Climate change is making everything worse — including apparently threatening the dairy that makes our precious cheese.
In interviews with Science News, veterinary researchers and dairy farmers alike warned that changes to the climate that affect cows are impacting not only affects the nutritional value of the cheeses produced from their milk, but also the color, texture, and even taste.
Researchers from the Université Clermont Auvergne, which is located in the mountainous Central France region that produces a delicious firm cheese known as Cantal, explained in a new paper for the Journal of Dairy Science that grass shortages caused by climate change can greatly affect how cows’ milk, and the subsequent cheese created from it, tastes.
At regular intervals throughout a five-month testing period in 2021, the scientists sampled milk from two groups of cows, each containing 20 cows from two different breeds that were either allowed to graze on grass like normal or only graze part-time while being fed a supplemental diet that featured corn and other concentrated foods.
As the researchers found, the corn-fed cohort consistently produced the same amount of milk and less methane than their grass-fed counterparts — but the taste of the resulting milk products was less savory and rich than the grass-fed bovines.
Moreover, the milk from the grass-fed cows contained more omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for the heart, and lactic acids, which act as probiotics.
“Farmers are looking for feed with better yields than grass or that are more resilient to droughts,” explained Matthieu Bouchon, the fittingly-named lead author of the study.
Still, those same farmers want to know how supplementing their cows’ feed will change the nutritional value and taste, Bouchon said — and one farmer who spoke to Science News affirmed anecdotally, this effect is bearing out in other parts of the world, too.
“We were having lots of problems with milk protein and fat content due to the heat,” Gustavo Abijaodi, a dairy farmer in Brazil, told the website. “If we can stabilize heat effects, the cattle will respond with better and more nutritious milk.”
The heat also seems to be getting to the way cows eat and behave as well.
“Cows produce heat to digest food — so if they are already feeling hot, they’ll eat less to lower their temperature,” noted Marina Danes, a dairy scientist at Brazil’s Federal University of Lavras. “This process spirals into immunosuppression, leaving the animal vulnerable to disease.”
Whether it’s the food quality or the heat affecting the cows, the effects are palpable — or, in this case, edible.
“If climate change progresses the way it’s going, we’ll feel it in our cheese,” remarked Bouchon, the French researcher.
More on cattle science: Brazilian “Supercows” Reportedly Close to Achieving World Domination
