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Comment by crispweed | Hacker News Reader

As other posters have said, it seems like it can be tricky to incentivise cattle owners to add algae to their feed, check this has actually been added, in proportions that have the desired effect, and so on.

But how about if governments provide subsidised feed centrally, instead, with the algae added?

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What if it turns out to make healthier cows? I'm not just making that up, I think it will probably have a positive effect - cows need iodine too! Not sure if it's enough to sway farmers.

Can't believe this comment is the only mention of iodine in both the thread and the article. I supplement iodine daily and it's honestly changed my life.

Ditto. Iodine and Magnesium have eliminated my asthma and had other positive effects - no sugar crashes two hours after eating for example.

Which supplement you are taking and where are you buying it ?

Get some blood work done before adding supplements to your diet. Creating an imbalance is even worst.

This particular iodine compound is effective precisely because it kills methanogenic gut bacteria. Given that those bacteria are a normal part of cows' gut flora, it's reasonable to worry that killing them might be bad for the cows, and would be surprising if it was good for them.

Although, of course, it might be! That's why the only way forward is to test it empirically.

Or just legislate that feed manufacturers must add the algae?

Sadly, I fear legislators won't do that until there's an economic advantage for their supporters. So they need some magnates to be convinced, and buy up the production before they go ahead.

Why would legislators make regulations that just save the planet but don't make them rich? /s

There couldn't possibly be any unintended side effects of that...

There are ways to mitigate unintended side effects. Start with a small small number of farms, AB test with no seaweed, small amounts of seaweed, medium amounts of seaweed, large amounts of seaweed, also AB test on which Farmers know which sample they are getting, iterate next year on results with larger number of Farmers. Buy insurance to compensate Farmers if the seaweed kills them. Discover why they died. Iterate with solution (if possible) or cancel (if seaweed always results in eventual death). Continue to keep large population of seaweed free cattle to mitigate possibly of extinction via unexpected long term consequences of seaweed.

Agriculture is already heavily regulated and inspected in terms of such things at least in the EU, owing to the fact that farmers get most of their income from subsidies and these are predicated on various terms.

Of course, it would be much simpler to just stop the nonsensical subsidies of environmentally and ethically disastrous ag products like beef...

> owing to the fact that farmers get most of their income from subsidies

Where on earth do people get these beliefs?

In my country it's 50+ %. While the EU paid direct cash subsidies are high, they only scrape the surface making up about 25% of the subsidies.

On top of the EU sibsidies there are direct national subsisidies and a wide spectrum of indirect national and EU level subsidies like export, pension, environmental, protectionist import duties, etc. And yes, beef production gets a similar share of subsidies as other types of farming.

I can't find good europe wide stats. I may have overgeneralized and the average may be under 50%. But the subsidies are still very high.

Depends on how you count, and if "income" is "revenue" or "profit".

~$200B/yr in subsidies in USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_farm_bill

$990B/yr food GDP in USA: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

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