Forty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border in Southern California’s Imperial Valley, the Brandt Company cattle ranch is the largest single point source of methane emissions in the state, releasing more of that greenhouse gas than any oil or gas well, refinery or landfill. The 643-acre feedlot is home to 139,000 beef cattle, according to […]
I don’t agree with the statement cows are bad. I think that factory / industrial farming at this scale presents an unnatural concentration of conditions that allow methane levels to be checked and highlighted. Its like if you judged the emmisions of all cars based off of the redneck that just rolled coal through an intersection.
I think the methane issue, if it was framed correctly, would be used to boost the endorsement and possibly subsidization of small farms that raise beef in a more generally traditional way (pasture grazing) or in ways that are more in the vein of permacultue.
Yes, doing so will likely raise the cost of the meat you buy at the store. But beef on pasture, especially when teamed up with chickens and other livestock create a much more balanced system that doesn’t impact the ecology in such an acute manner.
I’m concerned that the argument being made about beef overlooks more significant sources of greenhouse gases that aren’t tied to our food supply. There is an underlying assumption that we can’t go back to farming on a small scale and spin down the general economy so that we could all live simpler and more ballanced lives.
The powers that be will never push for that. They need our behemoth economic output to help keep their thumb on the world through miltary, political and economic force. But, one can’t help but recognize that we’ve become a significantly unwell society. I don’t think this all boils down to old people simply being out of touch with themselves or that it wasn’t OK to acknologe mental illness. I think our collective illness is one born of the pressures we all face from the GDP graph always needing to go higher and higher.
I just look at it like this. Families used to get by on 50 acres with a few livestock and would run minimal power equipment to manage it all. Their localized impact to the atmosphere was significantly smaller than all of our modernized, centralized methods. I’m not saying we all need to be farmers. But I do think the past has some valuable points to reference from the standpoint of reducing our individual carbon footprints and thereby reducing the incentive for companies to make more stuff that we don’t really need if it wasn’t in support of our fast paced highly commercialized way of life.
Sorry for the long wandering rant. I’ll go back to yelling at the clouds.
Power tools are not the main source of emissions for raising cattle. Methane emissions happen in ruminents from digestion. Grazing-only production actually has overall higher methane emissions due to longer growing times and lower slaughter weight. Further, it does not scale well in the slightest. For instance, the US would need a 4x reduction in beef consumption using 100% of available land (if you want to avoid high deforestation pressure, you would need even more reduction)
We model a nationwide transition [in the US] from grain- to grass-finishing systems using demographics of present-day beef cattle. In order to produce the same quantity of beef as the present-day system, we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
[…]
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall
methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives?
The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
I don’t agree with the statement cows are bad. I think that factory / industrial farming at this scale presents an unnatural concentration of conditions that allow methane levels to be checked and highlighted. Its like if you judged the emmisions of all cars based off of the redneck that just rolled coal through an intersection.
I think the methane issue, if it was framed correctly, would be used to boost the endorsement and possibly subsidization of small farms that raise beef in a more generally traditional way (pasture grazing) or in ways that are more in the vein of permacultue.
Yes, doing so will likely raise the cost of the meat you buy at the store. But beef on pasture, especially when teamed up with chickens and other livestock create a much more balanced system that doesn’t impact the ecology in such an acute manner.
I’m concerned that the argument being made about beef overlooks more significant sources of greenhouse gases that aren’t tied to our food supply. There is an underlying assumption that we can’t go back to farming on a small scale and spin down the general economy so that we could all live simpler and more ballanced lives.
The powers that be will never push for that. They need our behemoth economic output to help keep their thumb on the world through miltary, political and economic force. But, one can’t help but recognize that we’ve become a significantly unwell society. I don’t think this all boils down to old people simply being out of touch with themselves or that it wasn’t OK to acknologe mental illness. I think our collective illness is one born of the pressures we all face from the GDP graph always needing to go higher and higher.
I just look at it like this. Families used to get by on 50 acres with a few livestock and would run minimal power equipment to manage it all. Their localized impact to the atmosphere was significantly smaller than all of our modernized, centralized methods. I’m not saying we all need to be farmers. But I do think the past has some valuable points to reference from the standpoint of reducing our individual carbon footprints and thereby reducing the incentive for companies to make more stuff that we don’t really need if it wasn’t in support of our fast paced highly commercialized way of life.
Sorry for the long wandering rant. I’ll go back to yelling at the clouds.
Power tools are not the main source of emissions for raising cattle. Methane emissions happen in ruminents from digestion. Grazing-only production actually has overall higher methane emissions due to longer growing times and lower slaughter weight. Further, it does not scale well in the slightest. For instance, the US would need a 4x reduction in beef consumption using 100% of available land (if you want to avoid high deforestation pressure, you would need even more reduction)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
More broadly
https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
citation needed
I gave one in my comment? There’s a quote with a source there
not for that claim