Cooling Cows in a Warming World

The dairy industry has found an ingenious new way to respond to the climate crisis. Use more resources to keep producing milk.

Across parts of England, cows on dairy farms are being sprayed with water and blasted with industrial fans as prolonged heat and drought make conditions increasingly unbearable. Milk production is falling. Grass is dying. Winter feed is being dragged out months early.

The solution, apparently, is not to question a food system built around breeding millions of methane-producing animals into existence. It is to install cow showers. According to the BBC, dairy farms in the West of England are spending thousands of pounds on cooling systems as hotter, drier summers become increasingly common. One family near Chippenham spent £15,000 installing ventilation and sprinklers. Another farm near Swindon has ten industrial-scale fans running in its milking parlour.

The reason is simple.

The cows are too hot.

And when cows become heat-stressed, milk production falls.

Professor Nicola Cannon from the Royal Agricultural University told the BBC that production on some farms had dropped by around 20%. So we now have one of the more absurd feedback loops produced by animal agriculture.

Breed cows who produce large quantities of methane. Use huge areas of land to graze them and grow their food. Contribute to a warming climate. Watch temperatures rise and rainfall disappear. Then use more water and energy trying to stop those cows overheating so they can continue producing milk.

And call this resilience.

The Cows Are Paying for It

There is something revealing about the language surrounding stories like this. Milk production is down. Grass quality is down. Feed costs are up. Infrastructure costs are up. But behind every one of those agricultural measurements is a cow experiencing the heat.

The BBC report describes cows retreating from fields by midday because conditions have become too hot. They return to barns, stand under industrial fans and eat food that was supposed to be stored for winter. Other cows are sprayed with water to lower their body temperature.

One farmer described the summer as feeling like one continuous heatwave. Another said the family was praying these conditions would not become normal, while acknowledging that they probably will. Climate scientist Mike Kendon from the Met Office put it plainly: weather once considered extreme is increasingly being considered normal. The pasture is failing too.

After weeks without rain, soils can reach what Cannon described as “permanent wilting point”, where grass cannot properly recover after being grazed or cut. One farmer held up the dried remains of his pasture and described the grass as nutritionally useless. So farmers are feeding cows food intended for winter while simultaneously losing milk because the cows are struggling with heat. This is what climate breakdown looks like when it arrives in a milking parlour.

Dairy Is Not an Innocent Victim

The obvious temptation by the media is to frame dairy farmers entirely as victims of climate change. But dairy farming does not exist outside the climate system. It is part of the problem.

Cows produce methane during digestion and release it into the atmosphere. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and animal agriculture remains a major source of it.

One peer-reviewed paper estimated that animal agriculture was responsible for 53% of the increase in global average temperature between 1750 and 2020. Whatever arguments continue around how the climate impact of different sectors should be measured, one thing is not seriously in doubt: animal agriculture is helping heat the planet. And dairy is part of animal agriculture. That makes the current response particularly bizarre. Heat created partly by greenhouse gas emissions from farming animals is now reducing the productivity of those animals.

Instead of reducing dependence on them, farms are installing machinery to keep the system going. More fans. More sprinklers. More infrastructure. More attempts to maintain production in an environment becoming increasingly hostile to producing it. Meanwhile, the cows remain there, continuing to produce methane. The climate crisis damages dairy farming, and dairy farming helps intensify the climate crisis.

Round and round we go.

Then There Is the Water

The sight of sprinkler systems spraying cows during a drought should probably raise another fairly obvious question. Where does the water come from?

The BBC report appeared while drought conditions were already affecting large parts of England. Farmers described parched soils, failed grass and weeks without meaningful rainfall. And dairy farms are responding by deliberately spraying water onto cows because the industry cannot maintain production without keeping them cool.

This does not mean farmers should leave cows to overheat. They have a responsibility to protect the animals they have bred into dependency. But it does demonstrate the resource trap created by the system itself.

The hotter and drier the climate becomes, the more intervention may be required simply to maintain existing levels of animal agriculture. That is hardly an argument for continuing to build our food system around cows.

Especially when alternatives already exist.

Cow’s Milk Has a Much Larger Climate Footprint

The environmental difference between cow’s milk and plant-based alternatives is not small.

Figures reported by the Guardian put average greenhouse gas emissions per cup at around 330g for cow’s milk.

Soy milk came in at 122g.

Oat at 102g.

Almond at 98g.

Even when processing, packaging and transport were included, plant-based milks were estimated to produce around 1kg of CO2 per litre, compared with approximately 3kg for dairy.

There are environmental differences between plant-based options themselves. Almond production can require substantial irrigation. Oats perform particularly well on water use. Agricultural practices and locations matter. But none of that rescues dairy.

Plant-based milks still have a substantially lower greenhouse gas footprint. So while cows are being sprayed with water because climate change is making dairy production harder, consumers already have access to alternatives associated with far lower emissions. The sensible direction should be obvious.

But dairy remains deeply embedded as the default.

Milk Is Still Everywhere

Researchers interviewing people in Finland, a country with an especially dairy-heavy food culture, found that participants described milk as being everywhere. It was familiar. It was heavily marketed. It was normalised during childhood. It appeared in schools, homes and cafés as the default option.

Participants remembered milk promotion in schools, posters, visits from milk-promoting organisations and even nurses encouraging children to drink it. Those experiences followed people into adulthood.

Many participants understood some of the ethical and environmental problems associated with dairy. But price, convenience and familiarity often won. People do not make food choices in a vacuum. Governments, schools, supermarkets, restaurants and decades of marketing help determine what feels normal.

If dairy is cheaper, more visible and automatically offered, while plant-based alternatives require an extra request or additional cost, the system is steering people towards the higher-impact option. Researchers found that people were much more receptive to switching when plant-based alternatives were affordable and easily available.

Their recommendations were hardly revolutionary. Make them price competitive. Make them visible. Make them the default.

Instead, we continue propping up dairy with taxpayer subsidies while discussing how many giant fans and sprinklers will be required to keep it functioning through the next heatwave.

Adaptation Cannot Be the Whole Plan

Cows should not be left suffering in dangerous heat because humans refuse to provide cooling. But adaptation cannot become an excuse to preserve every environmentally destructive system exactly as it is. There is a difference between protecting cows who are alive today and insisting that millions more must continue to be bred into dairy farming tomorrow.

The first is a responsibility.

The second is a choice.

Drought is damaging pasture. Farmers are feeding winter supplies during summer. Milk production is dropping by as much as a 5th on some farms. And the proposed future appears to be more cooling systems, more technological fixes and farms becoming increasingly “resilient”. Resilient enough to keep doing what helped create the problem.

We have lower-emission alternatives. We know people become more willing to choose them when they are affordable and normalised. We know dairy produces considerably more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based milk. But when the climate crisis comes knocking at the barn door, our instinct is still to protect the milk.

Maybe it is time to protect the climate instead.