Climate Change Is Coming For Your Cheese

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

By affecting cows' diets, climate change can affect cheese's nutritional value and sensory traits such as taste, color and texture. This is true at least for Cantal - a firm, unpasteurized cheese from the Auvergne region in central France, researchers report February 20 in the Journal of Dairy Science.

Cows in this region typically graze on local grass. But as climate change causes more severe droughts, some dairy producers are shifting to other feedstocks for their cows, such as corn, to adapt. Farmers are looking for feed with better yields than grass or that are more resilient to droughts," but they also want to know how dietary changes affect their products, says animal scientist Matthieu Bouchon.

For almost five months in 2021, Bouchon and colleagues at France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment tested 40 dairy cows from two different breeds - simulating a drought and supplementing grass with other fodder, largely corn, in varying amounts.

[...] They found that a corn-based diet did not affect milk yield and even led to an estimated reduction in the greenhouse gas methane coming from cows' belching. But grass-fed cows' cheese was richer and more savory than that from cows mostly or exclusively fed corn. Grass-based diets also yielded cheese with more heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids and higher counts of probiotic lactic acid bacteria. The authors suggest that to maintain cheese quality, producers should include fresh vegetation in cows' fodder when it is based on corn.

Experts not involved with the study point out that warming climates impact cattle physiology as well as feed quality. Cows produce heat to digest food - so if they are already feeling hot, they'll eat less to lower their temperature," says Marina Danes, a dairy scientist at the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil.

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