The greenhouse effect of methane is 28x stronger than that of Co2. Cows produce so much methane and have been bred over generations for size and population, so we have too many of them. The methane produced in the process of making one burger patty is equivalent to the greenhouse gas effect of driving 40 km in an average sized sedan.
On top of the fact that cows produce so much methane, the amount of crops required to feed those cows takes up so much farmland that we would actually be able to feed humans an equivalently nutritious diet by growing crops on only a portion of the land required to feed cows.
So while yes, cow farts are the main contributor, it's used as a misnomer to invalidate the arguments that its the infrastructure of the meat farming industry as a whole that is so bad.
I agree with you, but one correction: it’s actually cow burps, not cow farts, that are contributing to climate change.
https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/which-is-a-bigger-methane-source-cow-belching-or-cow-flatulence/
There are actually solutions in terms of capturing the methane emissions of manure for power production on farms. As for the methane of cows, it's not Inherently a problem if you're not relying on diesel machines to feed those cows. However, the problem comes in with the SCALE at which we are producing meat and raising cows
For "grass fed" it's mostly burps and methane. The more they're in a CAFO system (most of them, and most of the products) the digestion shifts further down, so you get more GHGs out the other end, including lots of N2O from feces and urine, but less methane. In fact, one of the "efficiency savings" proposed by the industry is further intensification (CAFOs) in the poorer parts of the world where they still do herding. There's no winning between them, no solution, the whole thing needs to end.
The methane comes especially from the fermentation of fibrous plant matter, so the more fibrous stuff they eat (leaves, hay), the more methane. That's why I call them "walking tropical swamps".
>One ton of **nitrous oxide traps 273 times more heat than one ton of carbon dioxide**
and can persist in the atmosphere
**for up to 110 years**,
compared to 10 years for methane, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA
Thank you for the correction. It was late at night when I made that reply. The excess nitrogen in the soil and rivers from animal agriculture also creates ocean dead zones.
And then all of those grasslands can be repopulated with bison, deer, and other herbivores... who burp and fart methane exactly the same. Or we could just let the grass die and rot in the ground... and still produce methane...
But hey, at least we're ignoring the methane from oil and gas. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/overview
Not ignoring that at all.
We can rewild some of it, let some be used for food crops. The wolves can keep the deer at bay.
It’s almost like there was a set up that worked and kept it sustainable and then something came along and dug it all up.
Rewilding also means predators and no more "improved grasslands" either. Plus, a lot of reforestation. It's not as simple as "others take their place", they're not in some giant underground freezer waiting to emerge.
You're ignoring land use change and watering acres and acres of feed to feed the cattle which could otherwise be used to feed humans or left to nature.
Wild mammals would have quite a ways to go! There is currently 60 times more biomass of cows compared to wild land mammals! Source? Phys.org
Compared to wild ruminants? Even bigger difference!
https://phys.org/news/2023-02-weight-responsibility-biomass-livestock-dwarfs.html
I don’t have statistics at hand to back this up at the moment, but I doubt that wild bison and deer emit the same amount of methane as cattle being fed high-energy diets. Can you back up that claim?
I also doubt that wildlife would repopulate currently grazed areas in the numbers you are suggesting. Not to mention that a lot of land worldwide used for cattle was originally forest, not grasslands. And returning those areas to forest would store carbon.
I would be glad to know if there are any studies or literature to back up your claims.
It seems like one difference would be that farmed animals are constantly being bred and the same number of animals are kept on the grass and then fed grains. Whereas, rewilding would get back to the natural level of animals with changes according to the predation factor.
The latest IPCC numbers show 37% of ice free land as used for huma grazing of animals and 6% percent for animal agriculture cropland. So that 6% that can be rewilded plus the 37%% graze land (40% of that was forest land) so that could go back to nature too.
We'd better get going on this, deforestation happening fast.
No one is denying oil and gas is bad for our climate (apart from small groups of morons) but in my view it’s actually the better option than anything we currently have open to us. Yeah yeah… I know…electric, but have you ever researched the impact Lithium mining has on fresh water sources and communities in the areas where it’s mined? Not to mention the environmental and climate cost from the huge lithium ponds and the machinery( all run by oil ) that they use to get it out of the ground in the first place. We need a doable renewable source like hydrogen to actually work and even then I’d imagine oil will still be needed to run the military might of most countries not to mention all the things that oil is made from.
Oil is worse than lithium in water use. Oil is increasingly extracted from oil sands, where they use four tons of water and and third ton natural gas to get one ton of oil from a couple tons of sand. It's horrible. And a gasoline car takes a cubic meter of the gasoline in a year. Contrast this with 8 kilograms of lithium in an EV. Which is recyclable, while oil is not.
Hydrogen is a myth, meme and scam. Outside industrial processes actually needing it. But hydrogen in your daily life- no, just no. It escapes every container, with its tanks is even more unwieldy than batteries, and most of the energy is lost in conversions.
And the best thing to do in regards to cars, is to have less and smaller cars.
And have them be EVs.
There's a study that showed by mixing just a bit of seaweed into their feed, it reduces their methane expulsion by a lot. Wonder if this is a good solution going forward (but eating less beef is the ideal solution for water usage too ...)
I'll admit I just read some easily digestible articles on this not the full scientific article so feel free to correct me.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247820&mkt_tok=ODQzLVlHQi03OTMAAAF8ahQA42wnutWKFTdDeG77SMNDjrL6AfFY0uulV-37XLrYfp0Q7xlJbpZpmceWyc7WY_rqWtiIwvt5FY2-5ZqghSyF_0DpHGIGHtQUDW3B4Yx7CTUM&fbclid=IwAR1ZarhT-k3LdTSwaGIy3g3gwnPi6dNvIoXkrx2doEysJDI2IV3SEyfA7d8
Unfortunately there have been mixed results trying to implement this, it's probably not the magic bullet that it originally appeared.
[Article](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/seaweed-cow-feed-trial-fails-methane-reduction-australia)
There's also the land use issue as others have pointed out. Basically, beef is unlikely to become non-deleterious for the environment so the right thing to do is to scale back it's production.
There's plenty of areas that need ruminants, like large swaths of the US, but the native ones were killed off over a century ago. Cows fill this void fairly well. I agree that we need fewer of them, and we need to move away from feed lots and other concentrated production strategies. But, getting rid of beef probably isn't the best solution long term.
I haven't proposed getting rid of beef, I've said we need to scale back production so yeah there could still be ruminants that could be used for food.
I can't stress how much it would need to go from everyday foodstuff to a rare occasion luxury though. The pre colonial N. American bison population has been estimated at 25-30 million. The US slaughtered 34 million cattle in 2022. You can start to see we are talking drastic reduction in beef production.
So it's not far off from the pre colonial population. But, Americans consumption of beef is way down compared to the past, and chicken consumption is up. Which is better for the climate. I think the major driver of that is cost rather than a conscious decision.
Honestly, the answer to all these questions generally comes down to better technology and a reduced population. People just aren't going to stop eating meat or traveling internationally, I'm not. I think we need to just start planning on a population reduction that eventually leads to sustainability. The earth is going to do it either way, we might as well get a head start.
One big difference between livestock and natural animals is that farmers kill predators to save the livestock. If rewilded, the predator species would return also.
Scientist Jim Hansen said the best thing a person can do for the climate is give up eating meat.
That's great, it's not going to happen though. People are going to eat meat, we have to figure out the best way to do that at scale and implement policies and regulations to reinforce those conclusions.
mixing seaweed is not better than not raising cows at all though, Climate wise, because it is not just about the methane, but the land and water use, too.
I love when people go on about how much water it takes to produce almond milk. Then I ask them if they realize how much water goes into getting a full grown cow to milk.
It's not a one to one comparison though. The almonds we're generally talking about are grown in California, in an area that could be considered arid and has a large population that needs the water.
Other areas of the world have more than enough water and beef isn't really putting a dent in the amount available to humans. Beyond that, if you want to grow organic, sustainable agriculture it's almost impossible to do without having animals in the mix. Manure is often a better option than synthetic fetilizers that are generally overapplied and make their way into waterways. (Obviously, I'm not talking about feed lots or other concentrated operations here, more your traditional farm).
Cows live in my soaking wet country. Almond milk comes from places like California and are depleting water reservoirs.
As far as water is concerned, the cows are harmless, but the almonds are not.
Major issue is that almond production often uses blue water, while most livestock production uses green water. Green water is actually a renewable resource. It regularly passes through animals as part of the water cycle. Every drop of water you drink has been inside many, many plants and animals.
As another poster has commented, it's the burps (chewing the cud) that cause most of the methane. But otherwise a salient post.
Water input per kg of edible meat produced, is also ridiculously imbalanced. Essentially, eat less meat = breed and feed less cows.
All that said, much of cattle farming is smallholding, subsistence farming where the animals are grazed locally. The big issue lies with the industrial scale farming and the global impact of the feed supply that's required.
The way I would phrase it is that the resources used to grow feed for the cows could be used to feed humans and to mitigate climate change through rewilding all the saved land by eliminating animal agriculture. A University of Minnesota study found that we could feed 4 billion more people by replacing animal agriculture with a plant-based food production system. Details on request.
A good step in combatting this is doing away with subsidies but GOOD LUCK, the meat and dairy ag industry has that on lock with politicians, at least in US
If subsidies just went to struggling farmers, I'd be fine with it. The problem is that these subsidies are often going to large corporations and very wealthy farming families.
One thing to remember is that methane from natural sources at least isn't adding to the amount of carbon in the current carbon cycle. Fossil fuels are particularly bad because they take carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago and add it to the carbon cycle.
Agriculture is still a big issue and needs to be addressed as there is still a larger transient phase of methane in the atmosphere.
It does seem a bit wild, which is exactly why I used it as a comparison point.
The average cow produces around 210 pounds of methane gas per year and while cows can naturally live 15-20 years, they are usually slaughtered around age 5. 210x5=~1050 pounds of methane in their lifetime.
Since methane has a 28x greenhouse gas effect vs Co2, a cow that lives 5 years at an average weight produces about the equivalent of 28x1050 pounds of Co2, or 29,400 pounds of Co2.
Depending on the size of the burger, you could get anywhere from 800 to 1200 burgers from a single cow, but we will estimate on the high end to be conservative. 29,400/1200=24.5, so about 25 pounds of Co2 per burger patty.
The average car emits 170 grams of Co2 per kilometer, or 0.375 pounds. To emit 25 pounds of Co2, the car would need to drive 25/0.375 km, or about 66.66 km. So by this series of calculations, the average cow produces is the approximate equivalent of 67 km worth of driving.
Of course there would be a lot of variables so I reduced the number down to 40, as if someone was making the smallest burgers possible.
I came home from work and took some time to read over and digest this information. Then I went to verify everything and wow, it's not only accurate but I'd say you even overshot how many burgers you can get from a cow. The environmental cost is surprising.
Something felt off with the car comparison. After thinking about it, I think it would be more accurate to compare the total environmental impact of the manufacturing of the car, as well as the creation of the fuel, rather than the output of emissions from the car itself.
Manufacturing a car emits 6-17 metric tons of CO2, and over a car's 200,000 km lifetime, driving adds another 40.8 metric tons, totaling around 50.8 metric tons of CO2. Additionally, extracting, refining, and transporting fuel add about 8.2 metric tons (20% of 40.8), totaling around 56.8 metric tons of CO2.
For beef, methane from a cow produces about 13.3 metric tons of CO2 equivalent over 5 years. Including feed production, processing, and transport, a single burger's lifecycle emissions range from 10 to 50 kg of CO2 equivalent.
I don't think this diminishes your point but it seems more accurate to me. What do you think?
While the heat trapping effect of methane is 28x, its half life in the atmosphere is about 1/15 that of CO2. So, on balance its overall long-term impact is only about twice that of CO2.
Long term impact is much more complex than just how long an effect lasts, the magnitude of heat trapping can cause cascading population die offs, drought and forest fires. Even though its lower than Co2, methane still lasts at least 10 years in the atmosphere, which is more than enough time to cause crippling ecosystem collapse.
Land use.
It takes more food to sustain animals due to the energy transfer between [trophic levels](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/trophic-level)
We are clearing huge swathes of land to feed animals; land that could otherwise be used for crops to feed people(for a fraction of the land area being used), or remain naturally vegetated. As a result, animal agriculture is responsible for [~15% of annual GHG emissions](https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/)
Side note, the absurdity of 'cow farts' is an example of the [reducto ad absurdum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum) logical fallacy.
And the increased land use to support this much biomass promotes incredibly irresponsible levels of fertilization which have disastrous downstream effects
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but reductio ad absurdum is not a logical fallacy, it's a completely valid and sometimes useful form of argument.
The wikipedia link you gave doesn't call it a fallacy, and even gives some good examples of its use.
It's worth adding that your comment primarily applies to land animals.
For fish farms, the energy waste is very small due to fish being ectotherms. For ocean fishing, this problem doesn't really apply.
Ocean fishing has its own problems, but arguably these are about the way we do it and not the idea of fishing itself. Fuel usage, bycatch, overfishing populations are all solvable, and if we'd do, ocean fish is arguably more sustainable than plant-based food as it doesn't waste land on monocultures and there is more than enough biomass generated in the oceans to feed the world.
Farm fishes are fed with caught fishes,it couldn't be more ridiculous if I tried to make it . . . If they aren't, we'll, they are fed with multiresistant carcass powder.
Yes! The Outlaw Ocean did an excellent piece on African fish being caught by Chinese vessels and turned into fishmeal to feed to farmed fish. By the way, destroying the African subsistence fishing. It couldn't be more absurd.
https://www.theoutlawocean.com/reporting/how-a-third-of-all-fish-caught-in-the-ocean-is-turned-into-something-that-no-one-eats/
Fish farms have also various problems:
- fish in farms are fed with fishpallets wich are made from wild caught fish which is a problem because of the amount and the way we fish it
- contaminate the water with waste and antibiotics because fish get infected with lice
- these lice spread to wild fish wich threaten the ecosystem
Abart from that there is the ethics
(even though humans mostly don’t care for fish because we look so different they are conscious feeling individuals non the less) :
- tanks are way too small
- fish often die before even slaughtered because of the way they were farmed
I think the answer to all of this is less, we waste too much bc of capitalism and the way we farm in monoculture could be changed to permaculture.
And for the fish there wouldn’t be a problem if we wouldn’t consume that much but as of now we are fishing so much that the only answer is to eat less - where the answer will be plant based 🤷♂️
How healthy are those fisheries though? Sure, some numbers are doing great. But, more often than not, most fisheries around the world are being fished to exhaustion. I dk, it seems like well controlled land based protein is a better option going forward. Especially lab grown meat, yes it's an energy hog now, but I think that will be rectified in the near future. Especially with how cheap solar is going.
Ruminants are walking tropical wetlands, so they release lots of methane. There's also carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (from their excrements).
Another layer is that they use up a lot of land in terms of feed, which is associated with its own GHGs.
Another layer is land use change (turning lands into pastures or wild grasslands into pastures) and deforestation (obvious, but it's also the destruction of carbon sink).
If you have a few years you can understand it.
If not, here's some reading:
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-can-climate-change-and-biodiversity-loss-be-tackled-together/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-meatless-diet-is-better-for-you-and-the-planet/
https://theconversation.com/global-food-system-emissions-alone-threaten-warming-beyond-1-5-c-but-we-can-act-now-to-stop-it-149312
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01605-8
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19474-6
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1104-5
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac02ef
The topic is plagued by industry disinformation campaigns at all levels of understanding, as is the tradition and in the same fashion as the fossil fuel industry.
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2022/10/31/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis-climate-funding/
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22379909/big-meat-companies-spend-millions-lobbying-climate
https://theconversation.com/the-meat-and-dairy-industry-is-not-climate-neutral-despite-some-eye-catching-claims-219369
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-meat-industry-is-doing-exactly-what-big-oil-does-to-fight-climate-action/2021/05/14/831e14be-b3fe-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html
https://www.desmog.com/2023/12/14/the-livestock-industrys-climate-neutral-claims-are-too-good-to-be-true/
https://influencemap.org/report/The-European-Meat-and-Dairy-Sector-s-Climate-Policy-Engagement-28096
https://heated.world/p/big-meat-is-lying-about-sustainability
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08052024/usda-tyson-climate-friendly-beef-claim/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-024-03690-w
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad0f75
And, no, there's no climate mitigation without dealing with the animal industry, especially the beef and dairy sectors. All of these industries need to be tackled (to the ground, and then burried) simultaneously.
The amount of synthetic fertilizers used to feed a human with grains, is similar to the amount of synthetic fertilizers used to feed a cow with grains.
Now if the human eats nothing but cows, that becomes a crazy amount of synthetic fertilizers to feed that human.
Synthetic fertilizers are made with fossil methane. The less we consume, the less new carbon gases are added to the atmosphere, the slower it warms up.
So it’s not the farts, it’s the fact the farts are from synthetic fertilizers from fossil carbon.
Right - feeding a person beef requires 20x the grains (to feed that cow) than to feed that person grains directly. Thus, the land usage, transportation, and general equipment are 20x higher when eating meat, before even accounting for the cattle themselves.
We shouldn’t be feeding ruminants grain and we should be using ruminant manure as the primary source of N fertilizer instead of synthetic fertilizer. This would constrain domesticated ruminant biomass without making us dependent on fossil fuel fertilizer forever.
Without disagreeing directly, it is a pretty complicated issue, especially when accounting for land and water use. Constraining the number of ruminants will reduce their impact, but making each individual ruminant as productive (fat) as possible also reduces their impact (per kg meat).
> We shouldn’t be feeding ruminants grain
[So you're saying we should divide beef production by 3?](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/meta). We have to be clear about what we're saying.
> without making us dependent on fossil fuel fertilizer forever
Nitrogen fertilizer can also be made from electricity. It's a bit pricier (for now), but we wouldn't need as much without factory farming.
About a third to half, depending on how much we can scale up silvopasture.
So called “green” fertilizer is simply not economically viable for agriculture in the near future, and probably not without fusion.
Making stuff up again? Tsk Tsk
There's zero indication that fusion would be cheaper than current electricity sources. We don't even have a commercial prototype.
[Regarding green ammonia production, the Ammonia Energy Association’s target costs for 2030 are 0.48 USD/kg and for 2050 0.32 USD/kg. Currently, grey ammonia produced through Haber-Bosch costs around 0.33 USD/kg.](https://medium.com/extantia-capital/get-ready-for-the-boom-the-ammonia-market-will-increase-4-fold-until-2050-6996d7f8f35b)
["If the cost of renewable electricity becomes cheaper than about $50 per MWh, the cost of producing CO2-free ammonia from renewable hydrogen may become lower than that from natural gas."](https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/the-cost-of-co2-free-ammonia/). Guess how much renewables cost right now?
Keep in mind you’re competing with livestock, a revenue stream…
Not sure I’m going to trust a medium article and industry PR on future price projections. S&P Global is reporting significant price differences between green and blue ammonia. We need to stop thinking we can depend on electricity for everything we currently depend on fossil fuels for.
You prefer an academic source? Easy to find, and they agree with the source above:
[Global potential of green ammonia based on hybrid PV-wind power plants](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920315750) - Applied Energy article from 2021
"Green ammonia can be produced for 370–450 €/tonne in all continents by 2030"
Because, as stated before, we can't feed 8 billion people without adding nitrogen. If you still think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy and I'm not interested in arguing with you.
Are you denying the existence of self-regulating nutrient cycles in the biosphere? Wow.
Hint: we have a source of energy that is outside of the system: the sun. It’s not a closed system, so the laws of thermodynamics aren’t violated. Absolutely flabbergasted that this needs to be mentioned outside of creationist forums.
Absolutely not. You think the same nutrients go round and round with out loss? And that the artificially higher bio cycles we have due to synthetics could be maintained if we stopped adding the synthetics? A strict legume then cereal grain rotation still produces more if extra N is added to the cereal phase.
It’s not that we can’t nor shouldn’t make more use of legumes for nitrogen fixing. We use legume pastures on our farm. Then we add extra nitrogen in the cropping my phase because that manure cycle can only do so much. Farms are so busy exporting nutrients that we can do that faster than biology can replace nitrogen.
> Right - feeding a person beef requires 20x the grains (to feed that cow) than to feed that person grains directly
That's not how it works, no. The average "feed conversion ratio" is closer to 6 (pounds of feed per pound of cow generated) and most of that feed is grass, silage and things humans can't eat. Even the grains are mainly leftovers from other processes.
That's how it currently is, but it's not how it has to be. In a traditional farm, animals are necessary to avoid synthetic fertilizers. It's a closed system where the animals eat grass, food waste and some produced food. And in return they give manure which is used to fertilize the crops.
There are farms that are striving to do this to the greatest extent possible right now and you can buy products from them. You just have to search them out.
Organic is more of a marketing ploy, it doesn't really mean much. You really have to source the meat yourself if you want to embrace this type of system. You can often find farmers who sell their own meat online. It's more expensive, but you can actually ask them about how they raise the animals and how they're slaughtered. Beyond being more environmental, it's often less cruel.
This is one of the factors yes, but there is also land use. It takes significantly more land to feed people with meat than without. This results in less land being available for nature, meaning less carbon sequestration. It also means more fertilizer use.
And all that land for the needed also uses a huge amount of water and then the loss of fields and crops that are used to feed cows versus those crops and land being fused to feed humans directly.
I think it was a pretty recent oxford study that showed that a plantbased diet only needed 25% as much land as a meat eaters diet.
There is also a huge ethical problem with exploiting animals. Animal ag is also a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases and therefore epidemics and pandemics. Public health would also hugely benefit from moving away from animal based foods.
Besides the methane emissions, land use required to produce 1 calorie or 1g of protein from beef is much much higher than producing it from a plant based source. Which makes sense if you think about it. A cow, just like us uses lots of energy just being alive and does not gain one gram of mass for each gram of feed it consumes. Why don't we just eat the soy beans instead of inefficiently running them through a cow first? This would require much less land.
By using land area to grow feed for livestock, we prevent those same areas from being forests which would store large amounts of CO2. See how the Amazon rain forest is being burned down to export feed to livestock across the globe.
Here is good overview from Oxford University that describes the CO2 emissions of many common food types:
[https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local)
Basic biological inefficiency is what you are missing.
If a cow eats 2,000 calories of plant it doesn't make 2,000 calories worth of meat, closer to 200.
So if we hypothetically got rid of all cows and animal agriculture we'd still need to repurpose some of the land, water, fertilizer, and other resources to growing more plants but we could reclaim about 90% of it.
The biggest issues with cows is that they are incompatible with our climate goals. Even if by 2050 we are all driving electric cars, powered by a 100% net zero electrical grid and have replaced every gas range and furnace with an electrical stove and heat pump .... well if we haven't tackled the problem of cattle by then we won't be at net zero emissions.
Solutions do exist but if they were practical they'd already be in practice. They won't happen on their own.
Most detectable methane. For the fossil sources, it's usually some concentrated release which can be detected. For ruminants and wetlands it's a very diffuse plume which is hard to spot from some cool satellite.
This is the main issue. Animals farms used to be small, local affairs. Cows turned grass and hay, inedible energy sources, into dairy and meat that fed local communities. As population grew and farms became factories herds were overpopulated for the land use available. This created a spiral where land is currently being used to grow corn and other grains for feed. Instead of having animals utilize existing space they began utilizing more and more land to feed the herd.
Small farms are the answer. Animal farms are protection against famine and allow the preservation of food (i.e. cheese). For these reasons we need animal farms, but they must be reigned in and big agriculture must clean up their pollution and disregard for local communities. Subsidies must be revised to protect small farmers who utilize land correctly rather than big corn. These farmers are out there trying to do their part to protect our food supply while lowering their impact. Some farmers I know are developing milk cows that will be beef cows at the end of their milking life, effectively doubling their value as food producers.
There's a lot of places problems need to be addressed in the short term, along with animals farms. However the demonization of farm animals and the characterization that water thirsty crops like soy and almonds are going to feed the world is disingenuous at best and a total farce at worse. What happens when there's a drought and those crops fail? We need to find the balance and go back to some of the old ways.
Making fertilizer to grow plants to feed to cattle, to eat, requires lots more fertilizer than making fertilizer to grow plants which we humans can eat.
Making fertilizer creates pollution.
We use 18 times the amount of land to feed cows to feed us then we would need to grow plants that would feed us
Monoculture is a big thing in combo with deforestation for like soy that is used to feed cows
The methane yes too
Lots of great information in here and I am consistently shocked and confused to see people still eat beef.
Anyone who says they care about climate change and still eats meat are so confusing to me.
Some clarifications:
80% of methane comes from burps and only 20% from farts.
Methane starts out as a significantly stronger greenhouse gas (more than 100x CO2) but slowly breaks down to CO2. Many figures consider methanes impact over 100 years which averages out to like 20x CO2. This is why figures vary, and why in a healthy ecosystem ruminants don't slowly heat the planet. But for us right now, for the next few years, eating less ruminant meat&dairy is very effective at keeping temperatures low.
Mainly land use and the inefficient conversion from plant to meat based calories, in short you farm more plants to feed animals and get less calories than if you just ate those plants. I do want to point out that a bunch of animal feed are byproducts from farming inedible by humans so the exact numbers can be problematic.
This is just my two cents. It is not only the land that is required to house and allow these animals to graze. It’s also the removal of native species that would be in the area that would help with the erosion. All of these factor into the climate change as the weather increases and gets more chaotic. The natural system that were in place that helped diminish the effects of these things are now no longer there. The cattle industry has its own reasons for climate changes that are just as bad as big oil.
It’s a short the skinny is, we leave nothing for future generations. We basically say we deserve to have the best now rather than making sure generations from now will be able to be as prosperous as we once were.
Mostly it's the biodiversity loss,in the last 50 years we wiped out 70% of wild animals mostly to make more space for animal agriculture
But there are many others too
It’s not just methane (even though that’s a pretty good reason on its own), something like 40% of US water consumption goes to cows or growing crops to feed cows, FOURTY PERCENT. Also, a MASSIVE portion of deforestation happens to create pastures for cows, or grow crops to feed cows.
US demand for burgers directly drives deforestation in the Amazon: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil/)
I’m pretty sure cows *burp* methane, not fart it.
https://www.illumina.com/company/news-center/feature-articles/sustainable-cows.html
…500 liters a day, burped out per cow.
***"It's the how - not the cow."***
**Ruminant animals raised on pasture, in a density and duration appropriate for the land they are on, are an important part of a healthy ecosystem. With proper management, ruminants can be used to build soil, which sequesters carbon and increases productivity of the land and increases grazing capacity.**
##Search Topics:
- Regenerative Agriculture
- Holistic Grazing
- Rotational Grazing
- Soil Building
##Documentaries
- "Sacred Cow" (Nick Offerman, 2020, 80-min) ([streaming](https://sflix.to/movie/free-sacred-cow-hd-93499))
- "Kiss the Ground" (Woody Harrelson, 2020, 85-min) ([streaming](https://sflix.to/movie/free-kiss-the-ground-hd-63463))
- "Livestock on the Land" (2021, 80-min) ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xBDr_a1C2s))
- "Living Soil Film" (2019, 60-min) ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJouJhLM48))
##Videos
- The Updated Soil Food Web (Jeff Lowenfels, 2024, 50-min) ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x9hpXo6sfg))
- What is the Soil Food Web? (Dr. Elaine Ingham, 2022, 40-min) ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQwy0Xn9AU))
- Greg Judy, Regenerative Rancher ([YT channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi8jM5w49UezskDWBGyKq5g/videos))
##Books (available at libgen.is)
- "Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (Hahn Niman, 2021)
- "Sacred Cow - The Case for (Better) Meat" (Rodgers, 2020)
- "What Your Food Ate - How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health" (Montgomery, 2022)
- "On Eating Meat: The Truth About Its Production and the Ethics of Eating It" (Evans, 2019)
- "The Farm Bill: A Citizen's Guide" (Imhoff, 2019)
- "The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories" (Imhoff, 2012)
- "CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations" (Report: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008)
- "Grass Productivity: An Introduction to Rational Grazing" (Voisin, 1959)
- "The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability" (Keith, 2009)
A significant source of cow-related methane comes from manure holding ponds at factory operations, where most cattle spend their final months "finishing" on cheap (subsidized) grain.
Manure (bovine, human, whatever) decomposition without oxygen (anaerobic, i.e. in manure holding ponds on a feedlot) produces methane. Manure decomposition with oxygen (aerobic, i.e. on pasture) produces CO2.
People still associate animal production with nostalgic images of family farms that functionally went extinct over 50-years ago. Unless you are doing something rare, your food (meat, grain, fruit, vegetable, whatever) comes from monopoly-owned or controlled, factory operations powered by fossil fuels with fertilizers derived from fossil fuels.
##Food Industry Consolidation
- "Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry" (Book, Frerick, 2024)
- "Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization" (Book, Manning, 2005)
- How to Beat Big Beef when the Beef Industry is Rigged ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_3a8vtGYI), 2024, 40-min)
Clarification: Cows belch 90-95% of their direct emissions - not fart.
>“Of the **CH4 (methane)** produced by enteric fermentation in the **forestomach 95% was excreted by eructation (burp)**, and from CH4 produced in the **hindgut 89% was found to be excreted through the breath**.’” ([AP Article](https://apnews.com/article/9791f1f85808409e93a1abc8b98531d5), 2019)
Methane emissions were discussed on the latest episode of cleaning up. [The first 10 minutes had me audibly gasping](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LVCgC8fPjpM)
A plant based diet is not even remotely close to the same climate footprint, we could feed the world on 1/4 the resources if we stopped feeding animals for a year or two first. It’s absurdly inefficient.
Here’s an excellent source that delves into multiple facets of our agricultural system and its effects on climate etc. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
The real problem isn't what people go on and on about. There is a carbon cycle and whatever you feed a cow is already in the environment and is going to get into the air whether it is by decaying plant material or human feces. What we need to do is stop putting new carbon into the air that is buried. We need to encourage processes that sequester carbon. The problem with meat production is we use endless fossil fuels to produce feed for cattle, dry it, transport it. There is lots of land that is useless for agriculture and can't grow trees that is perfect for grazing animals. If rotated properly the soil is even enriched and starts to hold organic matter to a significant degree. We need to eat less meat. We need to use less energy is the bigger issue. We need to take a giant lifestyle haircut, live the way our grandparents lived energy consumption-wise, gradually give 1/2 the planet back to nature and figure out what we should be working towards. Instead we all get to watch the world burn.
Best estimates are that the the territory of the US held about 60M bison around 1800. There are currently around 30M beef cattle in the same territory.
Looking at just beef…it is not at all clear that beef production results in more methane than what the buffalo were farting out before humans intruded on their landscape.
No no no… go watch Food Inc.
The problem is that making meat into food is incredibly wasteful- you have to grow a lot of food that people could consume-
To feed to the cows- and then to feed to the humans. Eating meat is no longer feasible in our world. As an individual - I’m still consuming cow, pig, etc. And I also see where this is not maintainable. These are not issues to push on individuals. The problem is a lack of regulation etc.
Not that I eat much meat: but my biggest argument when it comes to saying the amount of space or the amount of animals that are being used… the North American Bison population was higher at its peak then there are of current cattle out there now.
The problem is feedlots having a large population in such a small area. The other problem is that at a certain point, the animals are just putting on fat instead of muscle. So they’re wasting food, and converting it to greenhouse gases.
Corporate funded anti-social propaganda meant to hook the easily manipulated into repeating the same lines at other people.
While livestock is and always has been a big human problem for tens of hundreds of thousands of years, i think the people who feed the world should own the responsibility of the problems they create in the process.
The irony here is people living in cities complaining about cows when they need massive amounts of CO2 and green house gasses to get ANYTHING they need to survive.
We idiot humans are tearing down the most important ecosystems like the Amazon to raise bloody cows? Really feel like we need to redefine our perception of intelligence.
Human caused increases in CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide levels are definitely a HUGE problem facing most life on earth. That said, global heating is only a symptom of the real problem, ecological overshoot.
Ocean acidification, oxygen depleted ocean dead zones, habitat loss, plastics pollution, forever chemical pollution, soil depletion, forest destruction, melting permafrost, AMOC slowdown, mass reduction of insects, birds, and all wildlife are all attributable to a worldwide capitalist economic system that requires infinite growth on a finite planet.
So far, human kind in the 21st century has shown no ability to work toward a sustainable way to live within earth's ecological boundaries.
There's a place for pastoral meat consumption in the traditional sense, when the meat was treated as a luxury for special occasions or added sparingly to staples. We have been so far beyond that since refrigeration enabled commodity meat trade a century ago and especially now with factory farms. Comparing the historical preindustrial conception of meat consumption to modern practices just confuses everyone and leads to innate defensiveness for the right to consume meat at all.
Edit: tbc what I mean is the mass consumption of meat is what displaces the plant consumption into the bioreactor that creates large amounts of methane and amplifies the impact of plant farming. It's close to half of plants are livestock feed. That amount of crops is also far higher than the equivalent would be for human consumption in substitution and leads to insane monoculture intensive practices that require vast amounts of energy.
Cows don’t need grain at all. High intensity rotational grazing of grass-fed ruminants is actually good for a managed pasture and the environment- but that’s not how we farm beef commercially. The issue is how we farm beef commercially, not the existence of cows or the moderate consumption of beef.
- poor ppl ration meat or even dont eat meat. and it\`s mostly chicken and pork.
- richest 10% contribute of \~50% of carbon emissions.
- it\`s 11-17 % of carbon related emissions.
- ppl still will need to eat.
So, even if we do make ppl drop meat, it will be tenths of a percent reduction. Rich ppl will absolutely not give up on something they want without their life is at stake. This topic is brought up specifically to distract from fossil resources. And create discord among the people.
You are right that meat industry must change drastically or even evolve to artificial meat, but carbon emissions is not the reason because it wont change a thing.
Nothing.
Going by up-to-date peer-reviewed studies shows that meat itself contributes at most 2% of novel GHG.
Ruminants in particular are likely a net benefit given the amount of agricultural waste they reprocess.
If you want to actually reduce meat-based GHG/environmental impact you'll need to start with chicken, and there won't be much bang for your buck.
They argue that methane is a bigger problem, but ignore the fact that our atmosphere can compensate some methane in the air quite fine and did so for millions of years (even with millions of bison roaming North America). The issue is that the fossil fuel industry puts EXTRA methane in the air well beyond what the atmosphere CAN compensate, and now we need to reduce the methane exhaust of our civilization.
Now, the sane thing to do would be to stop using fossil fuels, and to stop emitting methane from such sources. Then we go back to baseline, the world climate at least stabilizes, and all is fine.
But see, the cute animals have friends who see this as the perfect opportunity to go against the meat industry. They did that before climate protection was en vogue, and once we have solved the climate change problem, they'll find other reasons, while their true reason is they just like the animals (nothing wrong with that, they should just be honest about it).
And of course, the fossil fuel industry is somewhat happy about you talking about meat instead of the real culprit.
I would argue that we can tackle climate change from multiple angles else it would be carbon tunnel vision… like it’s not only methane and co2 but also overconsumption, biodiversity, air pollution, eutrophication, education, poverty, water scarcity, ecotoxicity etc etc etc
While you are right that fossil fuel industry likes to blame someone else for the issue food is still an important factor in this - and the meat industry itself does all the same by the way just like fossil fuels they try to hide that they have a massive impact on this whole thing.
Impact as in
- deforestation for monoculture farming for animal feed
- huge waste that often contaminates groundwater, streams and in the end the ocean which leads to huge mass dying events of fishes
- landuse itself as mentioned in other comments as well instead of farming animal feed to feed a cow we could just grow something on that land
- sure methane still
Not sure what I missed but yea
>multiple angles
How about we just go for the one angle that works, and ingore all the angles that will not work? Seems a lot more helpful.
> deforestation for monoculture farming for animal feed
You mean the farming on soil that is too bad for growing human food, so they farm stuff that brings less per ton? Or do you mean farming things such as soy, of which the oil is used for human consumption and only the rest is used to feed animals, because that's still better (yes, even for the climate) than throwing it away?
Deforestation isn't done because of animals, it is done because of money. Remove the animals, and they'll find other uses for the forests.
> huge waste that often contaminates groundwater,
Another misconception. The "waste" is fertilizer. Overuse of fertilizer is bad for groundwater, but good for harvests, which is why too many farmers overuse. They do that with artificial fertilizer as well.
> landuse itself as mentioned
Land use and deforestation are basically synonymous. Maybe don't say it twice?
> methane
Still much, much less than from mining fossil fuels.
Lmao! Buffalo roamed all over North America for thousands of years. There were way many 4 stomached animals on the planet a 1000 years ago than now. It didn’t cause global warming then.
People built some massive CO2 collection facilities to suck the CO2 from the air and condense it to solid waste and bury them underground.
Is building smaller or moveable equipment next to the dairy/meat farms possible? Is that more efficient?
I think the ‘cow problem’ is overblown. Before about 1800 north america was home to hundreds of millions of ruminants. It was only after the US and Canadian government decided to starve “indians” onto reserves by slaughtering the game did populations really drop. Bison (think of a massive battle ready cow) numbers dropped from well over 100 million to almost extinction. The same happened to deer, elk and pretty much all vegetarian game. Compared to pre 1800 I’m not convinced global methane emissions from animals are much higher today.
The greenhouse effect of methane is 28x stronger than that of Co2. Cows produce so much methane and have been bred over generations for size and population, so we have too many of them. The methane produced in the process of making one burger patty is equivalent to the greenhouse gas effect of driving 40 km in an average sized sedan. On top of the fact that cows produce so much methane, the amount of crops required to feed those cows takes up so much farmland that we would actually be able to feed humans an equivalently nutritious diet by growing crops on only a portion of the land required to feed cows. So while yes, cow farts are the main contributor, it's used as a misnomer to invalidate the arguments that its the infrastructure of the meat farming industry as a whole that is so bad.
I agree with you, but one correction: it’s actually cow burps, not cow farts, that are contributing to climate change. https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/faq/which-is-a-bigger-methane-source-cow-belching-or-cow-flatulence/
TIL. Cow 💩 are also significant according to that link!
There are actually solutions in terms of capturing the methane emissions of manure for power production on farms. As for the methane of cows, it's not Inherently a problem if you're not relying on diesel machines to feed those cows. However, the problem comes in with the SCALE at which we are producing meat and raising cows
For "grass fed" it's mostly burps and methane. The more they're in a CAFO system (most of them, and most of the products) the digestion shifts further down, so you get more GHGs out the other end, including lots of N2O from feces and urine, but less methane. In fact, one of the "efficiency savings" proposed by the industry is further intensification (CAFOs) in the poorer parts of the world where they still do herding. There's no winning between them, no solution, the whole thing needs to end. The methane comes especially from the fermentation of fibrous plant matter, so the more fibrous stuff they eat (leaves, hay), the more methane. That's why I call them "walking tropical swamps".
>One ton of **nitrous oxide traps 273 times more heat than one ton of carbon dioxide** and can persist in the atmosphere **for up to 110 years**, compared to 10 years for methane, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA
The manure from cows produces not only methane but also Nitric oxide.
Typo: Nitrous oxide, but agreed, and our rivers and soil is full of toxic amounts of nitrogen from the fertilizer used to grow the grass cows eat.
Thank you for the correction. It was late at night when I made that reply. The excess nitrogen in the soil and rivers from animal agriculture also creates ocean dead zones.
Sounds about right for some refrigerants as well.
Agreed. Just stop with cows for beef AND dairy. Cull them all and have one last cook out, fill your freezers - we are done.
And then all of those grasslands can be repopulated with bison, deer, and other herbivores... who burp and fart methane exactly the same. Or we could just let the grass die and rot in the ground... and still produce methane... But hey, at least we're ignoring the methane from oil and gas. https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/overview
Not ignoring that at all. We can rewild some of it, let some be used for food crops. The wolves can keep the deer at bay. It’s almost like there was a set up that worked and kept it sustainable and then something came along and dug it all up.
Rewilding also means predators and no more "improved grasslands" either. Plus, a lot of reforestation. It's not as simple as "others take their place", they're not in some giant underground freezer waiting to emerge.
Methane is made in anaerobic process aka without air. When you leave grass on the ground it stays in contact with air. So no methane there.
You're ignoring land use change and watering acres and acres of feed to feed the cattle which could otherwise be used to feed humans or left to nature.
Wild mammals would have quite a ways to go! There is currently 60 times more biomass of cows compared to wild land mammals! Source? Phys.org Compared to wild ruminants? Even bigger difference! https://phys.org/news/2023-02-weight-responsibility-biomass-livestock-dwarfs.html
I don’t have statistics at hand to back this up at the moment, but I doubt that wild bison and deer emit the same amount of methane as cattle being fed high-energy diets. Can you back up that claim? I also doubt that wildlife would repopulate currently grazed areas in the numbers you are suggesting. Not to mention that a lot of land worldwide used for cattle was originally forest, not grasslands. And returning those areas to forest would store carbon. I would be glad to know if there are any studies or literature to back up your claims.
It seems like one difference would be that farmed animals are constantly being bred and the same number of animals are kept on the grass and then fed grains. Whereas, rewilding would get back to the natural level of animals with changes according to the predation factor. The latest IPCC numbers show 37% of ice free land as used for huma grazing of animals and 6% percent for animal agriculture cropland. So that 6% that can be rewilded plus the 37%% graze land (40% of that was forest land) so that could go back to nature too. We'd better get going on this, deforestation happening fast.
No one is denying oil and gas is bad for our climate (apart from small groups of morons) but in my view it’s actually the better option than anything we currently have open to us. Yeah yeah… I know…electric, but have you ever researched the impact Lithium mining has on fresh water sources and communities in the areas where it’s mined? Not to mention the environmental and climate cost from the huge lithium ponds and the machinery( all run by oil ) that they use to get it out of the ground in the first place. We need a doable renewable source like hydrogen to actually work and even then I’d imagine oil will still be needed to run the military might of most countries not to mention all the things that oil is made from.
Oil is worse than lithium in water use. Oil is increasingly extracted from oil sands, where they use four tons of water and and third ton natural gas to get one ton of oil from a couple tons of sand. It's horrible. And a gasoline car takes a cubic meter of the gasoline in a year. Contrast this with 8 kilograms of lithium in an EV. Which is recyclable, while oil is not. Hydrogen is a myth, meme and scam. Outside industrial processes actually needing it. But hydrogen in your daily life- no, just no. It escapes every container, with its tanks is even more unwieldy than batteries, and most of the energy is lost in conversions. And the best thing to do in regards to cars, is to have less and smaller cars. And have them be EVs.
There's a study that showed by mixing just a bit of seaweed into their feed, it reduces their methane expulsion by a lot. Wonder if this is a good solution going forward (but eating less beef is the ideal solution for water usage too ...) I'll admit I just read some easily digestible articles on this not the full scientific article so feel free to correct me. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0247820&mkt_tok=ODQzLVlHQi03OTMAAAF8ahQA42wnutWKFTdDeG77SMNDjrL6AfFY0uulV-37XLrYfp0Q7xlJbpZpmceWyc7WY_rqWtiIwvt5FY2-5ZqghSyF_0DpHGIGHtQUDW3B4Yx7CTUM&fbclid=IwAR1ZarhT-k3LdTSwaGIy3g3gwnPi6dNvIoXkrx2doEysJDI2IV3SEyfA7d8
Unfortunately there have been mixed results trying to implement this, it's probably not the magic bullet that it originally appeared. [Article](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/seaweed-cow-feed-trial-fails-methane-reduction-australia)
Perhaps not but there may be ways to mitigate that if we were to put some effort into it.
There's also the land use issue as others have pointed out. Basically, beef is unlikely to become non-deleterious for the environment so the right thing to do is to scale back it's production.
There's plenty of areas that need ruminants, like large swaths of the US, but the native ones were killed off over a century ago. Cows fill this void fairly well. I agree that we need fewer of them, and we need to move away from feed lots and other concentrated production strategies. But, getting rid of beef probably isn't the best solution long term.
I haven't proposed getting rid of beef, I've said we need to scale back production so yeah there could still be ruminants that could be used for food. I can't stress how much it would need to go from everyday foodstuff to a rare occasion luxury though. The pre colonial N. American bison population has been estimated at 25-30 million. The US slaughtered 34 million cattle in 2022. You can start to see we are talking drastic reduction in beef production.
So it's not far off from the pre colonial population. But, Americans consumption of beef is way down compared to the past, and chicken consumption is up. Which is better for the climate. I think the major driver of that is cost rather than a conscious decision. Honestly, the answer to all these questions generally comes down to better technology and a reduced population. People just aren't going to stop eating meat or traveling internationally, I'm not. I think we need to just start planning on a population reduction that eventually leads to sustainability. The earth is going to do it either way, we might as well get a head start.
One big difference between livestock and natural animals is that farmers kill predators to save the livestock. If rewilded, the predator species would return also. Scientist Jim Hansen said the best thing a person can do for the climate is give up eating meat.
That's great, it's not going to happen though. People are going to eat meat, we have to figure out the best way to do that at scale and implement policies and regulations to reinforce those conclusions.
That’s why the cost of meat is skyrocketing? They’re forcing us to eat less?
mixing seaweed is not better than not raising cows at all though, Climate wise, because it is not just about the methane, but the land and water use, too.
I love when people go on about how much water it takes to produce almond milk. Then I ask them if they realize how much water goes into getting a full grown cow to milk.
It's not a one to one comparison though. The almonds we're generally talking about are grown in California, in an area that could be considered arid and has a large population that needs the water. Other areas of the world have more than enough water and beef isn't really putting a dent in the amount available to humans. Beyond that, if you want to grow organic, sustainable agriculture it's almost impossible to do without having animals in the mix. Manure is often a better option than synthetic fetilizers that are generally overapplied and make their way into waterways. (Obviously, I'm not talking about feed lots or other concentrated operations here, more your traditional farm).
Cows live in my soaking wet country. Almond milk comes from places like California and are depleting water reservoirs. As far as water is concerned, the cows are harmless, but the almonds are not.
California is the biggest dairy producer and exporter in the entire US....
The almond trees are sequestering carbon whereas the cows are using land and water and creating methane and manure and devastating wildlife.
Major issue is that almond production often uses blue water, while most livestock production uses green water. Green water is actually a renewable resource. It regularly passes through animals as part of the water cycle. Every drop of water you drink has been inside many, many plants and animals.
As another poster has commented, it's the burps (chewing the cud) that cause most of the methane. But otherwise a salient post. Water input per kg of edible meat produced, is also ridiculously imbalanced. Essentially, eat less meat = breed and feed less cows. All that said, much of cattle farming is smallholding, subsistence farming where the animals are grazed locally. The big issue lies with the industrial scale farming and the global impact of the feed supply that's required.
The problem is the food to feed the cows that could be going to feed people.
The way I would phrase it is that the resources used to grow feed for the cows could be used to feed humans and to mitigate climate change through rewilding all the saved land by eliminating animal agriculture. A University of Minnesota study found that we could feed 4 billion more people by replacing animal agriculture with a plant-based food production system. Details on request.
Exactly. Now do that with one sentence.
Feeding food to animals that you're going to eat results in fewer humans being fed.
A good step in combatting this is doing away with subsidies but GOOD LUCK, the meat and dairy ag industry has that on lock with politicians, at least in US
As a vegan I'm very upset my money goes to subsidize an industry of torture and pollution. 😭
Me too :(
If subsidies just went to struggling farmers, I'd be fine with it. The problem is that these subsidies are often going to large corporations and very wealthy farming families.
One thing to remember is that methane from natural sources at least isn't adding to the amount of carbon in the current carbon cycle. Fossil fuels are particularly bad because they take carbon that was sequestered millions of years ago and add it to the carbon cycle. Agriculture is still a big issue and needs to be addressed as there is still a larger transient phase of methane in the atmosphere.
One burger = 40 km of driving? That seems hard to believe for me
It does seem a bit wild, which is exactly why I used it as a comparison point. The average cow produces around 210 pounds of methane gas per year and while cows can naturally live 15-20 years, they are usually slaughtered around age 5. 210x5=~1050 pounds of methane in their lifetime. Since methane has a 28x greenhouse gas effect vs Co2, a cow that lives 5 years at an average weight produces about the equivalent of 28x1050 pounds of Co2, or 29,400 pounds of Co2. Depending on the size of the burger, you could get anywhere from 800 to 1200 burgers from a single cow, but we will estimate on the high end to be conservative. 29,400/1200=24.5, so about 25 pounds of Co2 per burger patty. The average car emits 170 grams of Co2 per kilometer, or 0.375 pounds. To emit 25 pounds of Co2, the car would need to drive 25/0.375 km, or about 66.66 km. So by this series of calculations, the average cow produces is the approximate equivalent of 67 km worth of driving. Of course there would be a lot of variables so I reduced the number down to 40, as if someone was making the smallest burgers possible.
I came home from work and took some time to read over and digest this information. Then I went to verify everything and wow, it's not only accurate but I'd say you even overshot how many burgers you can get from a cow. The environmental cost is surprising. Something felt off with the car comparison. After thinking about it, I think it would be more accurate to compare the total environmental impact of the manufacturing of the car, as well as the creation of the fuel, rather than the output of emissions from the car itself. Manufacturing a car emits 6-17 metric tons of CO2, and over a car's 200,000 km lifetime, driving adds another 40.8 metric tons, totaling around 50.8 metric tons of CO2. Additionally, extracting, refining, and transporting fuel add about 8.2 metric tons (20% of 40.8), totaling around 56.8 metric tons of CO2. For beef, methane from a cow produces about 13.3 metric tons of CO2 equivalent over 5 years. Including feed production, processing, and transport, a single burger's lifecycle emissions range from 10 to 50 kg of CO2 equivalent. I don't think this diminishes your point but it seems more accurate to me. What do you think?
Interesting.
While the heat trapping effect of methane is 28x, its half life in the atmosphere is about 1/15 that of CO2. So, on balance its overall long-term impact is only about twice that of CO2.
Long term impact is much more complex than just how long an effect lasts, the magnitude of heat trapping can cause cascading population die offs, drought and forest fires. Even though its lower than Co2, methane still lasts at least 10 years in the atmosphere, which is more than enough time to cause crippling ecosystem collapse.
Land use. It takes more food to sustain animals due to the energy transfer between [trophic levels](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/trophic-level) We are clearing huge swathes of land to feed animals; land that could otherwise be used for crops to feed people(for a fraction of the land area being used), or remain naturally vegetated. As a result, animal agriculture is responsible for [~15% of annual GHG emissions](https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/) Side note, the absurdity of 'cow farts' is an example of the [reducto ad absurdum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum) logical fallacy.
And the increased land use to support this much biomass promotes incredibly irresponsible levels of fertilization which have disastrous downstream effects
15% net or gross?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but reductio ad absurdum is not a logical fallacy, it's a completely valid and sometimes useful form of argument. The wikipedia link you gave doesn't call it a fallacy, and even gives some good examples of its use.
Thank you.
It's worth adding that your comment primarily applies to land animals. For fish farms, the energy waste is very small due to fish being ectotherms. For ocean fishing, this problem doesn't really apply. Ocean fishing has its own problems, but arguably these are about the way we do it and not the idea of fishing itself. Fuel usage, bycatch, overfishing populations are all solvable, and if we'd do, ocean fish is arguably more sustainable than plant-based food as it doesn't waste land on monocultures and there is more than enough biomass generated in the oceans to feed the world.
Farm fishes are fed with caught fishes,it couldn't be more ridiculous if I tried to make it . . . If they aren't, we'll, they are fed with multiresistant carcass powder.
Yes! The Outlaw Ocean did an excellent piece on African fish being caught by Chinese vessels and turned into fishmeal to feed to farmed fish. By the way, destroying the African subsistence fishing. It couldn't be more absurd. https://www.theoutlawocean.com/reporting/how-a-third-of-all-fish-caught-in-the-ocean-is-turned-into-something-that-no-one-eats/
Fish farms have also various problems: - fish in farms are fed with fishpallets wich are made from wild caught fish which is a problem because of the amount and the way we fish it - contaminate the water with waste and antibiotics because fish get infected with lice - these lice spread to wild fish wich threaten the ecosystem Abart from that there is the ethics (even though humans mostly don’t care for fish because we look so different they are conscious feeling individuals non the less) : - tanks are way too small - fish often die before even slaughtered because of the way they were farmed
Yes, I fully agree that we shouldn't be farming fish.
I think the answer to all of this is less, we waste too much bc of capitalism and the way we farm in monoculture could be changed to permaculture. And for the fish there wouldn’t be a problem if we wouldn’t consume that much but as of now we are fishing so much that the only answer is to eat less - where the answer will be plant based 🤷♂️
That's fine, we're not dolphins.
How healthy are those fisheries though? Sure, some numbers are doing great. But, more often than not, most fisheries around the world are being fished to exhaustion. I dk, it seems like well controlled land based protein is a better option going forward. Especially lab grown meat, yes it's an energy hog now, but I think that will be rectified in the near future. Especially with how cheap solar is going.
Cows actually burp more methane than they fart, but it’s still a problem.
Ruminants are walking tropical wetlands, so they release lots of methane. There's also carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide (from their excrements). Another layer is that they use up a lot of land in terms of feed, which is associated with its own GHGs. Another layer is land use change (turning lands into pastures or wild grasslands into pastures) and deforestation (obvious, but it's also the destruction of carbon sink). If you have a few years you can understand it. If not, here's some reading: https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/what-is-the-climate-impact-of-eating-meat-and-dairy/ https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-can-climate-change-and-biodiversity-loss-be-tackled-together/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-meatless-diet-is-better-for-you-and-the-planet/ https://theconversation.com/global-food-system-emissions-alone-threaten-warming-beyond-1-5-c-but-we-can-act-now-to-stop-it-149312 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aba7357 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01605-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19474-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0757-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-014-1104-5 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac02ef The topic is plagued by industry disinformation campaigns at all levels of understanding, as is the tradition and in the same fashion as the fossil fuel industry. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2022/10/31/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis-climate-funding/ https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22379909/big-meat-companies-spend-millions-lobbying-climate https://theconversation.com/the-meat-and-dairy-industry-is-not-climate-neutral-despite-some-eye-catching-claims-219369 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/climate/frank-mitloehner-uc-davis.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-meat-industry-is-doing-exactly-what-big-oil-does-to-fight-climate-action/2021/05/14/831e14be-b3fe-11eb-ab43-bebddc5a0f65_story.html https://www.desmog.com/2023/12/14/the-livestock-industrys-climate-neutral-claims-are-too-good-to-be-true/ https://influencemap.org/report/The-European-Meat-and-Dairy-Sector-s-Climate-Policy-Engagement-28096 https://heated.world/p/big-meat-is-lying-about-sustainability https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02042021/meat-dairy-lobby-climate-action/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08052024/usda-tyson-climate-friendly-beef-claim/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-024-03690-w https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad0f75 And, no, there's no climate mitigation without dealing with the animal industry, especially the beef and dairy sectors. All of these industries need to be tackled (to the ground, and then burried) simultaneously.
The amount of synthetic fertilizers used to feed a human with grains, is similar to the amount of synthetic fertilizers used to feed a cow with grains. Now if the human eats nothing but cows, that becomes a crazy amount of synthetic fertilizers to feed that human. Synthetic fertilizers are made with fossil methane. The less we consume, the less new carbon gases are added to the atmosphere, the slower it warms up. So it’s not the farts, it’s the fact the farts are from synthetic fertilizers from fossil carbon.
Right - feeding a person beef requires 20x the grains (to feed that cow) than to feed that person grains directly. Thus, the land usage, transportation, and general equipment are 20x higher when eating meat, before even accounting for the cattle themselves.
We shouldn’t be feeding ruminants grain and we should be using ruminant manure as the primary source of N fertilizer instead of synthetic fertilizer. This would constrain domesticated ruminant biomass without making us dependent on fossil fuel fertilizer forever.
Without disagreeing directly, it is a pretty complicated issue, especially when accounting for land and water use. Constraining the number of ruminants will reduce their impact, but making each individual ruminant as productive (fat) as possible also reduces their impact (per kg meat).
The nitrogen in manure overwhelmingly comes from artificial fertilizer.
> We shouldn’t be feeding ruminants grain [So you're saying we should divide beef production by 3?](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/meta). We have to be clear about what we're saying. > without making us dependent on fossil fuel fertilizer forever Nitrogen fertilizer can also be made from electricity. It's a bit pricier (for now), but we wouldn't need as much without factory farming.
About a third to half, depending on how much we can scale up silvopasture. So called “green” fertilizer is simply not economically viable for agriculture in the near future, and probably not without fusion.
Making stuff up again? Tsk Tsk There's zero indication that fusion would be cheaper than current electricity sources. We don't even have a commercial prototype. [Regarding green ammonia production, the Ammonia Energy Association’s target costs for 2030 are 0.48 USD/kg and for 2050 0.32 USD/kg. Currently, grey ammonia produced through Haber-Bosch costs around 0.33 USD/kg.](https://medium.com/extantia-capital/get-ready-for-the-boom-the-ammonia-market-will-increase-4-fold-until-2050-6996d7f8f35b) ["If the cost of renewable electricity becomes cheaper than about $50 per MWh, the cost of producing CO2-free ammonia from renewable hydrogen may become lower than that from natural gas."](https://ammoniaenergy.org/articles/the-cost-of-co2-free-ammonia/). Guess how much renewables cost right now?
Keep in mind you’re competing with livestock, a revenue stream… Not sure I’m going to trust a medium article and industry PR on future price projections. S&P Global is reporting significant price differences between green and blue ammonia. We need to stop thinking we can depend on electricity for everything we currently depend on fossil fuels for.
You prefer an academic source? Easy to find, and they agree with the source above: [Global potential of green ammonia based on hybrid PV-wind power plants](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920315750) - Applied Energy article from 2021 "Green ammonia can be produced for 370–450 €/tonne in all continents by 2030"
Why should we be adding to the nitrogen cycle instead of using already active nitrogen?
Because, as stated before, we can't feed 8 billion people without adding nitrogen. If you still think otherwise, you're living in a fantasy and I'm not interested in arguing with you.
Believe in perpetual motion too?
Are you denying the existence of self-regulating nutrient cycles in the biosphere? Wow. Hint: we have a source of energy that is outside of the system: the sun. It’s not a closed system, so the laws of thermodynamics aren’t violated. Absolutely flabbergasted that this needs to be mentioned outside of creationist forums.
Absolutely not. You think the same nutrients go round and round with out loss? And that the artificially higher bio cycles we have due to synthetics could be maintained if we stopped adding the synthetics? A strict legume then cereal grain rotation still produces more if extra N is added to the cereal phase. It’s not that we can’t nor shouldn’t make more use of legumes for nitrogen fixing. We use legume pastures on our farm. Then we add extra nitrogen in the cropping my phase because that manure cycle can only do so much. Farms are so busy exporting nutrients that we can do that faster than biology can replace nitrogen.
> Right - feeding a person beef requires 20x the grains (to feed that cow) than to feed that person grains directly That's not how it works, no. The average "feed conversion ratio" is closer to 6 (pounds of feed per pound of cow generated) and most of that feed is grass, silage and things humans can't eat. Even the grains are mainly leftovers from other processes.
Well I think it's both, but yeah.
That's how it currently is, but it's not how it has to be. In a traditional farm, animals are necessary to avoid synthetic fertilizers. It's a closed system where the animals eat grass, food waste and some produced food. And in return they give manure which is used to fertilize the crops. There are farms that are striving to do this to the greatest extent possible right now and you can buy products from them. You just have to search them out.
And I do. I think "organic" meat is largely produced that way but I still have much to learn about their specific farming methods.
Organic is more of a marketing ploy, it doesn't really mean much. You really have to source the meat yourself if you want to embrace this type of system. You can often find farmers who sell their own meat online. It's more expensive, but you can actually ask them about how they raise the animals and how they're slaughtered. Beyond being more environmental, it's often less cruel.
I go to the local "healthy" grocery stores and try different things. Eventually, I find the best products.
This is one of the factors yes, but there is also land use. It takes significantly more land to feed people with meat than without. This results in less land being available for nature, meaning less carbon sequestration. It also means more fertilizer use.
And all that land for the needed also uses a huge amount of water and then the loss of fields and crops that are used to feed cows versus those crops and land being fused to feed humans directly.
I think it was a pretty recent oxford study that showed that a plantbased diet only needed 25% as much land as a meat eaters diet. There is also a huge ethical problem with exploiting animals. Animal ag is also a breeding ground for zoonotic diseases and therefore epidemics and pandemics. Public health would also hugely benefit from moving away from animal based foods.
Besides the methane emissions, land use required to produce 1 calorie or 1g of protein from beef is much much higher than producing it from a plant based source. Which makes sense if you think about it. A cow, just like us uses lots of energy just being alive and does not gain one gram of mass for each gram of feed it consumes. Why don't we just eat the soy beans instead of inefficiently running them through a cow first? This would require much less land. By using land area to grow feed for livestock, we prevent those same areas from being forests which would store large amounts of CO2. See how the Amazon rain forest is being burned down to export feed to livestock across the globe. Here is good overview from Oxford University that describes the CO2 emissions of many common food types: [https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local](https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local)
Basic biological inefficiency is what you are missing. If a cow eats 2,000 calories of plant it doesn't make 2,000 calories worth of meat, closer to 200. So if we hypothetically got rid of all cows and animal agriculture we'd still need to repurpose some of the land, water, fertilizer, and other resources to growing more plants but we could reclaim about 90% of it. The biggest issues with cows is that they are incompatible with our climate goals. Even if by 2050 we are all driving electric cars, powered by a 100% net zero electrical grid and have replaced every gas range and furnace with an electrical stove and heat pump .... well if we haven't tackled the problem of cattle by then we won't be at net zero emissions. Solutions do exist but if they were practical they'd already be in practice. They won't happen on their own.
The land clearing mostly, grazing takes up huge amounts of land. Most methane still comes from Oil and Gas production
Most detectable methane. For the fossil sources, it's usually some concentrated release which can be detected. For ruminants and wetlands it's a very diffuse plume which is hard to spot from some cool satellite.
Watch "eating our way to extinction", great explanation of agricultural impact on climate change.
Cutting down the forest so cows would have more grass fields.... Using a bigger part of grain we grow to feed cows....
This is the main issue. Animals farms used to be small, local affairs. Cows turned grass and hay, inedible energy sources, into dairy and meat that fed local communities. As population grew and farms became factories herds were overpopulated for the land use available. This created a spiral where land is currently being used to grow corn and other grains for feed. Instead of having animals utilize existing space they began utilizing more and more land to feed the herd. Small farms are the answer. Animal farms are protection against famine and allow the preservation of food (i.e. cheese). For these reasons we need animal farms, but they must be reigned in and big agriculture must clean up their pollution and disregard for local communities. Subsidies must be revised to protect small farmers who utilize land correctly rather than big corn. These farmers are out there trying to do their part to protect our food supply while lowering their impact. Some farmers I know are developing milk cows that will be beef cows at the end of their milking life, effectively doubling their value as food producers. There's a lot of places problems need to be addressed in the short term, along with animals farms. However the demonization of farm animals and the characterization that water thirsty crops like soy and almonds are going to feed the world is disingenuous at best and a total farce at worse. What happens when there's a drought and those crops fail? We need to find the balance and go back to some of the old ways.
Making fertilizer to grow plants to feed to cattle, to eat, requires lots more fertilizer than making fertilizer to grow plants which we humans can eat. Making fertilizer creates pollution.
IT COMES OUT THE OTHER END! It’s the burps, not the farts.
So I assume everyone here is vegan, right?
Yes
Yep
Not vegan but I don't eat beef.
No 😔
We use 18 times the amount of land to feed cows to feed us then we would need to grow plants that would feed us Monoculture is a big thing in combo with deforestation for like soy that is used to feed cows The methane yes too
Lots of great information in here and I am consistently shocked and confused to see people still eat beef. Anyone who says they care about climate change and still eats meat are so confusing to me.
land usage... just over half the arable land in the US is used to grow feedstock for livestock rather than grow food for humans.
Some clarifications: 80% of methane comes from burps and only 20% from farts. Methane starts out as a significantly stronger greenhouse gas (more than 100x CO2) but slowly breaks down to CO2. Many figures consider methanes impact over 100 years which averages out to like 20x CO2. This is why figures vary, and why in a healthy ecosystem ruminants don't slowly heat the planet. But for us right now, for the next few years, eating less ruminant meat&dairy is very effective at keeping temperatures low.
Mainly land use and the inefficient conversion from plant to meat based calories, in short you farm more plants to feed animals and get less calories than if you just ate those plants. I do want to point out that a bunch of animal feed are byproducts from farming inedible by humans so the exact numbers can be problematic.
This is just my two cents. It is not only the land that is required to house and allow these animals to graze. It’s also the removal of native species that would be in the area that would help with the erosion. All of these factor into the climate change as the weather increases and gets more chaotic. The natural system that were in place that helped diminish the effects of these things are now no longer there. The cattle industry has its own reasons for climate changes that are just as bad as big oil. It’s a short the skinny is, we leave nothing for future generations. We basically say we deserve to have the best now rather than making sure generations from now will be able to be as prosperous as we once were.
Mostly it's the biodiversity loss,in the last 50 years we wiped out 70% of wild animals mostly to make more space for animal agriculture But there are many others too
It’s not just methane (even though that’s a pretty good reason on its own), something like 40% of US water consumption goes to cows or growing crops to feed cows, FOURTY PERCENT. Also, a MASSIVE portion of deforestation happens to create pastures for cows, or grow crops to feed cows.
US demand for burgers directly drives deforestation in the Amazon: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/amazon-beef-deforestation-brazil/)
I’m pretty sure cows *burp* methane, not fart it. https://www.illumina.com/company/news-center/feature-articles/sustainable-cows.html …500 liters a day, burped out per cow.
Go vegan already
This does a way better job than I could https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
Land
***"It's the how - not the cow."*** **Ruminant animals raised on pasture, in a density and duration appropriate for the land they are on, are an important part of a healthy ecosystem. With proper management, ruminants can be used to build soil, which sequesters carbon and increases productivity of the land and increases grazing capacity.** ##Search Topics: - Regenerative Agriculture - Holistic Grazing - Rotational Grazing - Soil Building ##Documentaries - "Sacred Cow" (Nick Offerman, 2020, 80-min) ([streaming](https://sflix.to/movie/free-sacred-cow-hd-93499)) - "Kiss the Ground" (Woody Harrelson, 2020, 85-min) ([streaming](https://sflix.to/movie/free-kiss-the-ground-hd-63463)) - "Livestock on the Land" (2021, 80-min) ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xBDr_a1C2s)) - "Living Soil Film" (2019, 60-min) ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJouJhLM48)) ##Videos - The Updated Soil Food Web (Jeff Lowenfels, 2024, 50-min) ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5x9hpXo6sfg)) - What is the Soil Food Web? (Dr. Elaine Ingham, 2022, 40-min) ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIQwy0Xn9AU)) - Greg Judy, Regenerative Rancher ([YT channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi8jM5w49UezskDWBGyKq5g/videos)) ##Books (available at libgen.is) - "Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (Hahn Niman, 2021) - "Sacred Cow - The Case for (Better) Meat" (Rodgers, 2020) - "What Your Food Ate - How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health" (Montgomery, 2022) - "On Eating Meat: The Truth About Its Production and the Ethics of Eating It" (Evans, 2019) - "The Farm Bill: A Citizen's Guide" (Imhoff, 2019) - "The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories" (Imhoff, 2012) - "CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations" (Report: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2008) - "Grass Productivity: An Introduction to Rational Grazing" (Voisin, 1959) - "The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability" (Keith, 2009) A significant source of cow-related methane comes from manure holding ponds at factory operations, where most cattle spend their final months "finishing" on cheap (subsidized) grain. Manure (bovine, human, whatever) decomposition without oxygen (anaerobic, i.e. in manure holding ponds on a feedlot) produces methane. Manure decomposition with oxygen (aerobic, i.e. on pasture) produces CO2. People still associate animal production with nostalgic images of family farms that functionally went extinct over 50-years ago. Unless you are doing something rare, your food (meat, grain, fruit, vegetable, whatever) comes from monopoly-owned or controlled, factory operations powered by fossil fuels with fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. ##Food Industry Consolidation - "Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry" (Book, Frerick, 2024) - "Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization" (Book, Manning, 2005) - How to Beat Big Beef when the Beef Industry is Rigged ([YT](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS_3a8vtGYI), 2024, 40-min) Clarification: Cows belch 90-95% of their direct emissions - not fart. >“Of the **CH4 (methane)** produced by enteric fermentation in the **forestomach 95% was excreted by eructation (burp)**, and from CH4 produced in the **hindgut 89% was found to be excreted through the breath**.’” ([AP Article](https://apnews.com/article/9791f1f85808409e93a1abc8b98531d5), 2019)
Methane emissions were discussed on the latest episode of cleaning up. [The first 10 minutes had me audibly gasping](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LVCgC8fPjpM)
https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g?si=Keoa_PF2_EzeIYIU
A plant based diet is not even remotely close to the same climate footprint, we could feed the world on 1/4 the resources if we stopped feeding animals for a year or two first. It’s absurdly inefficient. Here’s an excellent source that delves into multiple facets of our agricultural system and its effects on climate etc. https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
The real problem isn't what people go on and on about. There is a carbon cycle and whatever you feed a cow is already in the environment and is going to get into the air whether it is by decaying plant material or human feces. What we need to do is stop putting new carbon into the air that is buried. We need to encourage processes that sequester carbon. The problem with meat production is we use endless fossil fuels to produce feed for cattle, dry it, transport it. There is lots of land that is useless for agriculture and can't grow trees that is perfect for grazing animals. If rotated properly the soil is even enriched and starts to hold organic matter to a significant degree. We need to eat less meat. We need to use less energy is the bigger issue. We need to take a giant lifestyle haircut, live the way our grandparents lived energy consumption-wise, gradually give 1/2 the planet back to nature and figure out what we should be working towards. Instead we all get to watch the world burn.
Best estimates are that the the territory of the US held about 60M bison around 1800. There are currently around 30M beef cattle in the same territory. Looking at just beef…it is not at all clear that beef production results in more methane than what the buffalo were farting out before humans intruded on their landscape.
Mostly it is the rocket cows.
Yeah nothing to do with celebrities jetting around in their private jets on a weekly basis… zzzz
No no no… go watch Food Inc. The problem is that making meat into food is incredibly wasteful- you have to grow a lot of food that people could consume- To feed to the cows- and then to feed to the humans. Eating meat is no longer feasible in our world. As an individual - I’m still consuming cow, pig, etc. And I also see where this is not maintainable. These are not issues to push on individuals. The problem is a lack of regulation etc.
Humans fArt a lot also
Not that I eat much meat: but my biggest argument when it comes to saying the amount of space or the amount of animals that are being used… the North American Bison population was higher at its peak then there are of current cattle out there now. The problem is feedlots having a large population in such a small area. The other problem is that at a certain point, the animals are just putting on fat instead of muscle. So they’re wasting food, and converting it to greenhouse gases.
Corporate funded anti-social propaganda meant to hook the easily manipulated into repeating the same lines at other people. While livestock is and always has been a big human problem for tens of hundreds of thousands of years, i think the people who feed the world should own the responsibility of the problems they create in the process.
i wonder how this compares to methane that leaks from landfill decomposition
I read somewhere that the plants grown to feed cows use more land for less than using that land to grow something we can eat directly.
The irony here is people living in cities complaining about cows when they need massive amounts of CO2 and green house gasses to get ANYTHING they need to survive.
Cows with flamethrower farts probably aren't helping.
We idiot humans are tearing down the most important ecosystems like the Amazon to raise bloody cows? Really feel like we need to redefine our perception of intelligence.
farts.
Human caused increases in CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide levels are definitely a HUGE problem facing most life on earth. That said, global heating is only a symptom of the real problem, ecological overshoot. Ocean acidification, oxygen depleted ocean dead zones, habitat loss, plastics pollution, forever chemical pollution, soil depletion, forest destruction, melting permafrost, AMOC slowdown, mass reduction of insects, birds, and all wildlife are all attributable to a worldwide capitalist economic system that requires infinite growth on a finite planet. So far, human kind in the 21st century has shown no ability to work toward a sustainable way to live within earth's ecological boundaries.
There's a place for pastoral meat consumption in the traditional sense, when the meat was treated as a luxury for special occasions or added sparingly to staples. We have been so far beyond that since refrigeration enabled commodity meat trade a century ago and especially now with factory farms. Comparing the historical preindustrial conception of meat consumption to modern practices just confuses everyone and leads to innate defensiveness for the right to consume meat at all. Edit: tbc what I mean is the mass consumption of meat is what displaces the plant consumption into the bioreactor that creates large amounts of methane and amplifies the impact of plant farming. It's close to half of plants are livestock feed. That amount of crops is also far higher than the equivalent would be for human consumption in substitution and leads to insane monoculture intensive practices that require vast amounts of energy.
It’s not as bad as fracking.
Cows don’t need grain at all. High intensity rotational grazing of grass-fed ruminants is actually good for a managed pasture and the environment- but that’s not how we farm beef commercially. The issue is how we farm beef commercially, not the existence of cows or the moderate consumption of beef.
- poor ppl ration meat or even dont eat meat. and it\`s mostly chicken and pork. - richest 10% contribute of \~50% of carbon emissions. - it\`s 11-17 % of carbon related emissions. - ppl still will need to eat. So, even if we do make ppl drop meat, it will be tenths of a percent reduction. Rich ppl will absolutely not give up on something they want without their life is at stake. This topic is brought up specifically to distract from fossil resources. And create discord among the people. You are right that meat industry must change drastically or even evolve to artificial meat, but carbon emissions is not the reason because it wont change a thing.
We need revolution
Didn’t know you could use cows for a cigarette lighter
Nothing. Going by up-to-date peer-reviewed studies shows that meat itself contributes at most 2% of novel GHG. Ruminants in particular are likely a net benefit given the amount of agricultural waste they reprocess. If you want to actually reduce meat-based GHG/environmental impact you'll need to start with chicken, and there won't be much bang for your buck.
They argue that methane is a bigger problem, but ignore the fact that our atmosphere can compensate some methane in the air quite fine and did so for millions of years (even with millions of bison roaming North America). The issue is that the fossil fuel industry puts EXTRA methane in the air well beyond what the atmosphere CAN compensate, and now we need to reduce the methane exhaust of our civilization. Now, the sane thing to do would be to stop using fossil fuels, and to stop emitting methane from such sources. Then we go back to baseline, the world climate at least stabilizes, and all is fine. But see, the cute animals have friends who see this as the perfect opportunity to go against the meat industry. They did that before climate protection was en vogue, and once we have solved the climate change problem, they'll find other reasons, while their true reason is they just like the animals (nothing wrong with that, they should just be honest about it). And of course, the fossil fuel industry is somewhat happy about you talking about meat instead of the real culprit.
I would argue that we can tackle climate change from multiple angles else it would be carbon tunnel vision… like it’s not only methane and co2 but also overconsumption, biodiversity, air pollution, eutrophication, education, poverty, water scarcity, ecotoxicity etc etc etc While you are right that fossil fuel industry likes to blame someone else for the issue food is still an important factor in this - and the meat industry itself does all the same by the way just like fossil fuels they try to hide that they have a massive impact on this whole thing. Impact as in - deforestation for monoculture farming for animal feed - huge waste that often contaminates groundwater, streams and in the end the ocean which leads to huge mass dying events of fishes - landuse itself as mentioned in other comments as well instead of farming animal feed to feed a cow we could just grow something on that land - sure methane still Not sure what I missed but yea
>multiple angles How about we just go for the one angle that works, and ingore all the angles that will not work? Seems a lot more helpful. > deforestation for monoculture farming for animal feed You mean the farming on soil that is too bad for growing human food, so they farm stuff that brings less per ton? Or do you mean farming things such as soy, of which the oil is used for human consumption and only the rest is used to feed animals, because that's still better (yes, even for the climate) than throwing it away? Deforestation isn't done because of animals, it is done because of money. Remove the animals, and they'll find other uses for the forests. > huge waste that often contaminates groundwater, Another misconception. The "waste" is fertilizer. Overuse of fertilizer is bad for groundwater, but good for harvests, which is why too many farmers overuse. They do that with artificial fertilizer as well. > landuse itself as mentioned Land use and deforestation are basically synonymous. Maybe don't say it twice? > methane Still much, much less than from mining fossil fuels.
Any additional GHG emissions are a problem. Cattle also contribute through tillage and release of soil carbon through the crops grown to feed them.
Yes, and you contribute by exhaling. But really, it all pales in comparison to fossil fuels.
Lmao! Buffalo roamed all over North America for thousands of years. There were way many 4 stomached animals on the planet a 1000 years ago than now. It didn’t cause global warming then.
People built some massive CO2 collection facilities to suck the CO2 from the air and condense it to solid waste and bury them underground. Is building smaller or moveable equipment next to the dairy/meat farms possible? Is that more efficient?
I think the ‘cow problem’ is overblown. Before about 1800 north america was home to hundreds of millions of ruminants. It was only after the US and Canadian government decided to starve “indians” onto reserves by slaughtering the game did populations really drop. Bison (think of a massive battle ready cow) numbers dropped from well over 100 million to almost extinction. The same happened to deer, elk and pretty much all vegetarian game. Compared to pre 1800 I’m not convinced global methane emissions from animals are much higher today.
It's not. Its a convenient scapegoat to gaslight people into more processed foods that are easier to dose with antifertility chemicals.