Agricultural consultant Sarah Hawkins Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
It sounds radical but protein from farm pasture could be making its way directly from the paddock to your plate, without the need for an animal to chomp it up first.
New Zealand scientists have developed the technology to do this but can farmers be incentivised to lock up some of their fields for grass farming and reduce the number of cows on farm?
It's something agribusiness consultancy Baker Ag is about to study with funding from the research agency Our Land and Water.
Country Life caught up with one of the firm's consultants Sarah Hawkins in a paddock near Masterton to find out more.
Increased demand for non-animal high quality food and the pressing need to reduce emissions, particularly nitrates leaching into waterways, is behind the study.
Plant & Food Research, Fonterra and Pāmu have come up with technology enabling human digestible proteins to be extracted from pasture and processed to be a food additive.
"We're hoping to highlight opportunities for dairy farmers so they can still have the cows, still have their dairy farm, still remain financially viable while also reducing their environmental footprint," Hawkins said.
Three farms - one each in Southland, Hawke's Bay and Canterbury - will be used as case studies to find out how the concept could fit into an existing dairying system without too much disruption.
They are in areas where nitrate leaching into waterways from intense dairy farming is under heavy scrutiny.
"Some of them are facing restrictions of 90 percent ... I think the farmer down in Mataura he said they'd been told they want a 90 percent reduction in nitrate emissions within the next generation so without an alternate source of income that farm is not now financially viable."
The modelling would involve herd size being reduced, 10 to 20 percent of the pasture locked away and harvesting and processing of the grass protein out-sourced to a centralised facility.
"What we do is remove the cow from the paddock ... instead of cows eating (the grass) we bring a tractor in to harvest it like you would silage.
"Instead of making silage out of it, it goes to a big processing factory. They do whatever magic that they do and out the bottom comes a human digestible protein which can be turned into a food additive, maybe added to no-dairy cheese or to a protein powder."
Fibre left over after extracting the protein could be brought back to the farm as a poorer quality feed so nothing was wasted.
Preliminary research showed farmers would only be keen to incorporate grass farming if the grass protein price was linked to the price they could get for their milk.
But why grass and not other forms of plant protein like soy or peas?
"It's already on farm, it's part of the system, farmers already know it, there's no drastic change to the system for it so they're going to be more open to it for the most part," Hawkins said.
A whole new crop would mean the farmer would need more education around cropping and extra emissions from tilling, she said.
Besides, she said, unlike the huge plant protein farms in Australia and the United States, New Zealand does not have the benefits of economies of scale for such crops.
Added to that, New Zealand's maritime temperate climate produces good quality ryegrass with high levels of metabolisable energy compared to countries like Canada and the US.
"We're extremely lucky in New Zealand with our climate and what we can grow and how we can feed our animals ... and possibly our humans going forward, which is pretty exciting."
