DEBUNKED: “Vegans should abandon soya milk if they want to save the planet, urges sustainable food charity” - Daily Telegraph
Last year a study came out that pointed the finger squarely at people who drink soya milk as the true villains of Amazon destruction. Thanks to environmental author Tim Bailey, we take a look at the Sustainable Food Trust’s dodgy calculations, which the anti-vegan media was quick to amplify not least of all the Daily Telegraph.
Every now and then we receive word of new research that claims to put paid to the case for veganism. The mainstream media is quick to jump on such news, knowing full well that there are a great many people out there just waiting for a ‘gotcha’ to get back at those of us who know that a plant-based lifestyle is the way forward.
This is even more so when attacking a core vegan argument. In August last year, this is exactly what happened when the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) released a report that accused the alternative milk industry of being just as responsible for destroying the Amazon rainforest as industrial and non-grass fed cow farming, the traditional villains of the story.
In a nutshell, the report entitled Strategies to reduce reliance on soya bean meal and palm kernel meal in livestock nutrition and published in the Journal of Applied Animal Nutrition (JAAN; Wilkinson and Young, 2020), claimed that “soya ‘milk’ made directly from soya beans is a less efficient process than producing milk from dairy cows”. How does this place the blame on vegans for destroying the rainforest? Because, apparently, vegan-friendly milk is made from soy grown on rainforest plantations so we should reject it in favour of milk produced by dairy cows fed with soy meal as it’s a more efficient use of that soy, or even better, get our milk from grass-fed cows and remove soy from the equation altogether.
Cue the Daily Telegraph and its clickbait headline of Vegans should abandon soya milk if they want to save the planet, urges sustainable food charity. Even farming industry stalwart Farmers Weekly wasn’t quite so brazen, choosing instead to go with Cows milk better for the planet than plant-based alternatives.
Strong headlines, but both deeply flawed for two reasons: 1) soya milk is made from sustainable soy grown anywhere else in the world but the Amazon, a fact that the SFT later acknowledged as we’ll discuss more later; and 2) the SFT’s calculations regarding the efficiency of converting soybeans to milk via dairy cows versus soya milk production were questionable, to say the least, as environmental author Tim Bailey explained in a ‘letter to the editor’ sent into the JAAN and published in November.
This isn’t even to mention the fact that one of the report’s two authors, SFT policy director Richard Young, is a grass-fed cattle farmer and that the UK-based charity has multiple financial interests in organic animal farming. SFT chief executive Patrick Holden - quoted in the Telegraph as saying that the study “highlights the importance of grass, a crop ideally suited to our climate and the grazing animals that turn it into high-quality foods we can eat” - owns and runs a 300-acre dairy farm in Wales that produces grass-fed milk. Little surprise that they would feed something to the Daily Telegraph that attacked organic, grass-fed farming’s two enemies - industrialised agriculture and vegans. Was any of that disclosed as part of the journal’s publication? “The authors declare no conflict of interest,” said the report.
SFT chief executive Patrick Holden
According to the SFT’s website, the UK-based charity seeks to address the “worsening human and environmental crises that are associated with the vast majority of today’s food and farming systems, and that all the “information and policy direction we provide is grounded in good science.” Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and ignore for a moment that the headline in the Telegraph probably didn’t do their businesses any harm and look at the objective calculations.
In Tim Bailey’s letter published in JAAN Vol. 8, No. 3, 2020, the SFT grossly overestimated the amount of cows milk produced from 1kg of soy, claiming 85 litres of milk for every 1kg of soybean meal consumed. As Tim explains, this would be impossible given that the average dairy cow produces 28 litres of milk per day on average, and the AHDB estimates that a high-yield dairy cow eats 21kg of dry matter, of which around 7-9% is from soy.
Tim calculates the volume of cows milk produced per 1kg of soy to be around 1.67 litres, compared to the 85 litres the SFT claims - we encourage you to read his letter in full - but suffice to say, in the SFT’s response to his letter published in the same issue, they “accept his dry matter (DM) intake calculation for a housed dairy cow” although do offer up some counter-arguments such as that the amount of soy cows consume in the UK could in fact be higher according to estimations from the Netherlands, and that there are some efficiencies as soybean meal is a byproduct of soya oil production. You can read their response here to draw your own conclusions.
Regardless of the minutiae of cow yield calculations, it’s all for naught with the following admission made by the SFT in their response: “At the time of publication, we were unaware that soya drink sold in the UK is made from soya grown in Europe. We accept this frees UK soya drink from direct association with deforestation.”
“At the time of publication, we were unaware that soya drink sold in the UK is made from soya grown in Europe. We accept this frees UK soya drink from direct association with deforestation.”
As Tim points out: “In the UK there is no evidence to suggest GM soybeans or soybean meal is used in soya milk production. Most soya used in UK plant-milks originates from Europe, whereas a legume soya beans add to soil fertility, help reduce the need for manufactured fertiliser and help to rebuild dysfunctional soils. Soya bean milk in the UK is not associated with deforestation, but dairy cow milk is.”
One need only check the FAQ section of the websites of Alpro and Provamel, two leading producers on non-dairy milks, to see that the soy they use is sourced sustainably from growers in European countries such as France, Italy and Austria.
Unwilling to leave things there and admit that the headlines were unjustified, the SFT authors go on to say that as demand for soya milk increases, so too will the associated but indirect environmental pressures on other places where soy is grown, citing an example of the Great Plains region of the USA where, according to the World Wildlife Fund, 53 million acres of grassland was ploughed between 2009 and 2016, 16% of which was for soya bean production. What they fail to mention is that there is no indication from the WWF of how that soy is even used - it may very well be going to feed dairy or beef herds, and not necessarily exported to soya milk producers.
It would seem that the SFT is caught up in a vicious cycle of its own creation, making nonsensical claims that defy logic and trying to distract from their original error by relying on hypotheticals or simply saying that all soya is bad, despite saying that vegans are wrong for drinking soya milk because it should be fed to cows to be more efficient. Even trying to explain it all here has been challenging as the logic goes around in circles.
Besides the Daily Telegraph, uptake by the mainstream media has been thin, probably partly because the “science” is more confusing than it should be, but also because it doesn’t take much reading to get the sense that the claims are dubious and do not hold water.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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