In this episode, Dr. Jack Britt discusses the importance of dairy in global nutrition and the future of sustainable farming practices. Dairy plays a crucial role in feeding the growing world population, and as a leading dietary component, it can feed the greatest number of people. Listen in as Dr. Britt discusses the importance of innovation and sustainability to the U.S. dairy industry’s future.
Born and raised on a dairy farm, Dr. Britt has dedicated his entire life to working in agriculture as a farmer, teacher, scientist, executive and entrepreneur. He has worked extensively in the USA and 23 other countries and has been an advisor to major government agencies that regulate foods and drugs. Today, he provides expert worldwide consultation in emerging applied technologies; agricultural systems, biotechnology, and bioenergy.
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Scott Zehr
Hello, everybody. Welcome to Ruminate This with Agrarian Solutions. I’m your host Scott Zehr once again for another episode. And today, I think we’re bringing in the big guns today. No doubt about it. So I’m going to be joined by Dr. Jack Britt. I know if you’re listening to this podcast, it means you have an interest in ruminant nutrition or anything to do with mycotoxins and better ruminant nutrition and on your dairy or ranch here in the U.S.
And so likely you’ve already heard of Dr.Jack Britt. If you haven’t actually heard the name or met him in person, you know, some of the stuff that he has done, by proxy. So Dr. Britt, born and raised on a dairy farm, right near Bowling Green, Kentucky. I’m going to let him tell some of this story cause I, I think it’s pretty cool. But, Dr. Britt, you grew up in, near Bowling Green. And, I believe your parlor, you told me was built in 1953. Is that right?
Dr. Jack Britt
That’s correct. Yes.
Scott Zehr
That was a pretty early parlor back then. That’s pretty cool. And that, so it was out of herringbone.
Dr. Jack Britt
It was a four in line side open stall.
Scott Zehr
Okay. So that predated herringbone a little bit, probably.
Dr. Jack Britt
Right.
Scott Zehr
Oh, I’m showing my age. And then you, you really worked your way through college, both at, Western Kentucky and then just tell us a little bit more about your collegiate career.
Dr. Jack Britt
Well, that’s, that’s great, Scott. I was, living on the farm while I was going to college with Northwestern Kentucky university.
Was about four miles from our farm. So I’m a farm boy going to college. And I was asked to work as a relief AI technician for Kentucky artificial breeders. So I will work weekends and holidays, when the regular technician was off. And that’s really what got me interested in reproduction. I had anticipated going back to the farm and farming.
But once I got interested in artificial insemination, I ended up going to graduate school to study reproduction and cattle and to work on reproduction and cattle and so. That’s really what I did most of my career plus teaching. I worked at North Carolina State University. And Michigan State University. And the university of Tennessee. So I, I was exposed to lots of dairy farms in different parts of the country and worked on lots of farms. So that was my experience.
Scott Zehr
The start in an artificial insemination, that, that one’s, that one’s interesting to me.
And I, I knew that about you from, I interviewed you once before on a different platform for the Select Sires Federation. But if you’re following along and you’re a little bit of a historian, Cabba, as that would have been called KA Kentucky associate or Kentucky Breeders Association, right?
Yeah. Cabba. That became one of these Select Sires cooperatives at one point, or it was emerged in, in this Select Sires federation. So Jack, I started out with, Premier Select Sires now, Premier and which was when I started in 2013 was called, Select Sire Power after a merger of, bringing in the Sire Power company.
And, I too also started as a Relief Technician, but, I’m not working on my, on my grad school. I’m not going to get my PhD, any of that. I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing here in the, in the nutrition space. So…
Dr. Jack Britt
I started working as a technician in the pre straw era.
Scott Zehr
Ah, with ampoules.
Dr. Jack Britt
When the semen was in glass ampoules, and you had to break the top off the ampoule. And then suck the semen out into the inseminating pipette, and then we’re going to inseminate the cow.
Scott Zehr
Had to have the polybulb on the pipette?
Dr. Jack Britt
Exactly.
Scott Zehr
Yes. So I have, I, I’m sure I’m not the youngest person, but I have bred nine cows in my life with ampules. So even, even at my ripe young age of 39, my dad had bred cows for ABS.
When he was growing up, learned with ampoules, he had some ampoules in the tank when I started breeding and I said, I want to do this. I think I had three pregnancies out of the nine ampoules. So. But we’re gonna, you know, it’s a good, it’s a good segue. And just to give people a few more, little fun things here.
You’ve also worked in 22 countries worldwide, primarily, as you said, on egg and dairy projects. I think Dr. Britt that when I get to travel across the country, man, dairy, dairy looks different in New York than it does Florida, than it does California, than it does Texas.
That’s gotta be a vastly different contrast when you get into other countries like India, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and so on.
Dr. Jack Britt
It’s quite a contrast. I was in Germany for about eight days in this past December. We were in a different town every day talking to farmers, visiting farms, and you see quite a variation from small farms to farms with six or 700 cows, very similar to the diversity that you see in the United States.
Scott Zehr
So it looks different right across different, parts of the globe. There’s a host of things I want to talk to you about today, but I think I’ll start with, the first time I got to see you speak, I think was DCRC maybe in 2021, and that, that really left an impression on me, for your, with your global look, outlook at dairy. Where the United States kind of is as far as, environmental impact, our carbon footprint, and then just the sustainability to feed a growing population.
And I, I remember you contrasted, a hundred percent plant based vegan diets versus a hundred percent carnivore diets. And really the answer, not to sound political here, the answer is often in the middle, right?
Dr. Jack Britt
Exactly. You can feed the most people with a mix of dairy and vegan products. In fact, the greatest number of people can be fed when you have a dairy, when you have dairy as a lead product in their diet, and it’s huge.
If you compare vegan versus dairy, you can, in the United States, you can feed 85 million more people with a dairy based diet than a vegan based diet. So that’s a huge number, huge difference. And it really is related to the nutrients that are in milk that are essential for us to live. And those nutrients are not nearly as high in vegetables. So that’s a good story for us.
Scott Zehr
That is. And then, you know, the, the unique thing that dairy has over, you know, say our, our beef counterparts in the U.S., is that not only do we have the milk and the by products from the milk, the cheese, yogurt, that kind of stuff, but we, we have the beef too. Right.
Dr. Jack Britt
That’s right.
Scott Zehr
So yeah, very…
Dr. Jack Britt
It’s amazing now with, gender selected, semen breeding, just the top peppers and cows to make replacements. And then using beef semen on all the rest of the herd, it’s increasing our income about $2 per hundred weight of milk by producing extra beef. And that is a phenomenon in the industry today.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I know, when beef on dairy kind of was getting rolling in New York state, not that it wasn’t happening and just not as well adopted as it is today. I was working for Premier. 2018, 2019, I did a lot of consulting would be found dairy, herd, herd management, inventory. And, man, a lot of farms would start up and it was, it was really an eye opener because it’s probably the one thing that stands out in my career.
Sorted semen came out prior to me getting into AI. And that was certainly a big disruption in that industry. But the beef on dairy as far as disrupting really not just the dairy industry, but the beef industry and also the way dairy farmers perceived their own animals. And, challenge them to rethink genetic potential.
And there’s a lot of fallout from that, both good and bad. I think more good probably, but some of the interesting things that I have conversations about today is what happens now, if we have a bout of salmonella that goes through that wipes out a month’s worth of calves, right?
We don’t just make those up overnight. And, that heifer industry in the U.S. or heifer population in the U.S., is, is that a quite a few year low right now, if I’m not mistaken.
Dr. Jack Britt
The meeting I was just at in Winnipeg, they were talking about a shortage of heifers. Where are we going to get our heifers?
Scott Zehr
Yeah, we’re seeing 3,000, 3,500 for replacement heifers pretty regularly up here. I’d hate to be in a position to have to buy five, 600 of them or, or even 10.
Dr. Jack Britt
To me, it’s also amazing at what we see with cows being in the upper part of the country and then heifers being raised in the middle part of the country or even the Southern part of the country.
I think that’s good for disease control, so you don’t get the whole herd contaminated at one time.
Scott Zehr
Good point.
Dr. Jack Britt
And then growing baby calves.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
I was at a farm in, in the Midwest that hadfFour or 5,000 baby calves coming out of the North. You know, when they’re two days old, they get to go to a warmer climate and doing a great job. I mean, almost essentially zero mortality, way under 1%, which is pretty phenomenal.
Scott Zehr
So, on the sustainability conversation and, where we’re at, say by 2050 as an industry, these things like sorted semen, beef on dairy, the efficiencies we’ve gained in cattle raising, calf raising in particular on the dairy side.
What kind of an impact do those small things, which they’re big things within our industry, but they’re, they’re kind of small things on a global scale, but like, how does that impact, what’s the outcome of that?
Dr. Jack Britt
I think there’s two or three things that we’re going to see over the next 20 years or so.
If you look at what we are consuming, we’re consuming more dairy than we ever have. But it’s not fluid milk, it’s in other dairy products. And so we have to realize that we are not just producing milk that’s going to be fluid. But we have all these other dairy products and what is the best protein and fat in the milk for producing those other products.
And so we see butterfat creeping up on the average quite a bit. And I think we will continue to see that we may see protein going up to make those products. And then, then I think we have to think about the future. Can we make a product that does not have to be refrigerated? So that we can ship at large distances or we can ship it abroad.
I mean, there’s a huge market abroad. Our population is slowing down, how do we increase our demand by creating something very different? If you walk in the supermarket in Germany, you will see fluid milk setting on the shelf, not in the refrigerated shelf, but on the shelf. So they are already doing that.
And they do it through a different method of pasteurization. Just a little bit hotter for a short period of time. And you can, you can set it on the shelf. And so when are we going to start doing some things like that? That’s a question for our industry. I think.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, I think it is. I’m not going to name drop here, but I sit on a local economic development council here in New York.
You tell that story and it’s, those are the types of ideas, you know, and like you said, it’s already being done somewhere else. But those are the type of things that need to start getting talk about because, Dr. Britt, I’ll say it like this. So, about January, February, this conversation took place and it was, they were talking about the milk price and, you know, the price of milk has been down and it’s the same old story, right?
We’re not getting paid enough for our milk. People aren’t drinking as much milk in the U.S., and I admit that I, I got frustrated with it because, when I was 19 years old, so 20 years ago, I joined my County Farm Bureau and I became a director on the board when I was 20 years old. Dr. Britt, it was the same exact conversation we’ve been having for 20 years.
Dr. Jack Britt
Sure.
Scott Zehr
And, and I, I just finally said, okay, you know, rather than sit here and keep talking about the same old thing, why don’t we come up with some ideas? What’s the real answer here? Because, hey, you know, talking about it for hours doesn’t really get us anywhere, right?
Dr. Jack Britt
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think one of the issues, and I don’t know how we really address this, the farmers are farmers that they’re on the dairy farm, they’re not involved in processing a new product development.
So how do, how do we collaborate with that end of the industry to come up with new, what, what do they want? What, what is your local? They’re a processor wall.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
What are they thinking about in terms of new products?
Scott Zehr
So is it really just as simple as a communication gap between consumers, processors, and farmers?
Dr. Jack Britt
I think it is. Some communication. But some of it is an innovation gap. The consumer doesn’t know what they want until they get this new product that they love.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, that’s true.
Dr. Jack Britt
They are not creating products. They’re buying what we deliver to them in the supermarket or at the restaurant or wherever. And, if we deliver a new product, that’s exciting and good, good to eat or consume. It’ll sell. I mean, it sure will.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. Perception. So we have Facebook. I unfortunately am still on Facebook because I, I have to be for, for a couple other reasons. But I was scrolling through Facebook the other day and I saw a picture, it was an advertisement.
I forget which brand of tractor, but it had a mower on the front, the tractor, a baler, round baler, and wrapper is all one unit. They were mowing those in Florida. They were mowing the grass, baling it up, making baleage bales, right? All in one pass. That’s pretty efficient, right? However, I happened to notice one of the comments and it was apparent that it wasn’t somebody that is actively involved in agriculture.
But the comment from this consumer, I’m assuming here, was “no wonder our food prices are so high, that has to be a million dollars worth of equipment. Do they really need that?” Perception, right? Yeah, communication perception, because it is, I think about when, just over the years, somebody buys a new tractor. Well, they must have a lot of money.
Well, so we kind of went down a little bit of a rabbit hole there, but, it’s all good. And I think it’s all relevant too, because it points out some things that we, we definitely need to work on as an industry or a dairy community, I like to say. And then, like you said, our role, right, is feeding that world population.
And I, I didn’t ask you this ahead of time, but what was the percentage increase of population by 2050, that estimate? I think you’ve shared some of that information before.
Dr. Jack Britt
We’re going to see another eight to 10 percent increase in, in population.
Scott Zehr
Yep.
Dr. Jack Britt
It doesn’t look like that there’s a, that, that, that there’s an end somewhere that is going to level off.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
People say, well, we’ve got too many people. But relatively speaking, North America has a few people per square acre per square kilometer than the rest of the world. So, we’re not very heavily populated, except in certain areas.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, the coast, right?
Dr. Jack Britt
Yeah, the coastal area.
Scott Zehr
Dr. Britt, that, reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you and that is, why is it truly important for, for dairy farmers in particular to be thinking about their environmental impact?
Because that’s a topic we hear a lot and it’s, it’s a conversation that sometimes you might start to have with a farmer and they get it. But there’s still a bell curve of people that are like, hey, like we’re, look at all the stuff we’re doing. And it, I want to say there’s a little bit of cynicism out there.
Dr. Jack Britt
I think that’s a good question. What is the environmental impact? And for an individual farmer, maybe that farmer needs to ask, is my environmental impact good or bad? And I would start by saying that your environmental impact affects you economically and directly. Before we start worrying about neighbors and people seeing that impact, we need to realize how it’s impacting the farm income or profit directly.
A good example would be looking at manure management. I’m milking a lot of cows, so I build a lagoon and the waste goes in the lagoon. And the lagoon is not covered. So that waste is, is really just evaporating being lost, producing huge amounts of methane. Now, if I can afford it and I cover the lagoon up and capture that methane and modify it or treat it a little bit, then I’ve got a new product to sell.
Now you can’t do that really on a small farm. But farms are getting large enough and the technology is getting good enough to start thinking about how do I generate income from not just the milk and the sale of cattle, but also the sale of manure and its byproducts.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
There becomes an income source rather than than a waste source. And as long as we look at it as waste, we’re making a mistake. Because it has bad, and you’ve seen what they’ve done in California.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
By having a huge impact in increasing income for the farms and decreasing the environmental impact. So USDA provides all sorts of funding for new technologies and new ideas and for conservation, for example.
Maybe some of that money for conservation needs to go into helping farmers develop better manure management program. That would be good for the environment, good for the farmer, a justified investment, if you will.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, that’s a great point. How does, from a global perspective, I guess, you know, you’ve, you’ve touched on some of this in some of your presentations. I want to say it’s an accumulative effect where you have, we see some farms, right?
Doing that with lagoons, making methane, making power, selling that back. But, it takes more than just one person doing it and, and there’s certainly, there’s more than one. That’s not what I’m trying to get at. But from a global perspective, I guess, share with the listeners where we rank as a country. Like, are we doing our part currently or is there more we should be doing? I guess is how I want to ask that.
Dr. Jack Britt
That’s a good question because I was recently participating in meetings looking at where does the United States rank in terms of its dairy economy. We talk a lot about greenhouse gas, you know, one measure of what we’re wasting is greenhouse gas.
The United States has the lowest greenhouse gas output from dairying in the world. We are number one in the world in producing dairy efficiently without wasted products like greenhouse gas. And then if we add on top of that, we can capture that greenhouse gas and turn it into energy that could be used by the public.
That’s a phenomenal effect. Most other countries of the world are envious of how well we do. And I think it’s the scope of our industry. And the way our industry has adopted technology. I was in Germany in December, visiting a lot of dairy farms and talking to a lot of farmers. And they were concerned because milk consumption is going down in Germany.
Milk consumption is going up in the United States. And I was just in Canada, and there’s an interesting difference between the U.S. and Canada. In the U.S., the government puts milk as one of the essential foods that people should consume.
Scott Zehr
Mmm-mmm
Dr. Jack Britt
Milk is on that list. In Canada, it’s not on that list. And so, in the United States, milk consumption is going up. In Canada, the milk consumption is going down partly driven by the fact that the government is promoting milk because it’s, it’s one of the best foods that you can consume. Farmers need to be concerned about what the government’s doing and engaged with helping them do the right thing.
Scott Zehr
Yeah. You know, as you’re describing that we ranked number one in the world. Thinking of that methane production. Our ability to capture that, generate power. Why, and you said like there’s funding out there, there’s USDA funding out there for it. But, you know, when we look at what, I’m going to use New York as an example, cause this is where I live and, I guess if Governor Hochul listens to this and wants to scold me, she can. But I see a lot of solar going up. A lot of solar. I see wind towers all over my, my neighborhood.
We still have a nuke plant the way the crow flies, maybe 50 miles from my house. We’ve kind of gone away from hydro for the most part. But those are really the only three solar and, and solar certainly on fire right now and, and wind power is, is right behind it. But we don’t hear in the public or from coming from our politicians talking about the opportunities with capturing methane and doing that, why do you think that is?
Dr. Jack Britt
Maybe we haven’t promoted that. And I think the other issue is very large farms that you see in Texas and California can capture methane just from their farm. If you look at New York, where you’ve got a small…
Scott Zehr
Yeah, we’re spread out.
Dr. Jack Britt
… really have to have a collective capturing system among smaller farms. There are some places that are doing it. Some small farms in California are connected with the pipeline. So all of the, all of their methane is going to a single site, even though there are multiple farms.
So, so there has to be some creativity, if you will, maybe some state driven creativity to help put in a pipeline that farmers can contribute to. And, there’s a limit in terms of farm size that would work…
Scott Zehr
Right.
Scott Zehr
Individually, sure.
Dr. Jack Britt
But New York’s got lots of large farms and they’re increasing in size.
Scott Zehr
Yup, yup.
Dr. Jack Britt
Yep. There’s an opportunity there.
Scott Zehr
That’s interesting. Dr. Brett, along the lines of methane, I was at a DCRC, this past year, and there was a professor that talked about, the World Health Organization recently, reclassifying, if you would, methane, where, you know, years ago, and some of their calculations when they would, you know, when it came out that, the dairy industry was the number one contributor to our carbon footprint, more than the transportation sector.
The calculations were based on methane being a forever gas.
Dr. Jack Britt
Right.
Scott Zehr
And that’s not true. I mean it’s about a 15 year life in our environment or in our ozone, right?
Dr. Jack Britt
We now know that methane… If you compare methane and carbon dioxide, for example…
Scott Zehr
Yes.
Dr. Jack Britt
…carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere and it sits there forever.
Scott Zehr
About a thousand years, right? I think that’s the number they threw around.
Dr. Jack Britt
Methane goes into the atmosphere and it’s broken down to carbon dioxide or other products in about nine to twelve years.
Scott Zehr
Okay.
Dr. Jack Britt
So it, it does… In other words, as we are producing methane, we’re actually not increasing the world’s load of methane because it’s disappearing at a rate so that it’s staying fairly constant.
And now that’s being recognized, by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. Most of that data have come from work done in California.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
On the States, we do a measure methane and CO2 and monitored it. So, you know, the new data are showing that that methane is, it’s just a temporary effect.
It’s not a permanent effect on the environment. It has a temporary effect. And so that’s important, good news for us.
Scott Zehr
Yeah, I think that in a way, when I listened to that presentation, it kind of like, I don’t know, I want to say it gave me a pat on the back, like, you know, you’re, you’re not as bad for being in dairy as you were once told you were.
Right. It’s kind of like, look, we knew that. But yeah, interesting stuff. Dr. Brett, one more question, I want to throw at you and, I think you might’ve touched on it, right? Creating new products, maybe like shelf stable products. But as we see this growing population across the world, we’re in the business of making food and I think we all want to make high quality food.
But what are some things that we need to be doing now, like really need to be doing, as an industry, as a dairy industry to fill that role?
Dr. Jack Britt
I think that the one step that we could take to help fill, fill that role is to develop dairy products that don’t have to be refrigerated.
Scott Zehr
Yeah.
Dr. Jack Britt
Our biggest limitation, if you will, is that too many of our products have to be refrigerated. That’s all right if it’s in my refrigerator and I got it at the grocery store and put it in the refrigerator. But if I want to ship, a shipload of dairy products to, uh, Asian country. It can’t be all refrigerated. It has to be shipped at room temperature, if you will, or ship, ship them here, if you will.
Scott Zehr
Yeah
Dr. Jack Britt
I think we have to do that. There are pasteurization processes that are used in Europe that we don’t use that allow you to do that pretty quickly. Occasionally I’ll see liquid milk on the shelf in a grocery store here.
If you go to Germany, you see milk on the shelf everywhere because it’s been pasteurized slightly differently than our standard procedure. I don’t know why we’re stuck with that standard procedure. Maybe it’s because all of our processing plants have that system and they can’t, they can’t adjust it.
They can’t change it. But we need to have some versatility in how we handle products. If we want to be really creative in producing products. That are on the go that you don’t have to have refrigeration to handle.
Scott Zehr
Well, there you go. And you know, Dr. Britt, I, I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this because, so you’re somebody that I’ve looked up to for a long time. We’re going to actually have another conversation with you, that kind of predates some of the globalist stuff we talked about today, in your career.
Thinking outside the box, right? Coming up with new ways to sell an old product. And I think there’s, there’s a lot of businesses in our country that have teams of people working on this. So, I’m glad you’re on our side challenging the status quo on that.So Dr. Britt, I appreciate you coming on to Ruminate This. Hopefully I didn’t beat you up too bad.
You’ll come back for a second episode and, we’ll see you all again in two weeks.
Dr. Jack Britt
I’m looking forward. Thank you.
