The Land of Future Milk and Honey

There's enough secrecy in the food supply already

This week, European dairy giant Arla announced it would be trialling a special food additive on its dairy cows in the UK to reduce their methane emissions. You may not have heard of Arla, but you definitely know at least one of its brands: Lurpak butter, Castello cheeses, Cravendale milk.

The proprietary food additive, called Bovaer, is said to reduce enteric greenhouse gas emissions—read: cow farts and burps—by as much as 27%. Bovaer is being added to forage for cows on 30 Arla farms across the UK, in partnership with big supermarket players Morrisons, Tesco and Aldi.

Arla wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% per kilo of milk, by 2030—a key date in the globalist calendar, owing to the emissions targets in the Paris Climate Accords and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The World Economic Forum’s famous thinkpiece was called “Welcome to 2030” for a reason. 2030 is a key “inflection point,” even a “tipping point.”

The aim, clearly, is for the Arla trial to lead to a rollout of Bovaer on a massive scale, across the corporation’s entire Europe-wide network of cooperative farms. There are 2,500 Arla farmers in the UK alone, and many thousands in other European nations. Arla is the sixth largest dairy corporation in the world, with an annual net revenue of nearly 14 billion euros.

Arla haven’t actually said anything about what Bovaer is, but you can look it up. Wikipedia will tell you. Bovaer is a mixture of silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and 3-nitrooxypropanol. It’s that last ingredient that’s key, because it impairs the enzyme methyl coenzyme M reductase, which is involved in the production of methane in the cow’s rumen. Bovaer isn’t GMO, but it is proprietary nonetheless, being manufactured by a Belgian-Swiss perfume company called DSM Firmenich.

Announcement of the initiative was greeted with widespread anger on social media, as consumers realised they would have to forego some of their favourite dairy brands if they want to be certain to avoid participating in Arla’s little experiment. Thousands of users tweeted their displeasure, and other dairy players, large and small, tweeted out messages of reassurance to their customers that they would not be adding Bovaer, or anything else like it, to their animal feed this winter or indeed ever.

Arla’s response was predictable. They and their supporters reached for familiar labels: “misinformation,” “baseless conspiracy theories” and so on. Reporting—like this piece from The Grocer—focused on “unsubstantiated claims the additive could be unsafe” and “wider conspiracy theories centring on Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum and climate change denial.”

It's true: DSM Firmenich isn’t owned by Bill Gates and has nothing to do with the lilac-sweater-wearing, poop-water-sniffing misanthrope who still hasn’t explained to anybody’s satisfaction his friendship with the late Jeffrey Epstein. But Gates money is being used to develop a methane-reducing feed additive that’s very like Bovaer.

Don’t get me wrong: Bovaer has been approved as safe in multiple countries and territories around the world. In 2021, it was approved for use in Brazil, and then Chile. The next year it was approved in the EU, and now this year the FDA and Canada’s regulators have given it the green light, too; although it’s unclear when or on what scale it will start being used in the US. In 2022, DSM Firmenich and US company Elanco Animal Health Inc. entered into an exclusive licensing agreement for Bovaer in the US, so we can be sure, at least, that it’s coming to US dairy farms at some point in the near future.

Of course, approval doesn’t mean a product—a food additive, a medicine, an industrial chemical—is safe. Just ask the children born with seal flippers instead of limbs because their mothers were given thalidomide. That went on for the better part of a decade before anything was done about it. After decades, the addition of fluoride to public water supplies across the US is about to be reversed, because of what we now know about fluoride’s effects on IQ and cognitive development.