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Comment by gandalfian | Hacker News Reader

Planet wide dairy companies. Not just UK based. Are cows not carbon neutral? Grass grows sucking in carbon, cows eat grass?

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Cows produce (literally: fart) a lot of methane, which is an incredibly potent driver of global warming. A lot of energy also goes into the whole chain of production, from fertilizer used on feedstocks to transportation and so on.

Even compared just to other meats, beef is terrible for the climate. IIRC, pork does less than 1/3 the damage, and chicken gets close to vegetables on this measure

> Cows produce (literally: fart) a lot of methane

Excuse me my nitpicking, but cows mostly belch.

https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/33/which-is-a-bigger-methane-so...

Methane isn't as bad or terrible as it's made out to be https://www.alltech.com/features-podcast-blog/frank-mitloehn...

And the measurements for beef in regard to climate change was a global average, using Brazil burning down Amazon forests. Unless you're eating that beef you can find beef that is carbon neutral or even a carbon sink. It uses up land we can't grow crops on and without meats we wouldn't have enough.

In theory it's possible to farm cows without using fossil fuel so yes, it could be carbon neutral (ignoring the fact that current production levels aren't sustainable). But that's the problem with introducing a singular metric for a complex problem. The grass takes up CO_2, the cows produce CH_4 (Methane).

> Grass grows sucking in carbon, cows eat grass?

Very few cows are grown eating actual grass. Most are fed special cattle feed.

Cows are herbivores, I don't think grass vs barley or whatever they eat affects the carbon offset that much - they don't literally eat fossil fuels.

I would imagine it's not carbon neutral anyway because of transport and other overhead etc.

Methane being worse than CO2 seems to be also a concern,

The feed is grown with fertilizers, which are fossil fuel:

https://www.darrinqualman.com/historic-nitrogen-fertilizer-c...

> In 2015, farmers applied more than 110 million tonnes. We managed to increase grain output fourfold largely by increasing nitrogen inputs 23-fold. Nitrogen fertilizer is a fossil fuel product, made primarily from natural gas.

It depends on the country of course. UK cows tend to be fed mostly grass.

This is not the reality of the majority of dairy or beef production, at least not globally. The production of dairy itself is also a pretty cruel process.

Apparently not, according to the article:

„More than 90% of the corporate dairy industries’ emissions are produced by the cows themselves, mostly in the form of methane.“

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