Bovaer, a cow feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions, is facing public pushback despite industry assurances the additive is “safe and effective” and also key to reducing greenhouse emissions from dairy cows.
The feed additive works by suppressing the enzyme in a cow’s rumen that forms methane.
DSM-Firmenich, the company that created the additive, and Elanco, a U.S. drugmaker that markets the product in the U.S. and Canada, claim that feeding one tablespoon of Bovaer per lactating dairy cow per day can reduce methane emissions by about 30%. However, a meta-analysis of trials of the additive found a wider range of results.
According to Elanco, feeding Bovaer to 1 million cows for a year would be equivalent to eliminating more than 285,000 cars from the road for a year. The company also says that feeding Bovaer to cattle “has proven to be safe for animals, producers and consumers.”
Bovaer is available for sale in 68 countries and has been approved in the U.S., Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom (U.K.), where a major dairy giant, Arla Foods, recently initiated a trial of around 30 farms.
Several major U.K. supermarket chains are set to sell milk from Bovaer-fed cows.
However, in over 13,000 replies to Arla’s announcement on X about its Bovaer field trials, commenters slammed the company. Critics called the trial “insane” and filmed themselves pouring out Arla milk products. Some called for a boycott of the product.
We have just announced a new project with @Morrisons, @Tesco and @AldiUK to trial the use of feed additive, Bovaer® on ~30 Arla farms. Bovaer® can reduce emissions from cows by 27%, and this represents an amazing chance to reduce emissions on farm. #agriculture #climate pic.twitter.com/XaGmopwVJg
— Arla Foods UK (@ArlaFoodsUK) November 26, 2024
Critics also weighed in on TikTok and Facebook, where their posts have garnered millions of views, the BBC reported.
The public outcry has been so significant that DSM-Firmenich and Arla were compelled to make public statements about the alleged safety of the product. In the past 24 hours, British news outlets The Guardian, The Spectator and The Conversation published articles defending Bovaer and attempting to discredit its critics.
However, concerned scientists who spoke with The Defender said the product hasn’t been sufficiently studied to back up claims that it’s safe for cattle or humans. They also said there are better strategies to reduce methane emissions.
“All-in-all, there are warning flags that this drug could have harmful effects,” John Fagan, Ph.D., chief scientist of Health Research Institute, said. “It has been rushed to market without adequate testing for safety to the cows and to the people who drink the milk.”
Fagan said the drug could pose particular risks to children, who are more vulnerable because their detoxification systems haven’t yet matured.
“There is no need for highly toxic Bovear to be force-fed to cows to reduce methane emissions,” said André Leu, international director of Regeneration International, author and regenerative organic farmer.
“Most ruminant methane emissions come from Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs),” Leu said. “While methane and other greenhouse gas outputs are considerable for CAFOs and intensive industrial livestock production systems, this is not true for regenerative grazing livestock practices on pasture,” which could be a safer alternative for human and animal health.
‘Totally inadequate’ safety studies
Bovaer is made from chemicals silicon dioxide, propylene glycol and 3-nitrooxypropanol, or 3-NOP, a synthetic organic compound that prompted the U.K. Food Standards Agency’s warning last year about possible risks associated with handling the substance, Newsweek reported.
In its May approval letter, the FDA stated that 3-NOP, marketed as Bovaer, “is expected to pose low risk to humans or animals under the conditions of its intended use.” The agency said it has no public health concerns.
The FDA also noted that because Bovaer is intended to affect the structure or function of an animal’s body, it is technically a drug. However, the agency’s Center for Veterinary Medicine decided it wouldn’t make the product go through the typical requirements for new animal drug approval, which include adverse event reporting, labeling and other steps.
This was an unusual step, according to journalist Grace Hussain of Sentient, allowing the drugmaker to circumvent a lengthy and expensive typical review process for new animal drugs, which often takes nearly a decade.
Some industry-backed lawmakers are proposing to make this fast-tracked process standard for the entire feed industry.
This shouldn’t be a concern said Season Solorio, an Elanco spokesperson, who assured Newsweek that Bovaer is “safe” and “effective.”
“Bovaer — a safe, effective cattle feed ingredient — represents a key science-based opportunity,” Solorio said. “Bovaer is the most extensively studied and scientifically proven methane-reducing feed ingredient, with more than 15 years of research and more than 85 peer-reviewed published articles.”
But Leu said the safety studies that do exist have been “totally inadequate.”
“They are not long enough to determine common adverse health outcomes such as cancers, oxidative stress, endocrine disruption, reproductive problems, mutagenesis, and neurotoxicity,” Leu said. “No studies show that treated milk and meat products are safe for children.”
Leu recommended that until independent, peer-reviewed studies are published, people should avoid all meat and dairy products treated with Bovear.
Fagan said that Bovaer works by interfering with an important enzyme in the digestive function of cows. This can have long-term harmful effects, even though it has been shown that moderate doses of this chemical are not acutely toxic.
Studies so far have shown changes in liver enzymes, which suggest that long-term use of Bovaer could damage liver functioning, he added. In rat studies, non-cancerous tumors developed, but there was a risk they could become cancerous over time. “Longer studies are needed to assess whether they might become cancerous over time,” Fagan said.
Another safety concern, Fagan said, is that the drug has been approved only at very specific doses because it is clear there are risks with higher doses.
“This is risky in an agricultural setting in which agricultural laborers, not veterinarians, will be administering the drug,” Fagan said, “The risk of overdosing is much greater in this situation.”
He also criticized the regulatory decision to approve Bovaer feed additive instead of regulating it as a drug, saying it “increases significantly the risk that it will be handled less precisely to the detriment of the cow’s health.”
Administering the drug by simply adding it to feed also increases the risk of accidental higher dosing, Fagan said, which increases milk consumers’ risk of exposure to Bovear.
He added:
“Promoters of this drug claim that it is metabolized quickly and therefore will not be present in the final milk product. This ignores the key question of what are the metabolites and are they harmful either to the cow or to the person who drinks the milk? The answer is that that research has not been done.”
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Regenerative farming more effective than drugs at curbing emissions
Bovaer promoters, including Elanco, most mainstream press and the Environmental Defense Fund, argue that methane from livestock emissions poses a serious threat to the global climate and technical fixes like this drug are key to reducing those emissions.
However, research shows that most methane emissions come from leaking gas, oil wells and permafrost melt. What does come from cows, is emitted on CAFOs.
“The vast majority of these so-called miracle products being introduced are for CAFO animal production,” regenerative farmer Howard Vlieger told The Defender. “The issue isn’t the number of ruminant animals, but rather the manner in which the animals are raised. The CAFO production environment of beef and dairy animals is unnatural for these species of livestock.”
“Properly managed or adaptive grazing systems using cattle and other ruminant animals are not causing climate issues,” Vlieger said.
Leu said this is because “in ranch ecosystems, much of the methane emitted by animals on pasture is degraded by soil and water-based methanotrophic (methane-eating) microorganisms. These organisms do not exist in CAFOs, also known as factory farms, and intensive livestock systems — so 100% of their emissions go into the atmosphere.”
Methane has a short half-life of only 12 years and quickly decays into carbon dioxide, he added. Well-managed grazing systems provide the added benefit of sequestering that CO2 in the soil by photosynthesis — as numerous scientific studies, and Leu’s book, “Growing Life: Regenerating Farming and Ranching,” have shown.
A new carbon market
Elanco also promotes Bovaer as a way “for dairy farmers to be financially rewarded for reducing their dairy’s carbon footprint,” by joining Athian, the Elanco-funded carbon-credit market, which allows farmers who feed the drug to their cows to claim carbon credits.
Farmers can quantify their greenhouse emissions reductions achieved by using Bovaer through Elanco’s UpLook tool, which collects farm data to “track the progress of sustainability efforts.” Farmers can use the tool to certify carbon credits that they can then sell, the company said.
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What’s Bovaer got to do with Bill Gates?
Rather than taking concerns raised by scientists seriously, DSM-Firmenich has sought to discredit critiques of its product as “mistruths and misinformation,” and claimed that the product is “totally safe.”
The BBC, Newsweek and other outlets suggested that critics were engaged in “conspiracy theories” because some have made so-called “baseless claims” that Bill Gates was involved in the development of Bovaer.
While it’s true that Gates wasn’t involved in Bovaer, he has invested in a rival start-up, Rumin8, which develops a similar methane-reducing product.
Gates and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are also funding the development of a vaccine designed to reduce the methane produced by cattle.
They also are the financiers behind the Global Methane Hub, which is pushing for countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to reduce methane from fossil fuels and livestock by 30% between 2020 and 2030.
That pledge then functions as a justification in DSM-Firmenich’s promotional material and in the press for why products like Bovaer are necessary.
