Nobody's missing anything. That feed wouldn't have been planted in the first place if it weren't for feeding the cows. And that would translate to less deforestation [1].
Unless rainforests have an ever increasing layer of carbon (charcoal/coal) building up under them - which they do not - they stabilize with their total carbon intake being roughly the same as carbon released through other means. In most cases this happens (rate decreasing over time, though total carbon storage quantity slowly increases until a wildfire) in less than 100 years after a complete denudation event, most of it happening much sooner than that.
If you want to lock up carbon, you need to take it from the plants and sequester it somewhere natural forces (rot, weathering) won’t break it back down again - like a house, or in a cave, or in a hypoxic environment.
Methane is definitely a significantly more powerful forcing gas than co2, but also breaks down in the atmosphere in a short period of time into co2. Cow fart composition changes also only have a similar local, short term effect.
Short term effects can be helpful, but this only changes some parts of the (closed) cycle.
You only really change the math if you change how things are getting into or out of the overall cycle, which requires long term bonding of carbon to things such as rocks, or burial.
Converting atmospheric co2 (or methane) into plastic that gets buried in a landfill is net negative carbon balance for instance. Making the plastic out of oil products and then putting it in a landfill - net neutral (minus processing energy costs). Burning it for fuel? Contributes fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
Conditions on the forest floor typically facilitate aerobic decomposition which does not release methane. [1]
>If you want to lock up carbon, you need to take it from the plants and sequester it somewhere natural forces (rot, weathering) won’t break it back down again - like a house, or in a cave, or in a hypoxic environment.
Hypoxic environment is exactly the conditions methanogenic bacteria operate in to turn biomass into methane. [2]
> Converting atmospheric co2 (or methane) into plastic that gets buried in a landfill is net negative carbon balance for instance.
Except for the energy needed to convert the molecules, the energy needed to transport plastic to a landfill. Energy production and transportation both are powered by fossil fuels mostly.
[1]http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fundamentals/consideration...
No one in America has slash and burned a forest to feed cattle for a very long time.
It is extremely fertilizer and pesticide intensive, and entirely engineered. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the fertilizers are also fossil fuel based.
True, but these only account for 1% of energy demand[1]. Fertilizer is all about the nitrogen, not the carbon. The carbon for the corn is taken from the atmosphere.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
However, my impression this is very unique and produces much less pounds of beef per acre than most places. The cattle breeds there are leaner and half wild. I'm hesitant to speak more definitively because I don't know specific statistics on how ranches in other regions differ. My impression is that the difference are substantial.
There are actually a lot of researchers who believe that the Native peoples were keeping the forests back via controlled burns, since grassland is better for hunting and agriculture, and the forests have regrown substantially _since_ most of the indigenous people died via disease.
> In the Eastern Deciduous Forest, frequent fires kept open areas which supported herds of bison. A substantial portion of this forest was extensively burned by agricultural Native Americans. Annual burning created many large oaks and white pines with little understory.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_savannas_of_Nort...