New Chief Science Advisor spruiks methane tech, but what about the ruminant microbiome?
In New Zealand, the money flows for methane mitigation – not for the risks from methane mitigation.
New Zealand’s new Chief Science Advisor (CSA) and ongoing Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) CSA, Dr John Roche, has a PhD in animal nutrition.
RNZ’s Eloise Gibson’s Fieldays report announced ‘Farmers expected to come on board as methane science advances’. Eloise Gibson reported that:
The Prime Minister’s new chief science adviser believes farmers will come around to technologies that cut their emissions.
Some farming groups oppose inventions like methane vaccines, but John Roche says farmers will accept change once they see the products work.
Farmers have long been concerned that technologies could interfere with livestock health and lower productivity. Productivity is not just milk production, it relates to general livestock health, reproduction (repro) rates and the least possible expenditure on veterinarian costs. Farms are complex systems, and it takes a lot to be resilient, year after year, come rain or shine.
As Gibson reported,
‘Beef + Lamb say methane emissions shouldn’t be priced because it would force farmers to use products such as methane vaccines and other technology when they shouldn’t have to.’
Bang on.
MPI’s multimillion dollar conflict of interest
Because there is a nasty little conflict of interest that no-one is talking about.
The Ministry of Primary Industry (MPI) have ploughed millions of dollars into a proposed methane-lowering dollar joint venture (JV). MPI has a 50% stake in , with ten shareholders including Fonterra, ANZCO Foods, Rabobank, Ravensdown, Silver Fern Farms, Synlait, the a2 Milk Company, ANZ Bank New Zealand and ASB Bank holding the other 50%.
The investors read like a whose who of big agribusiness. Something tells me that the investors will be quite content if the government, in future, adopts a neat little combination carrot and stick policies to compulsorily require farmers to submit to methane lowering technologies.
What does this mean? Fascism comes to mind. But maybe I am jumping the gun.
The investors are onto a sure thing. Alert CEO’s observed in COVID just how willing the government was to sign a secret deal with a corporation to mandate a novel technology, a biologic drug that was designed to instruct your cells to reproduce an inflammatory protein, in order to get the job done.
There’s a precedent for a novel technology where trials were truncated and the end points were inadequate for evaluating the outcomes the intervention was purported to achieve.
Roche has been MPI’s CSA since 2018. I believe he continues to chair MPI’s Science Forum and Science Governance Group. He should be intimately aware of the MPI’s little JV.
Roche, as CSA has now been promoted to a front position to manufacture consent for the technology the institution that he is intimately involved in has invested in.
Chief Science Advisors: guiding science—or gilding government policy?
I’m concerned that the chief science advisor position has little to do with real science advice, and more to do with promulgating consent for predetermined policy.
So, when we see Roche at the Fieldays happily peddling methane technologies including vaccines, he is not exactly an impersonal arbiter. I don’t believe he gave a talk on the dozens of controlled trials that they are undertaking to ensure that methane lowering technologies don’t lower productivity (it is safe) and to ensure that methane is meaningfully lowered (it is effective).
It’s increasingly looking like the chief science adviser position may be just a political frontispiece, in place to legitimate the government’s science claims.
The prior CSA’s reputation became tarnished by having to push the government fluoride-in-drinking water propaganda. This propaganda became the ‘science’ used to uphold ‘proof’ that fluoride-in-drinking water is a good thing. No published papers, no critical peer review, just a white paper without a methodology and a yawning absence of experts in neurodevelopmental endocrinology.
Where are presentations to farmers showing long-term trials?
It’s more than a little eye-raising. With a PhD in animal nutrition Roche would be well aware of the function of the ruminant microbiome, its role in nutrient uptake, absorption and conversion.
Do New Zealand ruminant livestock farmers deserve long-term trials to determine what happens to the ruminant micriobiome, as a consequence of the input or drug that is designed to reduce methane emissions?
We’re not talking about test-rodents with a two-year shelf life. We’re talking about dairy cows that cost $1,800 each. We’re talking about intergenerational productivity where a healthy cow will live 8-10 years. Most commonly, each season, she’ll calve and a farmer might expect a 20% ‘empty’ rate off an average herd. Therefore, the best calves will be selected as replacement stock.
Not inconsequently, we can be fairly sure that the Gene Technology Bill is being rushed through, with no evidence of safety, to assist MPIs investment.
All drugs have side effects.
Here is the unfortunate paradox: MPI and ten of New Zealand’s largest agribusiness corporations are part of the machinery that would inevitably usher farmers to accept the methane drugs – but it is the farmers that are on the pointy end. If their herd repro rate drops in the next 5 years, who bears the brunt of that cost? Costs that would be negligible to Big Agribusiness, but existential to the everyday farmer.
What controlled trials have been undertaken either for dietary shifts or for drugs? Is there anything beyond 60-90 day feeding trials? Where are the trials parameters looking at reproductive health?
Yet it seems the CSA just wants to push farmers to an end point that is lacking any basis for safety.
‘Currently, there remains a gap in the literature for an updated comprehensive and systemic review and meta-analysis on the effects of CH4 mitigation strategies on the ruminant microbiome.’
The risks from methane drugs or feed inputs do not exclusively revolve around maintaining feed efficiency and energy production. There’s a big chance these technologies will target microbial communities.
There is a general lack of understanding of how rumen microbial ecosystems work. Ninety-five percent of a dairy-cow’s rumen is bacterial, and archea, which are mainly methane-producing, are a much smaller population. Protozoa makes up half the biomass while fungi can make up 5-20% of the biomass.
If a dairy cow’s gastrointestinal flora is disrupted, there can be acute problems, such as bloat or ruminal acidosis. But risk from altering the microbiome for the purposes of lowering methane emissions may result in chronic, difficult to detect harm. The greater metabolism and the relationship between microbiome function and fertility, disease resistance and productivity could be affected.
We’re used to recognising side effects from drugs. If you end up with expensive livestock where their health has declined within five years, their productivity tapers off earlier than previous generations, as a consequence of the methane reducing input – that’s a side effect.
But the problem is there is no scientist in New Zealand with the freedom to research this over the 5-20 years required to understand the intergenerational impact.
The antinomies accumulate…
Gibson’s article raises another quiet point. The politics of global trade. Fonterra perhaps believe that by reducing dairy emissions they can enhance supply chains with Big Agribusiness like Nestlé. If we look at market growth, the crappy processed food market is not doing well, while organic foods are doing a hell of a lot better. It’s a pity New Zealand’s CSA isn’t talking about that at the Fieldays.
The pious decarbonisation emissions reduction game is faltering. Blackrock is an influential institutional investor and actively pressures companies to decarbonise. But it is what Blackrock is doing rather than saying, that is important. The behemoth has recently teamed up with the Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) to deploy $30 billion to AI focussed data centres and power supply upgrades for massive gigawatt-scale installations.
But I digress while I have a coffee with delicious locally grown 50:50 grass-fed milk and cream.
The Ministry of Innovation, Employment and Innovation (MBIE) is fast-tracking the Gene Technology Bill to lower the barriers to market for the technologies it funds, while MPI has invested in these same technologies. MBIE have then somehow refrained from any analysis of risk should the legislation be enacted. Such a game.
Research proposals that potentially contradict government agendas will not get funded. MBIE’s science policies inhibit basic research that might ultimately contradict MPI and MBIE’s agendas. There are no funding streams for long-term research to examine the safety of the proposed gene technology legislation, the benefits of carbon and nutrient cycling from livestock, the role of non-human drivers of climate shifts, and the long-term impact of methane-lowering ruminant microbiomes. The groups with the funding are there to innovate and justify that innovation.
Resilience in livestock – fertility and productivity is a long-game. We know, for example, that feedlotted beef cattle are more susceptible to gut acidosis, dysbiosis and systemic inflammation. Their rumens are more intensively colonised with antimicrobial resistance genes than in grassfed beef cattle. Ironically – feedlot cattle are inseminated from cattle that are bred for optimum fertility – high nutrition. Effectively the reproductive robustness is outsourced, and therefore externalised.
Can Kiwi farming families with big mortgages, externalise their risks if the methane drugs/vaccine/feed erodes livestock health over a ten year period?
How do we know that their livestock, one of their biggest investments, will remain resilient?
Does the chief science advisor know what ‘resilience’ means to farmers?
In 2021 Dr Roche as Chief Science Advisor (CSA) of the Ministry of Primary Industries was a co-author of a paper Dealing with misinformation in the digital age with Stuart McNaughton, the CSA of the Ministry of Education. Somewhat surprisingly, the paper did not discuss how we arrive at knowledge, the role of the scientific process, and the way facts are negotiated. The paper did not look at the role of powerful interests in setting aside uncomfortable knowledge that contradicts their principles and priorities. It did not consider the role of institutional interests in shaping how scientists set values and parameters, in how and what they can research.
We can only ‘trust’ science if research follows transparent and accountable processes (ditto for democracy), and findings can be challenged. But this is not what CSAs seem to be focusing on.
Instead, the Dealing with Disinformation paper latched on to the role of misinformation and disinformation and lurched into a discussion on risks and resilience, and then waded into strange psychobabble around the relationship between personal control, beliefs and emotions. This patronising (and increasingly stereotypical) approach, appeared designed to embellish the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC)’s ‘Strengthening Resilience to Disinformation’ brainchild, which exploded during the pandemic. The government literature nudges populations to be resilient (fall in line) but does not nudge populations to explore the scientific basis of government decisions.
Roche and McNaughton’s paper reflects the modus operandi. Recruitment of ‘experts’ such as academics and media releases that craft information that consistently provides a weight of evidence to support a current agenda (but provide no funding for science which might contradict it).
Never to ask, how do we know a fact, or even a truth, how do we question it – and get to the bottom of a controversy.
If a farmer criticises the so-called consensus on man-made climate change (as opposed to changing weather patterns), the safety of GMOs and new gene editing technologies, they risk being accused of either being a luddite or embroiled in misinformation and disinformation.
Yet farmers will be carrot and stick forced to adopt the intervention that suits the policy goal.
Roche and McNaughton mimic hundreds of papers by academics in universities where ‘the people’ are misinformed or ignorant if they do not prescribe to the same belief as the person who is crafting the paper. But the political aims of the institutions that fund academics and media?
Roche and McNaughton refrained from exploring why a matter might be controversial and viewed with distrust. It’s a common tactic to accuse people of misinformation and disinformation when they are questioning the safety of technologies and policies that potentially directly impacts the resilience of people, the every-day small business and our kids, over the short or longer term.
It seems that the word ‘resilience’ in the context of Roche and McNaughton’s paper, concerns the capacity for people to quietly and obediently acquiesce to events and interventions.
‘The Treasury Living Standards and well-being frameworks refer to resilience generally as: capability to adapt positively and resourcefully to changing contexts and disturbances.’
Neither the Education CSA or the MPI CSA were able to talk about resilience in terms of a person remaining healthy and happy throughout life’s ups and downs, and being able to remain purposeful, productive and creative. The importance of independent scientific information in verifying (or not) the myriad of complex factors that intricately tie health to productivity – whether you have four tummies or one.
(This is wild when you think of the increasing rates of chronic illness and neurodevelopmental disorders in children, which directly impact the capacity of kids to learn and grow into happy adults.)
Chief Science Advisor to MPI and the Prime Minister attends the 2025 Fieldays and the only publicised discussion concerned a technology that his agency is directly invested in.
Roche could have talked about ideas, inventions and innovations brought to the Fieldays. He could have discussed scientifically relevant exhibits that could contribute to health, productivity and the environment. In the past I was an exhibitor involved in a small, innovative start-up. Believe me, you need all the help you can get. Not to be.
It seems that resilience has become yet word that has been turned upside down.
I hope farmers will be ‘resilient’ in raising attention to missing and undone science and not ‘resilient’ in just accepting bland assurances at face value.
Time to re-read 1984.
Come now, fewer words would suffice to describe the ideologically corrupted policy-based ‘scientivism’ forming the brittle backbone of UNEP/UNFCCC enforced policies designed to continue to precipitate destitution and deindustrialisation, enhance delegitimisation, and contribute to the over-arching agenda of depopulation?
Well said by anonymous! If the concerned receiving parties of each such vile doctrine, in this case the farmers, do not realise and have not learned by now, what the evil game is that is being played, we are all heading into a dismal future. The only mis- and disinformation comes from global corporations and globalist organisations. They fund universities and establish endless fictional research entities with fancy names to produce the fake science to support their doctrines. They corrupt or extort governments, which are supposed to actually serve the populace, but in the meantime have sadly, almost universally, been so corrupted by the globalist cabal, that they have fully subordinated to all those destructive doctrines like man made global warming, CO2 is harmful, having babies is a crime against the planet etc. They own all main stream and most social media so they can distribute their destructive misinformation babble to everyone willing to just absorb what is being fed to them 24/7. The good news is, it has no effect on the more awake, the number of which is increasing steadily, which are still curious and look for the real facts which are available far and wide. True science, true facts.
The covid script was identical and look what it did to the world because concerned parties like doctors, first responders, air crews, the military, teachers, the industrial organisations for individual segments of business, all complied instead of standing up and unanimously fight for the rights of their people! Most of these by nature of their levels of education and fields of activity surely had or could have obtained all the know-how and facts. Each of these groups alone could have put a stop to that tyranny, think if they would have all united! Instead unilateral compliance! This calamity has created the world we now live in with all the people suffering or dying and many not even being borne as a result of all the broadly discussed and documented vaccine injuries.
How much more harm needs to be created by these lunatic globalists which clearly hate all live on earth, human, fauna and flora, except their own, until ALL concerned groupings unite, stand up and do not comply? If united the power is always with the people not the lunatics!
We must all make this the meaning of: Capability to adapt positively and resourcefully to changing contexts and disturbances. Farmers PLEASE lead the way, thank you.