Considering the imminent food shortages due to the double whammy of blocked Ukrainian exports and global fertilizer shortage, closing farms for greenhouse emissions seems like a spectacularly bad idea.
It has nothing to do with greenhouse emissions, but with nitrogen compound emission. See https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2022/06/whats-all-the-fuss... (the first english source I could find)
The source is mostly cattle. Which doesn't make up for Ukrainian grain.
Animals eat the plant some of the CO2 is stored as fat and protein. The remainder is exuded in the form of cowshit and farts. The cowshit goes back to the soil and into plants. The Methane produced quickly becomes CO2 which is, AGAIN, used by the plants to produce plant growth. How is a single atom of carbon actually created in any of this? Sure ,if animal numbers suddenly expand rapidly, you get a very very minute increase in Methane levels. The effect is indiscernible in reality.
I would expect that the more food shortages become severe, the more different types of food become fungible.
You might think this happens only in extreme cases, but as a "poor" Uni student I don't remember eating expensive food very often. And I was living in one of the richest countries on earth.
Single parents, people in disadvantaged communities etc., even in first-world countries, have the problem of putting food on the plate, and they don't really have the luxury to think about what type of food that is.
Industrial beef is fed grains that could be instead used to feed humans (or, at least the land used to produce these grains can instead produce human food). This is a far more efficient use of calories. People worried about food insecurity should be looking at reducing meat production for this very reason.
> It's a luxury.
IMHO it's not a luxury in the same way that caviar and champagne are, it's a luxury in the same way that fresh greens are a luxury compared to frozen peas.
Medium or long term though, practically all other domesticated animals are more efficient than beef on a per-calorie basis. Chickens in particular, are substantially more efficient. Best case, replacing beef with chicken could increase meat yields by 10x, worst case, by 3x.
yes, this is true, although some of those, like chickens which you mentioned, or pigs that are mentioned in the link you shared, are dependent on grains - unlike beef, which can be grass-fed.
But there are more animals besides beef that can be grass-fed, and they might be more efficient than beef.
It would be interesting to know the feed conversion ratios of goats and sheep for example.
The problem of goats and sheep is that, in a regenerative faming context, their manure is not perceived to be as effective as cow manure.
For this reason, would be interesting to measure both feed conversion ratios AND manure production ratio.
Knowing the effectiveness of manure in a regenerative farming context is very important, unless we want to continue depending on fertilisers made from petroleum which is just as bad as burning gasoline in terms of global warming.
A few years ago a judge ruled that the way the government calculated the emissions were incorrect, and now the government is basically forced to act. As these livestock farms account for a huge amount of nitrogen compound emissions, the most pain will be felt here. This was known for many years though, but now the reality is here and shit hit the fan.
In general, I think all this is also a symptom of the general distrust in the government, frustration that has been building up, and there’s quite some overlap in this protesting community and the “covid is a hoax” group. It attracts some very weird people.
This just just not good timing.
I think this is an utterly ridiculous situation to be in, and the whole argumentation from the farmer’s side is ridiculous. I understand their concerns, but this process has been going on for years, decades, and at this point they’re just mostly spreading FUD.
Even for dairy production, cows consume a lot more calories than they provide on the other end. If fewer calories are going to feed cows, then more would be available for other uses.
There are no imminent global food shortages. Wheat futures are literally crashing right now because the entire thing was FUD-driven financial speculation: https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/futures/W00
There are (and are going to be) local food shortages, in countries which relied on ukraine specifically as they need new supply lines, and the speculation has done the opposite of helping by pricing them out.
And then also in other low-wealth countries which the speculation has also priced out, there the speculation alone creates the food shortages.
Reducing cattle farming increases the efficiency of food production.
(And eating less meat would significantly reduce emissions, but that seems unlikely to happen on a large scale)
"... 44% of consumers in Germany follow a low-meat diet, which is a significant increase from 2014 (26%). Similarly, 6% of US consumers now claim to be vegan, up from just 1% in 2014" [from 2017]
https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4959853/top-trends-in-pr...
"The number of vegans in Great Britain quadrupled between 2014 and 2019"
"The 400% increase of vegans in the UK is shocking, but the 1,500% increase in plant-based food sales in the UK is even more shocking. "
"In 2022, research by ProVeg found that 51% of Germans had reduced their meat intake in the previous year"
"In 2022, research commissioned by ProVeg Netherlands found that 28% of Dutch people want to see a future without meat, and 20% would like to see the government ban slaughterhouses"
" Research conducted in 2021 by Rakuten found that 82% of consumers in the US have tried plant milk, 40% have tried other vegan dairy alternatives, 62% have tried plant-based meats and 22% have tried vegan egg replacements. Key motivations included health (35%), wanting to try a food trend (41%), and concern for animals (23%). The same research found that 5% of respondents said that they only consume plant-based foods""
https://www.vegansociety.com/news/media/statistics/worldwide
Huge amounts of food is being processed into animal feed which in turn ends up producing relatively little food. I like my meats as much as the next guy, but in a world hit by a food shortage caused the Russian invasion, using more arable land to feed people instead of cows seems like the obvious choice.
What foods do they produce that isn't consumed in the Netherlands?