It was a mess of a Car­ni­val sea­son. Fetes at un­god­ly hours, un­be­liev­able traf­fic jams, abom­inable dri­ving, po­lit­i­cal ca­lyp­so bac­cha­nal, cold virus­es ga­lore and the “good­ie bag” go­b­ar stunt linked to a par­tic­u­lar busi­ness group that has been pro­gres­sive­ly cheap­en­ing mas.

As al­ways, con­grats to Kid­dies Car­ni­val and the steel­band as­so­ci­a­tion that main­tain artis­tic stan­dards, even though some­one made an ab­surd de­ci­sion forc­ing the bands to chook-up around the Drag at Sat­ur­day’s fi­nals. “The road made to walk on Car­ni­val Day.” It was all a mess.

Cow’s milk, whether processed in­to for­mu­la for in­fants or not, is an­oth­er mess.

There are 1.5 bil­lion cows in the world. About one for every five hu­mans. That is plen­ty cow! Thir­ty per cent of earth’s ice-free land is in­volved in car­ing for the cow pop­u­la­tion. Half of all the fresh­wa­ter on the plan­et is used for them. It takes 1,500 gal­lons wa­ter to pro­duce one gal­lon of milk.

The stom­achs of cat­tle are meant to di­gest grass, not grains like corn, bar­ley, wheat and oats.

Like milk it­self, grain di­ges­tion pro­duces gas, main­ly methane. Each cow pro­duces 100-500 litres/day of gas. This ac­counts for 15 per cent of glob­al green­house gas, which is high­er than the gas pro­duced by all trans­porta­tion de­vices, cars, trucks, planes etc, to­geth­er. The methane pro­duced by one cow year­ly is equiv­a­lent to the green­house gas emis­sions from a mid-sized car dri­ven 20,000 kilo­me­tres. One cow, one car! Cat­tle ac­count for 20 per cent of glob­al methane. Methane is 23 times more pow­er­ful than CO2 in terms of glob­al warm­ing. Sur­pris­ing­ly, most of this methane is re­leased by the cow as burps.

A sin­gle dairy cow al­so pro­duces a stag­ger­ing 150 lbs of ma­nure per day, to­talling over 12 to 20 tons an­nu­al­ly. With 1.5 bil­lion cat­tle in the world, that is a lot of ma­nure, as we pre­fer to del­i­cate­ly phrase it.

Dairy pro­duc­tion de­stroys land and pol­lutes air and wa­ter. Many peo­ple know breast­feed­ing is best for ba­bies. Some peo­ple know breast­feed­ing of­fers health ben­e­fits to the moth­er. Very few peo­ple re­alise the im­por­tance of breast­feed­ing for the en­vi­ron­ment.

Sub­sti­tut­ing in­fant for­mu­la for breast­milk de­stroys wa­ter, land and air. Cow ma­nure and urine pol­lute rivers and ground­wa­ter, while ni­trate fer­tilis­ers used to grow feed for dairy cows leach in­to rivers and wa­ter.

Each year in the US, over half a mil­lion women for­mu­la feed their ba­bies from birth. If these moth­ers breast­fed their ba­bies for a full year (with solids in­tro­duced af­ter six months), these valu­able re­sources would be save:

• 25 mil­lion pounds of steel from for­mu­la cans

• 2.5 mil­lion pounds of pa­per

• 2.5 mil­lion pounds of plas­tic from milk con­tain­ers

• 27 mil­lion gal­lons of milk, re­quir­ing 465 mil­lion pounds of dairy feed to pro­duce

• Six mil­lion gal­lons of oil for pro­duc­tion, trans­porta­tion and re­frig­er­a­tion

• 135 mil­lion pounds of car­bon diox­ide pro­duced by the use of those six mil­lion gal­lons of oil, re­quir­ing 35,000 acres of for­est to ab­sorb.

In In­dia, it would take 135 mil­lion lac­tat­ing cows just to sub­sti­tute the breast­milk of In­di­an moth­ers. That many cows would re­quire 43 per cent of In­dia’s sur­face be de­vot­ed to pas­ture. Moth­ers who breast­feed con­serve nat­ur­al re­sources.

Ar­ti­fi­cial feed­ing caus­es waste and us­es valu­able min­er­als. Pro­duc­tion of for­mu­la it­self is not the on­ly prob­lem.

If every child in Amer­i­ca were bot­tle-fed, al­most 86,000 tonnes of tin would be need­ed to pro­duce 550 mil­lion cans for one year’s worth of for­mu­la. If every moth­er in Great Britain breast­fed, 3,000 tonnes of pa­per (used for for­mu­la la­bels) would be saved in a year. Bot­tles and nip­ples re­quire plas­tic, glass, rub­ber and sil­i­cone. All these prod­ucts use nat­ur­al re­sources, cause pol­lu­tion in their man­u­fac­ture and dis­tri­b­u­tion, and cre­ate trash in their pack­ag­ing, pro­mo­tion and dis­pos­al.

This one is nev­er dis­cussed: ar­ti­fi­cial feed­ing means more tam­pons, more ba­by stool and more di­a­pers. Women who prac­tice to­tal breast­feed­ing av­er­age over 14 months with­out men­stru­at­ing. Mul­ti­ply this by the four mil­lion US births each year to see that over one bil­lion san­i­tary prod­ucts an­nu­al­ly could be kept out of land­fills and sew­ers. To com­pound the sce­nario, be­cause breast­milk is ab­sorbed by ba­bies more ef­fi­cient­ly, breast­fed ba­bies ex­crete less poop (and it does not smell) and thus re­quire few­er di­a­per changes than for­mu­la-fed ba­bies.

If Car­ni­val is in a bit of a mess right now, the milk in­dus­try is caus­ing a right, prop­er mess. It’s not the kind that smells good.