Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The most destructive thing, farming wise, we do... is the corn industry. Ruining soil faster than any other crop? Corn. Using so much water in the midwest that it makes California's water shortage look competent? Corn. Polluting the waterways with commercial fertilizers, resulting in, but not limited to, the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico? Corn.
Does corn have any nutritional value to humans or our livestock? Nope! Does it produce anything valuable for industrial purposes? Nope! Would it continue to exist without the trillions in subsidies we've paid over the past decade? Nope! Is it one of the primary drivers behind the obesity crisis? Yup!
Can't print that headline though, rich people get angry when the truth collides with their Scrooge McDuck-esque money vaults. So, "feeding them seaweed" as a "think positive" headline workaround continues to get the word out, albeit in a strange way.
The issue is generally that grass-finishing is slower, so cows (may) end up producing more methane overall.
However, grass-fed is definitely better from an animal welfare perspective.
Some of your other claims seem difficult to support; for example, I'm not sure it's well-understood what is driving obesity, and so claiming that it's corn seems like a bit of a stretch. Similarly, corn does actually have nutritional value, which is why people have grown it for a very long time, even before subsidies.
High Fructose Corn Syrup, no ?
It would be an interesting thought experiment about what would happen to obesity levels if prices were taxed to the point where the price difference would be eliminated.
> The more time grazing livestock are housed, the smaller the proportion of their excreta deposited on grazed pastures will be, and hence the smaller the emissions from those pastures.
[0]: https://www.eea.europa.eu/ds_resolveuid/8e90ca718fd34d5786c1...
This seems obviously false.
> The word "corn" outside the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand refers to any cereal crop, its meaning understood to vary geographically to refer to the local staple. In the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, corn primarily means maize; this usage started as a shortening of "Indian corn".
I (from the US) learned about this when a botanist pointed out that the movie "Fellowship of the Rings" incorrectly depicted maize for what Tolkein described as 'corn' in the Shire. http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Corn
Regardless, according to google, you can still eat field corn if you want to and it still has nutritional value.
3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17036221
2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20711498
11 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24574992
5 years and has not come to the feeding lot yet ?
I can tell a taste difference between grass-fed or grain-fed beef. I speculate that seaweed-fed beef would taste different.
The carbon in that methane and CO2 comes from plants, which extracted it from the atmosphere. If those plants were instead eaten by a different animal, or burned, or decomposed, that carbon would also be released. It's a closed cycle.
Methane currently takes about 9 years to break down into CO2 and H2O. https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2829/greenhouse-gas-detergent-...
All this is a distraction from the real problem - the systematic extraction of sequestered carbon from deep underground. That's the only thing that matters. We need to deal with it by radically limiting hydrocarbon extraction.
It looks like some fertilisers do contain carbon - but not all. Eg ammonium nitrate doesn't, urea does. The ammonia tends to be produced using methane - so right now the fertiliser production process does produce vast amounts of CO2 (but that isn't carbon which goes anywhere near the cow).
The CO2 from ammonia production seems solvable (assuming an abundant supply of non-fossil fuel energy) through the electrolysed hydrogen -> ammonia route. Would that be enough, or is the carbon locked up in minerals used in phosphate production also a major source of CO2?
https://www.fertilizerseurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...
Also you need to transport the fertiliser from the factory to the fields (diesel trucks) and spread it on the fields (diesel tractors)
Also, a lot of forest destruction is associated with beef production (often via soya) so again it's something we could get a short-term gain from and longer-term we need to reduce CO2 and forests are the only proven technology for doing that.
In Norway as far as I can tell cattle are mostly fed on grass with the addition of feed produced from cereals (but not maize). Does this mean that cattle fed on maize produce a product that is meaningfully different (on whatever axis of meaningfulness matters to you)?
Not really, it's a simple pattern, pull people up, pull them down. Keep them confused. They buy products from your ads. They donate to mass corps like environment movements. They pay off politicians. Facts don't matter.
Some evidence it increases weight gain & milk production. No evidence it changes taste for consumers -
https://theconversation.com/feeding-cows-a-few-ounces-of-sea... (2021)
It's seems like a viable, self propagating idea.
It just seems like if it was that simple then governments would be pouring billions - no TRILLIONS - of research dollars into this. Cattle are such a big part of greenhouse emissions that if this really had legs without some underlying problem it would be funded like a war effort.
According to a brief search, cattle represent about 3.3% of greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation is 29%, electricity is 25%.
Seems to me better logistics (not transporting stuff that needn't be transported) and better electricity generation is worth more trillions than cows burping.
Random thought experiment - how much should the global 'fund' be to attack greenhouse gas emissions. Not that it should be spent in proportion to % of total emissions, but I wonder what 3.3% of that number would be.
Say you spent 1T on cows, and spent it proportionally. That's a 30T fund overall. So around half from memory of what the US spent on the post 9/11 wars.
[1] http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
correction: removed N2O nitrous oxide is also a greenhouse gas which is included.
There are of course other forms of pollution, a big one we could easily tackle I think is water pollution by the textile industry [1]. So much clothing today is of garbage quality and completely unmendable (the fabric is too thin to be repaired ):, I tried).
[0] https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2019...
[1] https://www.textiletoday.com.bd/water-pollution-due-textile-...
Seaweed may be better than grass in regards to gas emissions, but probably not 99 percent better. However, grass or seaweed alone won’t let cows get fat enough fast enough. Time is money and it is a commodity market unless you specifically target the organic, non-GMO, grass-fed crowd, which, while growing, is still a niche market that adds a bunch of complications.
On some farms, grain only supplements the grass diet, but on many beef cattle farms a larger portion of their diet is grain so they grow and fatten up more quickly. Dairy cows often fair a bit better in this regard, although the calorically rich diet of grain is also good for increasing milk production, so they are fed a good bit of grain also.
The grain does serve a health purpose for cattle, it is just often probably given in excess of what would be required for optimal cow health.
What about feeding our species with plants instead of bovine meat and secretions?
(In case its not clear, i think this thread is silly)
Funny how easily pain can be ignored when you dont have to see the subjects suffering for you.
Personally I would prefer to see a major carbon tax on synthetic fertiliser and products that get produced from them (naturally this include corn feed meat). That way people would have an economic incentive to select the kind of food that has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions.
But I am not sold that one have to apply a carbon tax to everything at the same time. Eutrophication has turned a major portion of the baltic ocean into the dead sea and if left to continue we won't have anything left alive there for a very long time. On that environmental crisis alone synthetic fertiliser pollution need to be addressed. That it also is derived from fossil fuels and a major contributor to global warming is all more reasons to focus carbon taxes on synthetic fertiliser specifically.
Seaweed produces omega 3 so could become a far more common vegetarian diet supplement or food. It is a potential carbon sink at larger scales. And also the benefit described in this article of course.
I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons to cultivate seaweed en masse but those are the first ones that came to mind.
Also, has anybody asked cows if they like to eat seaweed?
Some of the earlier articles about feeding cows seaweed is about how a farmer did observe that his cows did burp less when grassing close to the ocean, where the cows did eat seaweed without anyone telling them to. So observation has shown that at least some cows like to eat some seaweed.
Perhaps farmers should have to pay 'methane credits' for their cows. I'm sure that would speed progress.
No one said you could. I imagine that the concern is that some unforeseen effect might happen just as prion disease was unforeseen. Or indeed that some foreseen effect might be neglected or deliberately hidden from the consumer.