> What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on weight before slaughter. There, algae feed additives can be churned into the cows’ grain and soy feed. But on feedlots, cattle already belch less methane—only 11 percent of their lifetime output
> Unfortunately, adding the algae to diets on the pasture, where it’s most needed, isn’t a feasible option either. Out on grazing lands, it’s difficult to get cows to eat additives because they don’t like the taste of red algae unless it’s diluted into feed. And even if we did find ways to sneak algae in somehow, there’s a good chance their gut microbes would adapt and adjust, bringing their belches’ methane right back to high levels.
> All told, if we accept the most promising claims of the algae boosters, we’re talking about an 80 percent reduction of methane among only 11 percent of all burps—roughly an 8.8 percent reduction total
https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/publications/from-b...
- we've cut those forests to have fields & pastures
- protect biodiversity
- stop extinction of wildlife
- capture co2
- capture water, replenish ground water
- biotic pump effect [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump]
- stop droughts and dust storms
- stop desertification
Why not solar fields?
An area of 254 km x 254 km (64516 km2) would be enough to meet the total electricity demand of the world [0]. We use 37 mil. km2 for animal agriculture [1].
[0] https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... (page 25)
There are actually many who think that pre-industrial heavy forestation is an artifact of early humans killing off all the giant herbivores (mammoths, sloths, mastadons), and that the "default" state of much of the northen hemisphere is steppe/grasslands.
I suppose weirdly both could be true at once if the mass killings came before fire did.
But I doubt that mammalian herbivores ever had the potential to permanently deforest vast areas.
Few decades ago some farmers in africa lobbied for killing tens of thousands of elephants for their supposed destructive effects on vegetation. Since then we've learned that even with all thair trampling and gobbling their positive effects on flora outweight any perceived negatives.
Still not fan of the human predation hypothesis for the decline of mammoth steppe (not that human predation is not responsible for megafauna extinction), but I'll read more and we'll see. I've been wrong before.
The methane reduction benefits also happen when only a small portion of the feed is replaced with seaweed, so it’s not the whole diet that becomes seaweed.
a] there's no other food that's worse from the climate and environment standpoint than beef & dairy [0][1]
b] transport is usually a tiny fraction of food's carbon footprint ... "eat local" is ruse & big ag propaganda [2]
c] seaweed is more expensive than corn because of subsidies? so take those subsidies from one of the most destructive industries and give it to seaweed. even if it's expensive now, it's because we plant corn and not grow seaweed. if more people would grow seaweed, the price would go down. there's no reason why it should be expensive other than there is more demand than supply now.
d] big cost of those corn fields and pastures is deforestation and land use change, a factor which is often undercounted and overlooked [1]
e] about 70% of seaweed naturally sinks to the bottom of the sea ... so even if we wouldn't be able to eat and use it all, it still make sense to grow it [3]
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat [1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use [2] https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local [3] https://phys.org/news/2019-08-seaweed-deep-carbon.html