to US investment firm Blackrock).

However, scroll through the new wokey-nicey alternative platform Bluesky, and you will find plenty of voices attacking these people as scaremongering ‘idiots’ while suggesting we should all go vegan. Soya lattes all round.

Across the board are those simply asking why we should be messing with the digestive system of the cow, which produces the things we feed our children, instead of, say, the innards of the average car.

On the other hand, what is wrong with tweaking an animal’s diet to stop emissions? We once had a family dog with an eye-watering flatulence problem until the vet recommended throwing charcoal biscuits into his bowl. Job done.

Bovaer has received a clean bill of health from the government, from media organisations like BBC Verify and an editorial in the Times. However, at the same time, there are plenty of well-informed agnostics. The Soil Association, the arbiter of all things organic, says it will reject any product with Bovaer in the mix. Patrick Holden, an organic pioneer and former adviser to the King, accuses Arla and its partners of addressing the symptoms rather than the cause and ‘re-engineering the cow’.

Paul Tompkins, chairman of the NFU’s dairy board, tells me he would be ‘very happy’ to drink milk from a Bovaer cow but would not give it to his own 450-strong herd in the Vale of York in the present circumstances. He is worried this whole business has cast doubts on the reputation of British produce at a time when farming and food security have enough challenges.

‘I have unequivocal confidence in the safety of the milk,’ he says. ‘But once the consumer has a certain perception, we need to respect the fact that they might be suspicious.’ He also questions the efficacy of Bovaer. ‘Many people would like to see further evidence that it will deliver on the claims being made.’

He was among those present at a Defra meeting under the last (Tory) government where the then-farming minister, Mark Spencer, was so impressed by Bovaer’s potential impact on emissions that he wanted to make it mandatory on all farms.

‘The NFU’s position was that this is completely unacceptable,’ adds Mr Tompkins. ‘We will never have a mandatory feed additive for our cows.’ However, Defra tells me that it is government policy to have ‘compulsory’ methane-suppressants fed to all the UK’s 9.6million cows by 2030. In which case, ministers can expect yet another showdown with the farmers in the near future.

For I find passionate opposition to Bovaer on my travels across the countryside. ‘I wouldn’t touch it. They’re tampering with the environment,’ says Ray Brown, 64, at the delightful Bidlea Dairy café on the family’s 600-acre farm near Holmes Chapel, Cheshire.

In recent years, they have built this into an award-winning producer of milk, cream, butter, ice cream and cheese which sells to farm shops, milk rounds and convenience stores right across the North West. And now things have suddenly got even busier.

‘The phone hasn’t stopped with people wanting to know if we use Bovaer and then, when they know we don’t, asking if we can supply them,’ says Ray’s son, Adam, 37. He runs the dairy side while younger brother Ryan, 31, farms the cows. It is an impressive family success story.

Having struggled in the early days of the Covid pandemic, the family decided to branch out into ice cream and immediately started winning prizes. Farm shops started stocking their other products and the workforce has risen from three to 40.

But Ray recalls something else from the pandemic: ‘Remember how the planes stopped flying? Well, I can tell you the cows didn’t stop farting. But the air was suddenly a lot cleaner. So why now pick on the cows?’

It is a similar story in Barlaston, Staffordshire, where William Seabridge, 47, receives constant calls from people wanting to know if his 400 cows are on Bovaer. He has no intention of using it and, besides, points out that the additive could only work on herds which are fed indoors, whereas his graze all over his 550 acres.

‘What would you do? Go round sprinkling it on the grass? And why are we blaming the animals instead of the human race for this problem?’ he asks.

Like the Browns, Mr Seabridge is all for innovation. He has borrowed a huge sum to install a new milking system and to build the Barlaston Milk Barn, a self-service farm shop where people refill glass bottles with milk fresh from the cow while vending machines dispense honey, cakes and eggs. He currently has 45,000 glass bottles in circulation while the rest of his milk goes to a high quality cheese producer.

Equally, Bovaer has its fans. Down near Abingdon in Oxfordshire, I meet David Christensen, 56, who farms 600 cows on an immaculate farm. I find his herd politely queuing up to rub against an automated back-scrubber.

He has been an Arla supplier for many years and, while he is not part of the trial, is wholly supportive. ‘I always go back to the science and there is really good science around this product,’ he says, adding that he has been ‘more than surprised by the reaction’.

He says that the welfare of his – obviously contented – cows is paramount and that he would be entirely happy to feed them Bovaer, but for the fact that he, too, has a grazing herd. The only challenge would be getting the additive inside them.

‘I always value the diversity of opinion among farmers,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘But I am worried about our attitude to science. We are in a tricky place and we are all going to have to do our bit.’

He says it is too early to say whether all this will blow over or will have a major impact on sales across the Arla brand. He accepts it will hit every member of the co-operative if it does.

At the other end of the argument, Rupert Lowe says that the Government must recognise that the public are not going to accept climate change as an excuse for ‘tampering with healthy food’.

The MP for Great Yarmouth adds: ‘Ruminants have been developing for tens of thousands of years. So you cannot just start messing around with them using an unproven substance.’

The debate over methane suppressants is not going to go away. For now, though, it is hard to see any other British milk producer wanting to sprinkle a single spoonful of Bovaer in the trough.

I can see one solution, though. Instead of re-engineering the cow, why not just reconfigure Bovaer for the fuel tank of that innovative new Jaguar?