Tag Archives: WWF

2021 WWF / DMI ‘Net Zero’ report inflated GHG baseline for total U.S. milk production

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By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, Feb. 26, 2021

EAST EARL, Pa. – At a time when dairy producers are in the fight of their lives to prove how sustainable they already are in providing nutrient-dense milk and beef from the much-maligned bovine, they can ill-afford publication of overblown climate data on total U.S. milk production. And yet…

Dairy producers have unknowingly paid to applaud, promote and contribute to inflated baseline greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data via their own national dairy checkoff.

The Jan. 27 report, produced by DMI’s former MOU partner World Wildlife Fund (WWF), established a GHG baseline that has been confirmed and admitted as being mathematically wrong by an order of magnitude — 10 times greater than reality.

So egregious is the mathematical error inflating dairy’s baseline GHG emissions, that the entire WWF / DMI Net Zero Initiative ‘Dairy Scale for Good’ case study is now questionable in the significance of its reductions because the significance of the starting-point — the ‘problem’ — is overblown.

Since receiving the DMI press release and copy of the 14-page white paper on Feb. 1, we have been reviewing it. The WWF Markets Institute ‘white paper’ entitled An Environmental and Economic Path Toward Net Zero Dairy Farm Emission” has been widely promoted by DMI. 

Its case-study model was concerning to us initially because of its narrow representation of comparable dairy farms and grand claims about what is needed for large farms to be “net zero in five years” and selecting pilot farms for the industry to prove-out the model.

Yes, the report was produced by WWF, but in a recent Pa. Dairy Summit breakout session on “What dairy checkoff has done for you lately,” DMI president Barb O’Brien confirmed that the WWF report is being promoted because it supports the Net Zero Initiative launched by DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.

More importantly, she said the report is a “spreadsheet exercise” that will now be piloted on large farms by Dairy Scale for Good executive director Caleb Harper to see if the exercise can be “proved out.” An exercise, mind you, that has inflated the significance of the problem it is purporting to solve. 

In the same “What has dairy checkoff done for you lately” session at Dairy Summit, O’Brien said the data for the WWF white paper came from DMI input!

This emperor has no clothes. This dog doesn’t walk. This math does not “add up.” 

We are talking about the math that established the baseline GHG for all U.S. milk production used to determine the significance of the reduction from the ‘Net Zero’ dairy case study, a 3000-cow Fair Oaks-style dairy, that does not represent reality for many large and small dairies in various geographies. But at the same time overblows the level of the problem everyone else contributes to.

We weren’t the only ones struggling to make sense of the WWF / DMI white paper. A Pennsylvania dairy producer did the math using his bulk tank calibration conversions and brought the “immense blunder” to Farmshine’s attention. 

He was concerned about what this means for all dairy farms, stating in an email: “Why would anyone set a specific reduction amount when it can be demonstrated that the starting amount is wrong? DMI may wish to partner with someone with better math skills.”

The producer who wished to remain anonymous pointed out to us in his email – and we agree – that DMI may want to get their facts straight with a Net Zero Initiative that shows this level of baseline blunder. In fact, as the producer observes: “If the objective (as indicated in the WWF report) is for a 10% reduction from the inflated number, then hallelujah! The EPA numbers show a 90% reduction (already — across all milk production).”

Could the inflated GHG baseline have been intentional? After all, that inflated number is instrumental in bolstering the significance of a prescribed ‘case study’ reduction for which pilot farms are being selected to ‘prove out’.

An inflated baseline harms all dairy farms because it does not reflect the truth about how small the GHG emissions really are – already — for all milk produced on all U.S. dairy farms, under sustainable dairy farm conditions, right now!

In fact, when the Pa. dairy farmer who alerted us to the math error supplied his figuring for the CO2 equivalent (CO2e), his figures put the inflation error at 8.6 times greater than reality.

We sent a media inquiry asking GHG expert Dr. Frank Mitloehner of University of California-Davis CLEAR Center to review the WWF report and let us know what we might be missing in our calculations.

Dr. Mitloehner agreed that the starting point for GHG emissions in the WWF / DMI report was off by “an order of magnitude”. 

We asked him for his expert review and on Wednesday, we received a copy of a letter Dr. Mitloehner sent to WWF. In it, Mitloehner references the white paper’s value of 2.3T pounds (trillion pounds) of GHGs as the emissions from total U.S. milk production (page 7 of the WWF white paper).

“When I went over your calculations, I noticed some potential errors. My own estimate arrived at GHG emissions that are about 10 times lower than the number you reported,” Mitloehner wrote in his letter to WWF.

“Assuming the conversion of the annual milk production in 2018, using Thoma’s equation, into kg fat-and-protein corrected milk (FPCM) and then changing to gallons of FPMC, my calculated values come out to be 287,453,374,279 (287 billion) pounds (not 2.3 trillion pounds),” 

GHG expert Dr. Mitloehner writes. “Using GHG emissions of 10.6 lb CO2e per gallon FPCM, the total GHG come out to 2.87453E+11 lbs CO2e. To simplify the number using the Tera unit prefix, the GHG would be 0.287T pounds CO2e, which differs significantly from the aforementioned value (in the WWF white paper) of 2.3T pounds.”

In his letter, Mitloehner emphasized that the WWF / DMI report was “very informative and points toward solutions that are attainable and scalable, both of which are considerations desperately needed as we look at feeding people in a sustainable manner.”

However, he adds, “I do worry that if the calculations are incorrect, it could lead to misinformation and confusion.”

Along with a copy of his letter to WWF, Dr. Mitloehner included in his email reply to Farmshine the WWF response thanking him for bringing it to their attention. 

“There is indeed an error and we are in the process of fixing it and will have an updated PDF soon and will share it with you, and we will fix the links on the website,” wrote Katherine Devine, director of business case development for WWF Markets Institute.

Once again, a climate-focused NGO with global goals against animal agriculture overblows GHG emissions from cattle, in this case dairy cattle. But this time, it happened within the full purview of mandatory producer-funded dairy checkoff.

 The reason this is a big deal is that it is being used to set policy. The DMI and WWF press releases point to this report as being based on “stakeholder” data that can “demonstrate what is possible with the right practices, incentives and policies within five years.”

For the four weeks, this WWF report has been applauded and promoted by DMI, using case study data that was contributed by DMI. 

The question now is how did this happen and what will the retraction look like? 

Will anyone stand up for the sustainability of dairy farms as they are – today – for an accurate baseline of their real contribution to GHG emissions, especially per unit of nutrition provided? Where is logic in the overall equation?

Dr. Mitloehner indicated in his email reply that the overblown GHG baseline does not completely jeopardize the paper’s ideas about strategies that can position dairy as a climate solution. However, when the starting math is off by 10 times the true amount, it becomes obvious the larger truth is that dairy is a small emitter and should already be paid for so-called ‘ecosystem services.’ Why is checkoff not pounding that message?

While dairy farms across the U.S. should be applauded and promoted for the reality of how small their emissions are while producing nutritious food for all of us – already – every day, DMI got its focus set on spreadsheet modeling to tell one story when the truth is they could have used accurate numbers to tell a better story.

Instead, the baseline GHG math error undermines the current sustainable performance of all dairy production while putting on a pedestal the Net Zero model based on a 3000-cow Fair Oaks-style dairy with no heifers on site, 80% of forages grown on site, a ration that is 70% forage, and a methane digester mix made up of more than 50% co-digestion of other waste streams.

In fact, some producers of similar size who have inquired about this model, have hit brick walls in having their sustainable practices even considered to  show levels of reduction. No wonder! The starting math for the WWF / DMI model is inflated and banks on that inflation to achieve the “significant” reduction in farmgate pounds of CO2 equivalent (CO2e).

While the math is muddy, the problem here is clear. Cattle as contributors to climate change continue to get a black eye by those inside and outside the industry overblowing the problem to push a marketing agenda that fits a global transformation narrative.

(POSTCRIPT NOTE: Just this morning after Farmshine went to press, we notice the PDF file at the WWF link (previously called ‘version 9’) has been quietly replaced with a file noted in its name as ‘v.10’. In it, on page 7, the total U.S. milk production GHG baseline of 268 billion pounds CO2e now appears where 2.3 trillion pounds once stood. No other change or discussion. We’ll be following up to do comparisons of how the smaller baseline impacts the significance of sweeping transformation, including calculations per unit of nutrition vs. other foods in next week’s Farmshine.)

Connecting dots:

— The January 27, 2021 WWF white paper uses a Fair Oaks-style 3000-cow Net Zero dairy case study. The WWF report was produced by the WWF Markets Institute and was written by WWF Markets Institute senior vice president Jason Clay, Ph.D.

— Clay heads the WWF Markets Institute Thought Leader group. According to the WWF Markets Institute website, the Thought Leader group members include DMI Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy Sustainability Alliance chairman Mike McCloskey of Fair Oaks fame, along with May 2020 DMI hire Caleb Harper serving as Dairy Scale for Good executive director.

— Harper started with DMI a few weeks after his departure from the MIT Media Lab under a cloud of press reports raising questions about aspects of donations, performance and environmental compliance within his digital food research project at MIT. For three years prior to being hired by DMI, Harper served on the board of directors for New Harvest, an organization that supports research and promotion of cell-cultured fake animal protein with the tagline ‘meat, milk and eggs without animals.’

— According to a Sept. 2019 Chronicles of Higher Education article, Harper’s father Steve was a grocery executive, senior vice-president of marketing and fresh product development and procurement from 1993 to 2010 for the H-E-B supermarket chain in Texas and northern Mexico and stayed on part-time through 2012 before retiring.

— During that time, H-E-B became the first and longstanding partner of Mike and Sue McCloskey when they were dairying in New Mexico and founded Select Milk Producers. Sue explained this in her presentation at the 2020 Pennsylvania Dairy Summit, that the H-E-B alliance was instrumental and painted a picture of how it progressed to dairy’s future as seen by DMI’s Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy and its food industry partners, with Mike serving as chair of the Sustainability Alliance.

— According to a June 15, 2014 Houston Chronicle article, the McCloskeys worked with H-E-B, supplying their milk and in 1996 producing Mootopia, the ultrafiltered milk H-E-B store brand and pre-cursor to fairlife, now solely owned by Coca Cola.

— During a February 2021 zoom presentation at the 2021 Pa. Dairy Summit, DMI’s vice president of sustainability Karen Scanlon confirmed that DMI had an MOU partnership with WWF from the inception of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy in 2008-09 and that this partnership opened doors with companies on shared priorities over the past decade. The MOU between DMI and WWF expired in 2019 and was not renewed, but Scanlon confirmed that a close relationship and exchange of information continues.

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Revealing look at what’s behind the curtain

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Having attended urban food conferences and working with people influencing the locally produced discussions, I have found that the quest by rank and file consumers is for real, local, minimally processed foods. By kowtowing to the global scheme for sustainability, we miss what is behind that curtain: the billionaire food system takeover agenda and the vegan activists who propel it and will quite simply never be satisfied.

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, May, 2019

Getting into a social media conversation with anti-animal activists is a truly educational experience. I’ve occasionally been in these back-and-forth discussions before, and didn’t have much tolerance for them.

Over the weekend, however, a simple ‘tweet’ on Twitter thanking farmers, ranchers and veterinarians for everything they do to deal with the tough decisions and situations on the real biological side of agriculture turned into a flurry of vegan responses that took me down a road I did not enjoy traveling.

They were mean, nasty, ridiculing and extreme. Instead of returning their insults, I came back with logic, reality, explanations that would satisfy most people. Instead, it fueled their attacks, and soon they were crawling out of the woodwork to do a pile-on tackle upon every tenet of animal care and agriculture many of us hold dear.

They posted links to flawed studies, talked about doctors telling patients to ditch dairy for causing a host of diseases. They harped on climate change, land and water resources, detailing how they believe cattle are ruining “the ecosystem.”

Quite often I found myself telling them that I respect their freedom to choose their dietary path, but cannot respect their attempts to push this on others or demean and degrade my choices.

Each time I provided a scientific piece of information or a link, they either ignored it and went on to some other seemingly crazy rationale or they called me an animal agriculture ‘shill.’

That word ‘shill’ was used over and over again. It’s their favorite insult. A shill is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “an accomplice of a hawker, gambler or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others.”

They accused me of profiting off the misery of animals, of being selfish in destroying THEIR planet (as if it only belongs to them). They wrongly described so much about dairy and livestock farming that it was difficult to hold my figurative tongue and respond in 134 characters or less per tweet another side to the story they were portraying.

In fact, they were against pastured cattle, saying the grasslands should be re-forested and re-wilded. Their agenda became crystal clear in every detail.

What I am explaining here is just the tip of the iceberg, so I sat back and read their tweets, their links, their self-congratulatory tweets to each other as they presumed they had gotten the best of me.

What they didn’t know is that I was studying their game. I chose to respond only to tweets that I felt other ‘watchers’ could benefit in hearing a logical response. I avoided the insult name-game and did not go back repeatedly on one thought for more abuse, but kept my tweets to a minimum, refusing to be goaded.

So, by now you’re reading this wondering, what’s my point? We already know the 3% of the population that are truly vegan anti-animal activists are crazy, why ‘entertain’ them?

Here’s the point. The entire dialog began with a tweet of gratefulness for the less than 2% of our population taking care of food animals, and the veterinarians that are part of that deal. Simple. Gratefulness. There must have been a buzz word in that tweet that sent me to them through social media algorithms, who knows?

But here’s the larger point. They are armed with pseudo-science being published in even some of the more respected and mainstream news, financial and scientific journals.

They have a world view that is increasingly making its way a few steps at a time into U.S. and global dietary policy, environmental policy, regulations and the like.

But here’s an eye-opener. They will never be satisfied. Nothing, I mean nothing, we can do will appease this fringe in its march to infiltrate our institutions. Their less aggressive counterparts – HSUS, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and others – are already internally working within government and industry.

It goes like this: “Work with us, take the steps we want you to take, and we’ll support you and hold you up as an acceptable animal ag industry.”

Baloney. The old adage of give them an inch and they’ll take a mile pertains here.

This is why I am concerned about the direction of our industry organizations, including the dairy checkoff with its multitude of new initiatives on diet and sustainability and animal care aimed at working with the enemy to somehow get a pass – a social license to exist.

But it’s not the non-governmental organizations, the NGOs, that give us the pass to exist, it is the consumer. Our consumers are being swayed bit by bit by the radical fringe only because we allow them to be. When we validate these NGOs with our internal strategies to “work together with external organizations” we endanger our ability to stand up for truth.

Should we be doing all we can to improve animal care and environmental practices? Sure!

Should we be talking about these improvements? Definitely.

But should we be aligning with the polished and refined versions of this fringe believing they offer us passage with their stamp of approval? No.

Why? Because they will never be satisfied. Not until we stop breeding dairy and beef cows. Not until we stop eating meat and drinking milk. Not until every farm produces plant-based diet alternatives and every pasture is re-wilded to its un-managed natural state.

They will not be satisfied.

Instead, we should be educating the other 97% of the population about the realities of animal biology. A Pennsylvania veterinarian on facebook is doing that. She gets real with her facebook posts and school presentations, and it’s refreshing.

The more we sugar-coat what we do to appease people who will never be satisfied, the more of our mile they will take because we have given them that inch.

This brings me to my next point. Dig below the surface of these fringe folks on Twitter and the organizations our industry is partnering with to build so-called consumer trust, what they advocate for, ultimately, is the world view of billionaires like Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and the other Silicon Valley investors in fake meat and fake dairy.

Their view of the world is one that relies on their food technology to replace what farmers, ranchers and veterinarians do every day. It’s not that they don’t trust farmers and ranchers, it’s that they believe the world should have fewer cattle, rely more on plant and lab-created proteins, and yes, surprise, they will profit on their patient capital investment to provide that alternative.

There is an organization few know about that I have been researching, called Breakthrough Energy. On their website, they list the ventures and you can see their world view mapped out in great detail. At first blush, it appears to be related to energy, but look deeper, they want to change the food system. The investors and founding members are a who’s who of the rich and famous, including the big tech owners and CEOs of everything from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon, to big political investors like George Soros and Tom Steyer.

Meanwhile, our consumers live in the real world. And it is the millennials who are changing the consumer quotient as they are funneled into the new planetary lifestyle with the subtle steady drumbeat of fear from our educational institutions.

Animal ag needs strange bedfellows to get their story to be heard; but at the same time, those strange bedfellows are changing our story, leading to programs that will determine who and how to farm.

It’s time for local and regional alliances to be built more strongly than ever. It’s time to partner with rank-and-file consumers, not the big NGOs with billionaire wishes fueling them. It’s time to activate our communities to realize they, too, are being fooled and threatened.

In other words, we need to find other bedfellows – groups and organizations we can rely upon – not the self-proclaimed ‘cool kids’ who say we can be ‘in the club’ if we bend until we break. Because what they want, really, is for us to break.

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