The environmental organization Greenpeace is calling for more support for farmers who keep their dairy cows on pastures instead of exclusively in stables. “The proportion of dairy cows that are allowed to graze has been falling for years,” says Greenpeace agricultural expert Martin Hofstetter. In 2010 it was still 42 percent nationwide, ten years later it was only 31 percent. According to Hofstetter, Bavaria does even worse. And this despite the fact that the Free State has had a support program for farmers who let their cattle out on pasture for years.
Bavarian farmers are leaders in dairy farming, at least as far as the number of cows is concerned. According to Greenpeace, 1.26 million of the four million dairy cows nationwide live in Bavaria. This corresponds to 28 percent of the total stock in Germany. “But four out of five Bavarian cows are in the barn all year round,” says Hofstetter. “They don’t come into a pasture at all.” Strictly speaking, only 18 percent are allowed to graze in a meadow. In Schleswig-Holstein, on the other hand, according to Greenpeace, more than half of the cows are grazed at least temporarily, in North Rhine-Westphalia it is half and in Baden-Württemberg at least a quarter.
To make matters worse, tethering is comparatively widespread among Bavarian dairy farmers. The cattle are fixed in the stalls in their places or in narrow boxes with a chain or other devices around the neck, so that they move little, let alone turn around, lick their backs or walk through the stall – even when eating and at milking. Animal rights activists denounce this as terrible animal cruelty. This type of husbandry is particularly common on small farms. In 2020 there were a good 14,000 farms in Bavaria with tethered housing. That was 56 percent of the dairy farms in Bavaria. The number of dairy cows in it amounted to 303,000 or 26 percent of the dairy cattle in the Free State. The current figures may only be slightly lower. The Bavarian Minister of Agriculture Michaela Kaniber (CSU) is an outspoken critic of tethering.
“Dairy farming urgently needs to be improved,” says Greenpeace official Hofstetter. “Cows are naturally walking animals that eat grass. We have turned them into overbred turbo cows that stay in the barn all year round and are fed more and more concentrates to give maximum milk.” This week, the conference of agricultural ministers of the federal and state governments will be dealing with dairy farming.