Officers James Riter and Joseph Borodawka were first on the scene.

“I could hear the girls screaming in the backyard and I hoped they weren’t getting trampled,” said Riter.

Luckily, cows were only interested in beer, so no one got hurt.

Two hours later, cows were herded back.

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Cows were implanted with cloned human genes which were added to the cow embryos. Technology used was similar to the one used to produce sheep Dolly, first cloned animal.

Scientists say that this kind of milk is better for the babies.  “The milk produced by the trans genic cows is identical to the human variety and has the same immune-boosting and antibacterial qualities as breast milk”. Also, it has a higher nutritional level and less fat.

Professor Li Ning, director of the research project, says: “There are 1.5 billion people in the world who don’t get enough to eat, it’s our duty to develop science and technology, not to hold it back”.

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At just after 8 a.m. Friday, on a farm east of Campion, Ben entered the world after mother Bella, a lowline Angus cow, spent a zero-degree night in labor in her stall.

Two hours later, still wet and shivering, the tiny calf snuggled against his diminutive mother.

The miniature panda cow is the result of 44 years of genetic manipulation by Richard Gradwohl, a farmer in Covington, Wash., about 20 miles southeast of Seattle.

A white belt encircling the animal’s midsection, and the white face with black ovals around the eyes, give the cow an appearance that is very much panda-like.

“We had a Chinese delegation visit our farm, and they were fascinated,” Gradwohl said in a telephone interview Friday. “They want them in China, so we’re going to be exporting.”

Miniature panda calves sell for as much as $30,000 from Gradwohl’s online clearinghouse for mini-cow aficionados. While Chris Jessen said he’ll likely sell Ben, his price has not been set.

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The 11-year-old cow is named Swallow and her owner, Caroline Ryder, said she would spend Thursday either grazing with her herd or listening to BBC radio in her cowshed.

Swallow is a Dexter cow, a breed known for its diminutive stature, but is small even by Dexter standards.

She already has nine regular-sized calves and is pregnant with her 10th. Guinness said her youngest calf has already grown larger than she is.

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The video was recorded in an undercover investigation at one of New York’s largest dairy farms, according to Chicago-based Mercy For Animals, a not-for-profit group that publicizes what it calls cruel practices in the dairy, meat and egg industries and promotes a vegan diet.

The video, posted on YouTube, shows workers punching and kicking cows to get them to move and dragging newborn calves from their mothers by one leg. After seeing it, Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat, proposed a tail-docking ban similar to one enacted last year in California.

The video also shows cows with various injuries, including swollen and festering sores and a prolapsed uterus, and several animals too sick or injured to stand.

Dairy officials say the practice of cutting off cow tails to prevent them from slinging manure is practiced on a small percentage of dairy farms. It is usually done without numbing, either with sharp shears or with a tight rubber band that stops the blood flow and causes the tail to die and fall off. Dehorning is done to prevent the animals from goring each other or their handlers.

The only person authorized to comment for Willet Dairy was out of the country and unreachable, said Laura Wells, the farm’s accounting manager. Attorney David Cook, who successfully defended the farm against a pollution lawsuit filed by neighbors several years ago, was also out of the country, his assistant said.

Assistant District Attorney Diane Adsit said in an e-mail that many of the actions shown in the videotapes “are commonly accepted practices used to protect both animals and farmers on large dairy farms.”

“While shocking to look at, these practices are not necessarily illegal,” Adsit said. If an investigation by the local SPCA leads the organization to file animal-cruelty charges, “we will prosecute anyone so charged,” she said.

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Crash course: Mad cow disease essentially eats holes in the brain and is always fatal. In humans, it initially causes memory loss and erratic behavior. Over a period of months, victims gradually lose all ability to care for themselves or communicate, and eventually, they die. The disease has been traced to farmers’ cost-cutting practice of mixing bits of dead animals’ neural tissue into the feed of cattle, who are naturally herbivorous. If cattle eat the brains of cattle who already have mad cow disease, or of sheep suffering from a similar disease called “scrapie,” the cattle can develop the disease. If humans eat flesh (and possibly milk) from infected animals, they can develop the human version of the disease, called “new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.” The disease is caused by misshapen proteins called “prions.” Prions are virtually indestructible—they aren’t destroyed by cooking, disinfecting, or freezing.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the tonsils must be removed from cows and other ruminants who are slaughtered in order to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, something that a bison slaughterhouse in North Dakota failed to do, which prompted the recall.

It can take eight years for an infected cow to begin showing symptoms of mad cow disease, but most cattle in the U.S. are killed by age 5, before many would be displaying symptoms. Only a very tiny fraction of the cows who are slaughtered are tested, which means that the only way to ensure that you’ll never get mad cow disease is to go vegan.

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But for dairyman John Fiscalini, the dung on his farm is renewable gold: He’s converting it into electricity.

At his farm outside Modesto, a torrent of water washes across the barn’s concrete floor several times a day, flushing tons of manure away from his herd of fuzzy-faced Holsteins and into nearby tanks. There, bacteria consume the waste and release methane, which is then burned in a generator capable of producing enough power to run Fiscalini’s 530-acre farm, his cheese factory and 200 additional homes.

Fiscalini’s resourcefulness should be drawing accolades, considering that state mandates are requiring California industries to boost renewable energy use and slash greenhouse gas emissions sharply over the next 10 years.

But efforts to convert cow pies into power have sparked controversy. State air quality control regulators say these “dairy digester” systems can generate pollution themselves and, unless the devices are overhauled, are refusing to issue permits for them.

The standoff underscores how conflicting regulatory mandates are making it hard for California to meet its green-energy goals.

“We didn’t expect this,” said Michael Gallo, chief executive of Joseph Gallo Farms in Atwater, Calif., whose family has spent “a lot of money” to get its dairy digester system compliant.

The idea of turning biological waste — whether manure, trash or grass clippings — into fuel has been around for centuries. Technologies vary, but the idea is to extract methane from decomposing organic material, remove impurities and burn it for heat, light or transport. Interest boomed after the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on climate change. Methane, considered by many scientists and environmentalists to be as damaging a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, was among the key six pollutants targeted.

Today, the European Union is leading the global charge to turn waste into watts; more than 8,000 biogas operations are up and running in Europe, and thousands more are slated to open in the next decade. The United States, which has not ratified the Kyoto accord, has only about 150 digester projects operating at livestock farms nationwide, said Chris Voell, a manager of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AgStar program, which works with farmers to get such systems up and running.

The concern: NOx.

Air district officials said they’re just doing their jobs. Combating smog, not climate change, is the agency’s mission.

“The board has been clear that when we’re faced with these sorts of trade-offs between reducing greenhouse gases and reducing NOx, we’re going to choose NOx,” said Dave Warner, director of permit services for the San Joaquin Valley air quality district.

The farmers “should have checked in with us first, before buying their equipment,” he added.

Last year, six dairy digesters were shut down because of regulatory or financial problems. One of them is at Ron Koetsier’s dairy in Visalia.

Koetsier shut the system down. Now the equipment is collecting dust.

“They have a point. I want clean air,” Koetsier said. “But it doesn’t make financial sense for me keep doing this. I don’t see how they can turn methane gas into electricity in California, given these rules.”

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At an experimental government farm in the western Amazon’s Rondonia state, researchers analyze grass seeds under microscopes, shake soil samples in test tubes, and measure the milk production of a new breed of cows.

While high-profile police raids targeting illegal ranchers and loggers in the Amazon grab more headlines, these scientists may produce a more important solution in the long fight to save the greatest rainforest.

Their aim is to reduce the pressure for forest destruction by raising the productivity of pastures through fertilization, better choice of grass, and planting trees.

Brazil’s ability to meet its ambitious 2020 target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent from 2005 levels depends largely on the ability of its agriculture sector, and particularly its huge cattle industry, to meet growing world demand without destroying more forest.

The cattle industry is the main culprit of deforestation, which accounts for around 75 percent of carbon emissions in Brazil, one of the top global emitters.

“Brazil’s emissions targets hinge significantly on its cattle industry,” said Paulo Barreto, senior researcher with Imazon, an environmental institute in the Amazon city Belem.

At stake is not only Brazil’s role in climate change but also the competitiveness of its agriculture in a global market increasingly demanding eco-friendly products. Its beef exports account for $5.3 billion each year. Major importers of Brazilian beef products include Russia, China, Iran and the United States, as well as Britain and Italy.

Environment group Greenpeace said in a June report that consumers around the world were unwittingly fueling destruction of the Amazon by buying hamburgers and shoes linked to illegal deforestation. That spurred a wave of pledges by big meat processors aimed at reducing deforestation by farmers who supply them.

“Our producers know if they try to expand their land, they won’t have a market anymore. They’ll have to use the area they have better,” Agriculture Minister Reinhold Stephanes told Reuters.

Near the town of Ji-Parana in southern Rondonia, farmers on their own initiative have planted trees on pasture land, giving cattle and pasture shade from the scorching sun and introducing nitrogen into the ground through the trees’ roots.

The richer pasture and healthier cattle will allow the cooperative to raise 5.2 animals per hectare, nearly triple its previous rate.

Brazil’s 200 million head of cattle, more than a third of which is in the Amazon, occupy an area nearly three times the size of Texas, or on average 1 per hectare (2.47 acres).

“We have the land and technology today that allows us to expand cattle ranching without chopping down a single tree,” said Luiz Carlos Balbino, senior Embrapa researcher.

He says Brazil can double or triple beef production without deforesting by boosting the productivity of existing pastures, recovering degraded grass lands, and developing as much as 50 million hectares (123.5 million acres) of unforested savanna.

FROM FOREST DEFENDERS TO CRIMINALS

But many ranchers are set in their ways and continue to slash and burn. Most were invited by the military government in the 1970s to populate the region to help defend the Amazon against alleged foreign designs on its natural resources. Back then they were told to deforest; now they’re told to reforest, complains one of their leaders.

“We came as human shields and now they turn us into criminals. If a settler is caught chopping down trees to survive, he goes to prison without bail,” said Francisco Ferreira Cabral, head of the Rondonia Agriculture Federation.

For decades ranchers and farmers have slashed and burned, consuming one-fifth of the world’s largest rain forest.

Poor soil quality means ranchers and farmers often abandon the land after a few years to push deeper into the forest.

From above, Rondonia state looks more like the Irish countryside than the western Amazon. Green pasture land has replaced most of the jungle, and cows have taken the place of jaguars, giant anteaters and hundreds of other species once roaming the area. The number of cattle — 11 million — is nearly triple the human population.

“There is hardly any forest left in the state, only in parks and Indian reserves, and even that is threatened,” said Cesar Luiz da Silva Guimaraes, head of the local office of the government environmental agency Ibama.

In June, police had to abandon attempts to pull 30,000 cows out of Bom Futuro national forest in Rondonia. Ranchers had made death threats, burned police cars and succeeded in pressuring the federal government to back off.

Some ranchers believe in conservation but don’t have the know-how or financial resources to buy fertilizer, equipment or proper seeds to improve their business.

“It’s not enough to give them technology, we need to give them the resources to apply it,” said Ibama’s Guimaraes. “If they don’t have access to credit, it’s cheaper to slash and burn. It costs you a box of matches.”

Many farmers lack proper land titles, meaning they have no collateral to put up for a loan.

While technology is available to increase output on existing land, it requires investments, infrastructure and a change in producer mentality.

That could take decades to apply — time that the Amazon does not have. Although the deforestation rate has fallen to a 20-year low, helped by stepped-up police raids on illegal loggers and lower global demand for soy and beef, the 7,000 sq km (2,700 square miles) lost in the year to July still represents a major source of emissions. Scientists say it could lead to higher temperatures and less rain, risking a desertification process.

The government has set a goal to regenerate 8-9 million hectares (19.8-22.2 million acres) of degraded land in 10 years an area larger than Scotland. But a 2 billion reais ($1.16 billion) line of credit it made available this year for that purpose — the first ever — has gone virtually untapped.

“We haven’t found the way to make this attractive yet,” Stephanes said, blaming red tape and high interest rates.

DOUBTS ON 10-YEAR TARGET

Coinciding with the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen this month, leading meat packers will launch a satellite tracking system that uses implanted microchips to identify cows, helping them to avoid buying cattle from illegally cleared land.

Most conservationists applaud the measure but say the deal requires independent monitoring and worry that it excludes slaughterhouses that account for as much 40 percent of the beef market.

Like attempts to control drug-trafficking, experts say, measures to reduce illegally-produced beef will only work when the underlying economics change. As long as it remains cheaper to chop down trees than boost output on existing pastures, ranchers will do so, they say.

“The cattle industry goes to wherever land is cheapest and that’s the Amazon,” said Egon Krakhecke, secretary for rural sustainable development in the Environment Ministry.

Brazil’s agriculture minister remains confident that the cattle industry will do its part to help Brazil meet its 2020 carbon emissions target, as more ranchers see that environmental awareness makes good business sense as well.

“The long-term productivity gains far outweigh the initial investment — we need to spread that message,” said Stephanes.

“Brazil has shown before it can successfully apply technology — 10 years is more than enough time for this,” he said.

Yet scientists on the ground are less optimistic.

“Technology helps but isn’t an aspirin you take to fix the problem. You need investments, logistics, a change in attitude — we’re talking a generation to change things,” said Embrapa’s Balbino.

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