How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle? I.e. including all the energy used to grow the crops they eat, the deforestation to make room for the crops + cattle, the waste the cows produce.
Animal farming creates vast damage because of how inefficient it is and seaweed won't address how much feed cows need or that the world is eating more and more meat as countries get richer:
> The energy efficiency of meat and dairy production is defined as the percentage of energy (caloric) inputs as feed effectively converted to animal product. An efficiency of 25% would mean 25% of calories in animal feed inputs were effectively converted to animal product; the remaining 75% would be lost during conversion.
All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.
In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. My own experience confirms this. I've seen many cattle farms around Queensland - some with low stocking density and no deforestation, others very poorly managed with no trees at all or full of invasive species.
It's not as simple as eating meat = bad, but that's the message most people are getting. If they respond by stopping eating meat, then great - not the best choice, but a step in the right direction. If they respond by stopping to care where their food comes from then not so great.
> In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. My own experience confirms this.
72% of all deforestation in Queensland and 94% in the Great Barrier Reef catchment areas is a direct result of land clearing for beef production.
If the beef you're eating was raised on a deforested area (anything from a big fast-food chain almost certainly was) then that's still pretty unethical though. I agree it doesn't mean that beef is inherently unethical. But people will need to be willing to accept higher prices in order to make it ethical.
As unethical as eating soy from a deforested area. Or eating mostly anything with sugar, canola oil or palm oil. But people don't ask those to be in non deforested areas, and they don't ask to increase the price to make sure soil is not destroyed by monocrop cultivation.
That's not entirely true. There is a whole movement around boycotting palm oil for example, just as there is with beef. It certainly could be more widely supported.
It's worth noting that a lot of the soy from deforested areas also goes towards feeding livestock. The soy that humans eat (or drink) tends to be more more ethical on average.
> Most of the food animals eat is not human-grade, and a big part of it are by products of food for human consumption it would not be used anyways.
Food grown in deforested rainforests often isn't human grade because, stripped of the natural forest ecosystem, the land often doesn't have the nutrients to support high-quality agriculture. Don't you think pretty awful that we destroy some of natures most important ecosystems to make room for poor quality agricultural land?
1. Deforest land, for some purpose at most tangentially related to agriculture (presumably to use the wood)
2. Land becomes fairly useless; find most productive usage possible
3. Animal agriculture / grazing fields
That is, I doubt land is being specifically destroyed for this purpose -- there's enough available land to simply use as-is... unless it's already been destroyed as a byproduct of other activity.
For reference, only about 6% of soybeans grown worldwide are turned directly into food products for human consumption.[0] Most goes to feeding animals that are used for human consumption.
> As unethical as eating soy from a deforested area
Exact. Soy monocultures are devastating for environment, is an evil league respect to pastures, that still hold thousands of species. Soy fields have one species for Km and Km. Period.
Pastures in areas that are naturally grassy is fine. Pastures that have been created by deforesting the Amazon are not at all ok (Brazil is the worlds largest exporter of beef - not all of that is Amazonian land, but a lot of it is).
Soy is often grown in deforested rainforest areas too. But as a sibling comment says, only 6% of soy goes towards direct human consumption. The rest is for animal feed.
> As unethical as eating soy from a deforested area.
Not really, though - the GP link says it takes 50 calories of feed to make 1 calorie of Beef, so eating the feed directly would require 50 times less land.
Let me doubt that assessment. That would be true if (1) the 50-to-1 was true (doubt it); (2) what we feed the cattle is human-grade food and (3) 1 calorie of a plant was as nutritious as 1 calorie of meat.
Sure but soy beans are about 10x-20x more energy efficient than cattle at feeding humans so much less deforestation. Skip the middle man and eat your veggies and beans.
Page 7: Beef production is the leading cause of deforestation and land clearing in Australia. A recent GIS analysis undertaken by the Wilderness Society found that 73%
of all deforestation and land clearing in Queensland
is linked to beef production.16 This figure is likely to be an underestimate of the beef industry’s contribution due to the conservative methods used throughout the study. That result is consistent with the Queensland Government’s official tree‐cover reports which regularly attribute over 90% of the state’s forest and bushland destruction to replacement by ‘pasture.’17 Similarly, Australian government data ascribed 72% of national deforestation in 2016 to grazing.18 There are numerous scientific articles that identify cattle grazing as a key driver of deforestation, particularly in Queensland which has the largest cattle numbers in Australia.19
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I will note, I've noticed people sometimes saying "well, you can't grow anything else on that land!" as a defense for animal agriculture. Maybe /we/ can't grow any /crops/, but nature can thrive in such spaces. I think given what we know about Climate Change, it should go without saying that we shouldn't bulldoze every forest and bushland and farm on it in any way we can.
Sorry I typed that out and left to run some chores. I had a second report open from the same organisation and I quoted 73% not 72%, fixed in the parent comment.
Its quite rare for beef cattle to be 100% range raised.
Beef cattle generally start out in rangeland or pasture where they eat grass with supplementary grain feed for a year or so. Then they get moved to an extremely dense feedlot or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation where they are fed mostly grain based feed for the next 6 months or so.
That's what gives cows the taste most consumers recognize as "prime beef". Eating solely grass-feed is definitely a different taste;I'm not sure most consumers would like it, at least initially (outside of a hamburger).
Not sure why parent was voted down but it's true. The inputs have a lot to do with the outputs. Grass fed beef has its advantages in many ways, but grain fed does as well. Generally, you see a nice balance when a cow is grass fed most its life and then fed grain the last couple months to fatten it up.
Aaron Franklin talks about this in his book and mentions he only uses grain fed beef for BBQ. Grass fed briskets just aren't as tasty and lack the marbling of a prime Angus brisket, in his opinion. But the guy has cooked over 100 briskets each day for over a decade so I imagine it carries some weight.
In my preference for steaks, I like both. But it depends on the cut. For a Ribeye I'll take the grain fed. For a filet I'll take grass.
Given a year on grass and 6 months on feedlot, that already mean that they only use 33% compared to a factory farmed one that only eat grain. A pretty large gain for the climate.
> cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production
This doesn't really matter - it's about the fact that the cattle are eating crops that could have more efficiently been directly turned into food. Unless you're claiming most Australian cattle aren't given feed? (Hint: pretty much all cattle are given feed, even the "free-range" ones)
> If they respond by stopping eating meat, then great - not the best choice, but a step in the right direction. If they respond by stopping to care where their food comes from then not so great.
In terms of the environmental impact, "caring where your food comes from" is truly, qualitatively nothing compared to stopping eating meat. Why are you trying to push this message?
This is at least a step in the positive direction.
A quick Google tells me that soy has a yield of 2.81 metric tons per hectare, and seaweed has a yield of ~20 metric tons per hectare. Depending on how much of the feed can be replaced by seaweed additive, it's another arrow in the quiver to reduce the environmental impact of food production, the same way that cheap solar and wind don't displace the need for energy efficiency.
I'm not claiming most Australian cattle aren't given feed. I'm claiming it's possible to get beef that was raised almost exclusively on grass that was grown on land that is unsuitable for crop production. (Hint: I have 10s of kilos of it in my freezer)
> In terms of the environmental impact, "caring where your food comes from" is truly, qualitatively nothing compared to stopping eating meat. Why are you trying to push this message?
Caring about where your food comes from is the driver behind avoiding meat for a lot of people. If people don't care about the impacts of the food they eat you will never convince them to stop eating meat. Not sure why you have a problem with this message.
For many of us in the Western World and specifically Canada, water use is a major area of concern as well. Seaweed obviously doesn't use a lot of fresh water to grow, but I'm not sure about the processing. Cattle production still does use a lot of water and we don't raise a lot of cows by the oceans, but this has some interesting applications.
> In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production.
I'm not sure how that makes anything better. It will still require more carbon emissions than growing elsewhere. In fact raising cattle in a spot like you describe still well require growing the feed elsewhere. Wouldn't it be much better to just eat the soup or other crop directly, save the carbon emissions and give the land the cattle are on back to mother nature and turn it into a wildlife refuge?
Factory farms, or intensive animal farming as is the technical name, have animals living on a small space that primarily/only eat crops that has been grown elsewhere. In many cases that is the same crops that humans also eat such as soy.
Cattle raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production eat primarily from the land they graze on. Depending on where in the world it is there might be periods like winter where extra "support food" is added, which amount and type depend on weather and circumstance. Support food is usually silage made from hay, grown on land which is deemed too inefficient for other crops. Hay can also be grown on land needing crop rotations, with or without added fertilizers.
Wildlife refuges are sometimes where I live combined with grazing cattle as a cost (and environment) saving method to keep overgrowth down for which otherwise heavy machinery would be needed. It has also been experimented to use sheep for areas with over land power lines, as those otherwise need regular clearing from fossil gulping heavy machinery.
The distinction between factory farming and everything else is sadly lost in most discussions around meat, and when sold it is not marked in the store to distinguish between the two. Most processed food is also said to contain factory farmed meat. Factory farmed meat is basically always a negative for the environment and the animals, but outside of that we got the whole spectrum.
> In fact raising cattle in a spot like you describe still well require growing the feed elsewhere.
No. Feeding bovine meat cattle with commercial crops is uneconomical. It only happens as a small complement to the main diet or in emergencies. Nearly all of the cattle food grows on the terrain where they are created.
For sure almost all cattle are 'fattened up' at so-called "feed lots" immediately before butchering. In fact "grass fed" is one of those misleading labels that imply one thing but the true way to get what "grass fed" is implying is "grass fed and grass finished."
But it really is that simple at the scale we're producing meat. Factory farming is bad, and it will never be sustainable to produce the amount of meat we need to feed the world.
I have no doubt that free range grass fed beef is fine, but that's not where the majority of people are going to be able to get their meat.
The regenerative ag conversation is really overhyped. Its a way to justified the continuation of an industry plagued by environmental issues and ethical issues. The numbers don't work out in terms of how much land would be needed to effectively use regenerative ag at anything close to current meat consumption and there is still no agreement on whether it actually even works, mostly just meat industry advocates sitting behind flimsy science with a friendly sounding non profit sitting in front of the meat groups.
The idea that we need to slaughter cattle to regenerate land is pretty flawed if nothing more because if this was actually effective, we could simply reintroduce bison and other animals that are natural to a given local and not need to constantly pump meat out of that same land. Meat production will slowly decline as consumers have more ethical, environmentally friendly, cost effective, healthy, and savory enough alternatives. Impossible and Beyond are the mvp and this is only going to accelerate. Especially if we are eventually start to price GHG.
We have 100s of farmers that we personally work with - some of them with less than 2 hectares of land, who are using livestock to help in their agriculture. Without livestock they will be paying through their nose for biofertilizer and other inputs.
They sell male calves and older cattle and also eggs, chicken etc. But not much else.
In all likelihood these farmers probably do far less damage to the environment and also "consume" far less plastic packaging and produce far less non-recyclable waste than the average person living in an apartment in a city. Also, the overall pollution per person in the household of a farmer is likely a lot less as well.
If we're really looking to "leave no trace" on the land as much as we can, that could definitely include a roaming head of 100m bison or so IMO. The way they interact with the carbon cycle could be a net positive.
You're talking about manure usage here, not meat consumption. You don't need cattle for regenerative agriculture.
Compost can do just fine in this case. Also if you want to boost nitrogen on the soil you can do by using FAA (a KNF entry) based on fish, instead. Anyways, the second link you sent says that they have controlled grazing to prevent the cattle from destroying new growth. As the text says: plants can do it all.
The “four wheels” of ZBNF are ‘Jiwamrita’, ‘Bijamrita’, ‘Mulching’ and ‘Waaphasa’.
- Jiwamrita is a fermented mixture of cow dung and urine (of desi (Indian) breeds), jaggery, pulses flour, water and soil from the farm bund.
- This isn’t a fertiliser, but just a source of some 500 crore micro-organisms that can convert all the necessary “non-available” nutrients into “available” form.
- Bijamrita is a mix of desi cow dung and urine, water, bund soil and lime that is used as a seed treatment solution prior to sowing.
- Mulching, or covering the plants with a layer of dried straw or fallen leaves, is meant to conserve soil moisture and keep the temperature around the roots at 25-32 degrees Celsius, which allows the microorganisms to do their job.
- Waaphasa, or providing water to maintain the required moisture-air balance, also achieves the same objective.
All sorts of livestock is used - not just cattle. Goat manure, for instance, is very good in some circumstances and is quite expensive.
As with everything, all things have to be done in moderation. A certain acreage of land can only support so many plants, animals and humans.
I was only countering the narrative that livestock=evil because it damages the environment based on one single parameter - methane emissions.. which is also something that is being addressed by different types of feeds etc.
the demand will always be there. Humans like to eat meat. I doubt very many will give up the privilege, esp. when others are not.
So any solution that improves the production of meat should be a good outcome. Ideally, lab grown meat (of the same quality and taste as from a cow) with low emissions is the best, but we aren't anywhere near that level of tech yet.
> the demand will always be there. Humans like to eat meat. I doubt very many will give up the privilege, esp. when others are not.
I guess that's why we're all doomed to a broken planet. As long as we keep using "well, no one else is going to change" as an excuse we'll inherit the world we deserve.
Any plan that relies on self-imposed austerity measures of billions of people from disparate groups is doomed to failure. We need to quietly change the math behind the scenes by internalizing externalities legally - long enough for green tech to get enough investment dollars to be cheaper than dirty tech even if those rules change later.
This is mostly already happened with solar / wind power, though we need some improvements on battery tech to get grid-scale adoption. The levelized cost of wind is lower than any alternative, and solar is getting close. I’m sure the situation has improved in the last two years, but here is a report from 2018:
> Any plan that relies on self-imposed austerity measures of billions of people from disparate groups is doomed to failure
True, but if people who otherwise realize the necessity of the change are unwilling to subject themselves to any inconvenience, what hope do we have of ever making the kinds of organized societal changes that are necessary? If you are unwilling to make a tiny change like reducing your meat consumption, you're probably the kind of person who would never vote for a government that forces you to.
The argument is simply way to excuse your own behavior.
I completely disagree. Individual restraint will not do the trick. Your limited time and energy is better spent working on creating mandatory, systemic behavior change. It is not hypocritical to, for example, vote for closing tax loopholes while using the very same.
Absolutely. There are some many direct and indirect subsidies (fossil fuels, defense, farm) that actively encourage and reward actions with huge negative externalities.
Placing the onus for all these problems squarely on the consumer is misguided and ineffective. Even if a large percentage of the population gave up meat, it would not be nearly sufficient to curb C02 emissions and prevent further climate change. Such that, both innovation and policy changes targeting the private sector are needed.
Reducing methane from cattle is important, finger wagging at consumers is a red herring that will deepen partisan divides.
There's nothing partisan in choosing to eat meat, unless you choose to make a partisan issue. As it stands, livestock are a significant contributor towards global CO₂ emissions, and going in with the mindset that "this isn't useful unless innovation and policy changes come about" is the same as saying that it's not worth worrying about a car purchase because you have loans already that are difficult to pay off.
There will always be someone telling us we're "doomed to a broken planet." Some people aren't going to subscribe to your brand of Catastrophism or your solution to the problem.
Well, maybe I'm wrong and technology will outpace our looming problems. I hope that's the case but it would be foolish to depend on it, don't you think? It seems to me that your brand of thinking is one that comes to down to a simple mater of believing what it is convenient for you to believe.
You at least see how hypocritical that is, right? The Western world got to fulfill our gluttonous desires -- now, when it comes time for the developing world to get their turn at the table, we wag our fingers and say "Sorry, that's bad for the planet!"
I don't see the hypocrisy. We did stuff one way. then we learned new stuff about how we do stuff, so we decided that we should change. It's fairly normal for an individual to grow and learn from their mistakes, why do you have to call "hypocrite" when it's time for the society to grow?
The OP is lamenting that western countries got to enjoy the fruits of their emissions. The cost, however, is externalized.
Now that developing nations have started to get richer, western nations cannot say that they ought to now make a sacrifice and stop consuming meat, because doing so _is_ hypocrisy.
On the one hand yeah, I do get it. On the other hand there's a very real possibility that not changing our ways now will result in a significantly worse future for literally everybody.
My recent observations of HN is that many here take their own experience, and extrapolate that they are common and therefore anybody else could've also done it, and would be willing to.
But there's empirical evidence that not many people want to stop eating meat. Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians. Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetarians?
I routinely encounter people who believe it is not possible to live healthily as vegetarians. I hired a developer who was a Hindu a couple of years back and half my team could not believe that he had never eaten meat, in part because he was very active and healthy.
Yeah, I can also confirm this. I live in the midwest, so I've encountered these people more than a few times. Even on HN you'll see a lot of people arguing that vegetarianism is actively unhealthy if not downright unsurvivable without supplements.
The answer is somewhere in the middle, is it not? I am in the camp that we've over indexed on meat products in the weest(we eat too much of it) but I also believe that knife cuts both ways.
Humans evolved eating meat - just a whole lot less of it than we do today. It was a luxury, something you got once in a while, when an animal could be caught. I believe if we all went back to this intake level (90% vegetarian) we, and the planet, would be better off.
On average ancient hunter-gatherers got about 30% of their calories from meat. But it varied widely by location. People living in colder areas ate more meat because there often weren't any edible plants to be found.
>Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians
So how do you explain that many people become vegetarians even though they checked all the boxes of "knowing it is possible but yet not willing to change"?
I was in that category until I was not. Why?
I knew it was possible (like almost everyone) and I didn't want to stop eating meat. But it isn't just an information, it's a belief (how the knowledge affects you, exactly).
What makes people believe they can't or don't want is mostly a product of culture/habits. It's really easy to change that, especially as it's become a hot topic. Not everyone changes at once, but it's quite viral (when people stop eating meat around you, the possibility of change doesn't seem abstract anymore). Idem when restaurant start offering good options in their menus (not a mere salad).
The issue is not of "knowing" but of "realizing". You can't distinguish people who are in one camp or the other as if those who change their eating habits become whole different persons, all the sudden.
>Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetarians?
Yes! I actually do think that! Anecdotally, almost every time someone, especially the 50+ crowd, finds out I eat a vegan diet they ask "are you getting enough protein?!". My answer is usually "do you think about how much protein you're eating right now?" and the answer is always no, people don't think about their diets period, even the easy tracking stuff like macronutrient intake. Given the obesity epidemic going on in the US right now, many people don't know how to live healthily as omnivores.
I think most of us think it is possible to live healthily as vegetarians, but much more difficult. Meat from other mammals contains almost all the nutrients we need in a convenient and properly balanced format. In particular the protein quality and digestibility is higher than in most plant sources.
For those of us who are active athletes, there are a lot of anecdotes about people who tried vegetarian or vegan diets and found they had trouble recovering from workouts or healing from injuries. I suspect many vegetarians suffer from subtle, sub-clinical nutritional deficiencies
and that makes me hesitant to give up meat.
There are around 300 million vegetarians in India. That is close to the population of the United States. Whatever health problems you think they may suffer from it isn't the ability to procreate.
I gave up meat 6 years ago. All of my non subtle clinically diagnosed health problems went away.
I did it because I couldn't think of killing animals anymore and the wonderful side effects of obesity, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure all went away.
Most of the benefits you mention come from weight loss, and almost any intervention that can cut weight during the first years would report similar improvements.
Plenty of people lose weight, drop blood sugar and drop blood pressure by going keto. And some with a more extreme carnivore diet.
The real comparison here would be to have "2 people like you" 6 years ago and have two interventions. One going vegetarian and another going keto or carnivore, and see where there are now.
There's more to life than procreation. How many of those 300 million vegetarians are still able to perform at a high level in strength and endurance into their 50s and 60s?
Assuming equal caloric intake there is no reliable evidence that eating meat increases obesity, blood sugar, or blood pressure. Rather the opposite.
I post this hesitantly because it's probably some subtle bias (possibly selection/observation bias), but: the vegetarians and vegans I know personally, they all look borderline unhealthy and seem to lack energy in a subtle ways. Also, my wife sometimes watches cooking vloggers, and I can usually tell at a glance whether the particular tuber is a vegan/vegetarian blogger or not: the ones who are also give this impression of health problems and lethargy. This observation makes both of us hesitant to go vegetarian (though we try to reduce the amount of meat we consume).
Worth noting that being vegetarian does not necessarily equal healthy. There are plenty of vegetarians who are just eating mac and cheese. My sister, when in high school, became iron anemic due to poor food choices while being vegetarian.
That is a crazy high efficiency, when you think about it. A quarter of all food this animal receives through its entire life ends up as milk. The rest is used for growing cells, keeping it alive and warm, moving around.
Back of the napkin says that I've eaten my bodyweight in food in less than 2 months.
Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for the green revolution and understood the misguidance of efficiency as a strategy better than anyone. As a tactic it works under the strategy of managing population, as he said in his acceptance speech:
> "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. . . Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the “Population Monster”. . . Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth."
We haven't curbed population growth. It's slowing, but we're in overshoot, which leads to collapse, and most projections still show us growing through 2100.
Luckily, have examples like Mechai Viravaidya in Thailand, who helped lower their population growth from around 7 children per couple to below 2 through voluntary means -- think the opposite of China's One Child Policy -- leading to greater stability and abundance. His TEDx talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/mechai_viravaidya_how_mr_condom_ma....
> Luckily, have examples like Mechai Viravaidya in Thailand, who helped lower their population growth from around 7 children per couple to below 2 through voluntary means -- think the opposite of China's One Child Policy -- leading to greater stability and abundance.
South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines follow the same general population decline curve from the 1960s to now, that Thailand has followed. They all began at close to the same change rate circa 1960, all between 2.9% and 3.3%. Thailand's drop has been more pronounced since 2000 than Vietnam, however that can properly be attributed to the huge difference in standard of living between the two (the decline in Thailand matches the decline also seen in South Korea).
Did most countries in Asia have their own Mechai Viravaidya? They all simultaneously drop from 1960 onward. Or is this person getting credit for something that was happening regardless and has a lot more to do with increased economic prosperity? Which is something we already know is the primary natural change agent for lowering population expansion. Thailand's GDP per capita skyrocketed after 2001, whereas eg Vietnam and the Philippines followed slower trajectories (until recently). Thailand actually saw an increase in its population growth change rate in the 1990s (1993-2001), before the economic boom that began in 2001 pushed it back down again. The population change rate in Vietnam and Thailand were nearly identical until Thailand's economic boom began in 2001 (also, Thailand's rate wasn't much lower than Indonesia circa 1998-2000, they've split both economically and on that pop change rate from 2001 forward).
It's worth noting that continued population growth is an inherent assumption in today's economic climate and really for the past century or two. Just look at all the alarmist headlines around Japan's stagnating population.
While a huge environmental win and globally necessary, nations are incentivized to strive for continuing population growth as wellfare, pension systems and arguably the entire economy has been relying on a growing population for "sustainability".
Imagine, in 50 or so years, a fairly substantial human colony is established on another planet, and it figures out how to become self-sustaining.
This self-sustenance act is what we need to refine - not the going to Mars bit, of course - but what I am trying to say is that the pressure is on to find self-sustaining ways to feed humans (hint: grow local or gtfo) at the very high end of the privileged technologically elite spectrum of the human misery scale, i.e. SpaceX versus the slums.
If we can get to Mars and sustain, we can change the way humans on Earth live, in extraordinary ways. I'd even be willing to wager a bet that in 100 years, ones sovereign citizenship is going to be irrelevant - what will count, is whether you can make water towers into rocketships.
(I don't see SpaceX as a rich mans game - I truly believe its a human response to the human disaster you talk about. If we can move manufacturing and food production into space, we may very well have a chance to turn things off in 100 years, and let Mother Earth just grow again ..)
First of all, 50 years is at least an order of magnitude off for realistic colonization of another planet. Secondly, there's plenty of land here on earth that is uninhabited and hostile that we could try self-sustaining colonies in first.
the difference between a space colony and earth is that on earth we have a global economic system that demands infinite growth, and high disparity between producer countries vs consumer countires, which is the opposite sustainability
just look at how many articles about how we generate more food than we know what to do with, yet people still starve or go hungry all around the world, or the vast differences between what is called the "global south" vs "north"
i highly doubt we need a colony on another planet to teach earth how to be sustainable; the problem is the existing system refuses to change fast enough to make a difference
Without excrement from animals you need synthetic fertilizer, whose production causes massive production causes massive environmental damage eg emissions and algae bloom.
There's also the "classic" option, discovered some 200 years before synthetic fertilizers - crop rotation that includes some form of legumes. IMO with the current state of agriculture and food production we went into a local maximum that is very unsustainable and bad for the environment.
There's a reason we had to switch away from that. The crop rotation cycle isn't an efficient use of land. Synthetic fertilizers exist for a reason -- the human race wants and needs an excess of food. No one wants to switch to a model of food scarcity.
This is an all too easy narrative. Synthetic fertilisers might simply have caused an arms race for short term, higher efficiency which destroyed less efficient production techniques.
That does not make it long term efficient, see research on sustainable farming[0].
Every addition of a new consumer in a food chain brings with it a high rate of energy loss. The cow will need to use its energy to live, only a small portion of the energy is left in the steak you eat. 75% is a good approximation.
In general, the shorter the food chain, the more efficient it is. This is a universally known fact.
I will drop some helpful links for you if you doubt this:
Absolutely true. We can definitely be treating the land better.
The only reason we need industrial fertilisers, is because its packaged so well and easy to distribute. But if we weren't raping the soil in the first place, we wouldn't have this problem.
Industrialized farming needs to be revolutionised by the same technique that computing went through: a DIY revolution.
If you don't have a garden, now is the time to start. Everyone should have a garden.
A garden and a few chickens. Getting 4-6 eggs per day is simply fantastic, and the hens are great at eating up harmful insects and weeds that would otherwise harm the output of the garden. They also fertilize the land in a very natural way.
Manure and synthetic fertilizer both have similarly severe, but somewhat different, environmental impacts. Synthetic fertilizer requires large amounts of energy to produce, but manure generally needs to be applied much more inefficiently to achieve the same effect because of its relatively low nitrogen content and the inability to control its release. It also has transportation issues [1].
However, these types of impacts are trivial in comparison to the 1.9% energy efficiency for beef. Regardless of the fertilizer used, we would use just under 1/50th of it if we consumed the plants directly, along with the same savings in land and water.
Only a small amount of fertilizer usage in the US is waste based. In 2015 13M tons of nitrogen based synthetic fertilizer was used, on top of that 4M tons each of phosphate and potash fertilizer. For waste based fertilizer compost, dried manure and sewage total 600K tons. That doesn't even take into account that the raw weights aren't directly comparable.
There is more than enough liquid manure, forcing farmers to pay for its removal (at least in Europe, that is). Also, it can be used only at certain points in time to avoid food poisoning.
> How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle? I.e. including all the energy used to grow the crops they eat, the deforestation to make room for the crops + cattle, the waste the cows produce.
Quite a bit. Most of the deforestation you are mentioning happens for monocrop cultivation, from which livestock consume (mostly) the leftovers. That's usually hidden in data by using total weight, but the reality is that 86% of the dry matter consumed by livestock are not edible by humans [1].
>All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Both are compatible. You can be against the Amazon deforestation and pro-reduction of emissions of current cattle. Most of the beef consumed in the US (~90%) is raised in the US.
> Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.
Ahhh... No, thanks. It will also be vastly worse for my health.
> Most of the deforestation you are mentioning happens for monocrop cultivation, from which livestock consume (mostly) the leftovers.
This is incorrect. Humans can and do eat soybean meal. About 98% of soybean meal is used for animal feed and only 1% is used to produce food for people.[0] For soybeans as a whole, only about 6% grown worldwide are turned directly into food products for human consumption.[1]
> Ahhh... No, thanks. It will also be vastly worse for my health.
The peer-reviewed science we have suggests that higher soy consumption correlates with increased lifespan and positive health outcomes. Can I hazard a guess that you think MSG is bad for your health too? These are antiquated views.
> "So far, the evidence does not point to any dangers from eating soy in people, and the health benefits appear to outweigh any potential risk. In fact, there is growing evidence that eating traditional soy foods such as tofu, tempeh, edamame, miso, and soymilk may lower the risk of breast cancer, especially among Asian women. Soy foods are excellent sources of protein, especially when they replace other, less healthy foods such as animal fats and red or processed meats. Soy foods have been linked to lower rates of heart disease and may even help lower cholesterol."
> The peer-reviewed science we have suggests that higher soy consumption correlates with increased lifespan and positive health outcomes.
Couple of things here:
(1) Correlation is not causation
(2) Garbage in, garbage out -> referring to most observational studies.
> Can I hazard a guess that you think MSG is bad for your health too? These are antiquated views.
I don't know if it is bad for my health long term, even though I guess yes. I don't think there are good studies pointing in either direction. It is definitely not healthy short term for me, since I get bad headaches and flushes when I eat something with MSG.
The problem is that there should be good studies when adding something humans don't consume into their diet. Humans have consumed meat for hundreds of thousands of years, yet now it is the source of all evil. We haven't consumed rapeseed at all yet its oil is labeled "healthy". In my book skepticism is a virtue.
Cattle responsible for 15 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that humans cause."
It's the methane, chickens are much less damaging. The outsided damage cattle does is because if the biochemistry in the stomache, which this feed addresses (Lamb is terrible too, but less popular)
At the end of the day this is signalling. We all know that the best thing we can do is eat a local, veg-friendly (vegetarian/vegan) diet. That also doesn't mean that people are going to do it, or can. But at least it's one form of a step in the right direction.
War doesn't have to be waged and won in a single battle. Every little step helps if it truly reduces emissions.
> At the end of the day this is signalling. We all know that the best thing we can do is eat a local, veg-friendly (vegetarian/vegan) diet.
Local doesn’t belong in there. As a reductio ad absurdum would it be better to eat a diet of nothing but imported NZ lamb or to grow all food locally at McMurdo Base in Antarctica? Grass is next to free. Ocean shipping is the most efficient means of transport for bulk freight there is. To grow food at McMurdo you’d need to heat the environment, insulate it and light it half the year.
Eat local is class signaling, not environmentalism.
Don't forget places like Chad and Niger. Antartica is, as the parent post said, a reductio ad absurdum, but I often pay attention to how global warming (or even just bad years and seasons) affects agriculture and animal husbandry in places like Chad and Niger because it's a forewarning of what might happen to the north of Nigeria (the north is our breadbasket). We also import grain from places that are now having bad season after bad season and it does affect.
If, in the near future, food transportation relies on mostly clean or renewable energy, then it shouldn't be unsustainable to grow and import our pearl millet from a different country or even continent. It would also promote trade, which is sometimes desperately needed.
As long as the methods of production and transportation are sustainable and environmentally friendly, what would the issue be?
As a more realistic example, I think you can buy locally grown tomatoes in Finland all year round these days, or if not at least pretty close to it. A large portion of them are grown in Närpes, where day length dips below 5 hours in December. Keeping those greenhouses lit and warm is in no way ecological.
The guys in Närpes has an impressive thing going, but they're simply an excellent example on how you can produce things locally if you have a lot of space and cheap electricity available. That doesn't automatically mean it's more efficient in regards to CO2 emission, so you're pretty much proving the grandparent's point; they could probably grow food on Antarctica too.
Almost all power plants waste huge amounts of low grade waste heat (typically ~90C water), fossil fuel plants also give off considerable amounts of CO2 which can be used to enrich the atmosphere of a greenhouse. It's a shame there isn't more joined up thinking when these things are planned.
That's not strictly true. Eating (extremely) locally has lower costs with regards to at least packaging and transportation. As an added benefit eating in-season foods means that industry, regardless of size will conform to a cheaper form of growth and cropping.
What you said isn't strictly true either. Transporting a train load of food across the country emits less CO2 per unit than a farmer driving a van load of their produce to a farmer's market. Scale drives down price and emissions.
> Eat local is class signaling, not environmentalism.
It's true, but it shouldn't be applied litterally either. It's perfectly reasonable to consume locally produced and cheaply available food and it's quite logical to encourage local production assuming it is financially viable and results in a reduction in total CO2 emissions.
I can imagine it could even result in increased meat consumption for a few select individuals living in areas where agriculture isn't viable.
> We all know that the best thing we can do is eat a
> local, veg-friendly (vegetarian/vegan) diet.
I do not know that. First I am not sure vegan diet is better than balanced diet. Second, I am not sure "local" is always better. Keep in mind that "local" is all over the globe, and some places may be a gardener's paradise, in others you will struggle to grow anything.
I was under the impression that the local part is hit or miss due to the efficiency differences between large national/global supply chains and small local ones.
Buying local is not necessarily better. A small farmer who hauls 50 pounds of tomatoes to the local farmers market can be far less efficient than an industrial farm shipping 2 tons from 1000 miles away to your local super market.
Good questions. As someone who's enjoyed eating beef for most of my life, I feel compelled to recommend Impossible Burger "meat" as a legitimate alternative. No, it's not exactly the same, but it is delicious (unlike, say, Beyond Burgers, which taste to me like a failed experiment).
Thats an interesting question for sure. Would need to be calculated against the current energy needs, hopefully an increase in seaweed feed leads to a decrease in soy bean farming.
I'd rather eat the seaweed or soy directly, but this could be an improvement.
> How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle?
Poore and Nemecek did a pretty comprehensive survey of the climate impact of different foods https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 in 2018. Their underlying data suggests that methane accounts for about 38% of the total CO2 equivalent impact of beef herds. So if this is true, beef would still be highly damaging, but materially improved over where it sits now.
I don't think it's fair to call this a mere distraction when you account for the sheer impact of methane on climate change. Quibbling about energy efficiency is besides the point. Play around with this - https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=45&...
I do not need arguments to support my opinion that most soy products are garbage. I have tasted most of them and that is my verdict. Exceptions include soy sauce and miso.
There is also some research that suggests soy is unhealthy, but since I am not interested in a debate on the validity of such research, I will not link to any of it.
Re "Amazon deforestation" — those lands haven't been deforested because of the western country's consumption of meat, they've been deforested because people are starving, and they need to put food on the table, and be lifted out of poverty.
And countries, such as Brazil, are only now doing what the western countries have been doing all throughout the 19th and the 20th century. I know this sounds terrible, but you have no right to demand that Brazil stops the deforestation, and in fact you have no sway either, because you are not buying the result of their agriculture anyway.
If western countries want the deforestation of the Amazon to stop, the cold, harsh reality is that they should subsidize the price for it.
---
As for making personal changes, if eating soy makes you feel any better, sure, do that, but stop shaming people for eating meat. Because in the large scheme of things, switching from meat to soy does mostly nothing for the environment.
The reason is that, going vegan, as an individual, only saves you a couple of $ in CO2 emissions per year. That's right. All of your efforts are only worth a couple of $ per year in CO2 emissions. And even if you think that's worth it, those emissions would be re-allocated to industry anyway.
Also, ironically, the behavior of people going green changes. If you have an electric car, for example, you might feel the need to ride it more, to make more trips. Because it's cheaper, and you've been a good citizen, you've earned it. And when that happens, and it does, your net emissions might not go as low as you'd think. Never mind that the subsidies for electric cars are yet again subsidies for the rich.
Go carless first, then we can talk about not eating meat ;-)
---
Real change will come from technological progress. It always came from technological progress. Remember whales? Whales were not saved by political activism, by individuals refusing to use whale oil. Whales were saved because cheap replacements for whale oil became available.
Ironically, renewable energy might not be very green at all. Maybe we should address the fact that solar panels are super inefficient, taking up massive land use, and their recycling is super expensive. Instead of investing more in nuclear energy, money is being diverted on solutions that may in fact be worse for the environment than cleaner fossil fuels (e.g. gas).
We are currently unable to replace fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives, because "renewable" energy isn't up to snuff, and because of nuclear-phobia, which prevents investments in nuclear power.
But sure, let's all eat soy, that will save the planet.
> they've been deforested because people are starving, and they need to put food on the table, and be lifted out of poverty.
And countries, such as Brazil, are only now doing what the western countries have been doing all throughout the 19th and the 20th century. I know this sounds terrible, but you have no right to demand that Brazil stops the deforestation, and in fact you have no sway either, because you are not buying the result of their agriculture anyway.
Brazil is a net exporter of food, so there goes that narrative. I am certain there are people starving in Brazil, but this is much more of a distribution problem than a "didn't cut down enough trees in the Amazon" problem.
> solar panels are super inefficient
No longer true, renewables are pretty cost competitive and nuclear is looking less and less good by comparison every day. I say that as a big believer in nuclear power.
> Brazil is a net exporter of food, so there goes that narrative
Yes, but it doesn't export that food to western countries. In the US for example, less than 10% of beef is imported, and most of that is from Mexico and Canada.
Believe it or not, western countries grow their own meat, and in the west the CO2 and methane emissions for growing meat has been pretty steady, and is a moderate slice of the carbon emissions' pie.
> No longer true, renewables are pretty cost competitive
Renewables are only cost effective because that cost is subsidized. It's a sham IMO.
> Yes, but it doesn't export that food to western countries.
I don't understand why that matters? Brazil doesn't export to the US because of its FMD problem among its cattle.
> CO2 and methane emissions for growing meat has been pretty steady, and is a moderate slice of the carbon emissions' pie.
Beef production accounts for 1/3 of all agricultural emissions in the US. Obviously it's not the primary or even a huge share of overall emissions, because there are so many other human activities like driving and using electricity that we are doing all the time.
> Renewables are only cost effective because that cost is subsidized. It's a sham IMO.
Yeah, it is ridiculous that we subsidize industries to such an extent! Good thing beef and milk production are not subsidized at all...
It matters because convincing people to eat soy in the western world does absolutely nothing for the Amazon forest. It's a false narrative.
It's also untrue that the Amazon forest is deforested because of meat production, and that stopping meat production will prevent deforestation, but that's an argument for another day.
> "Good thing beef and milk production are not subsidized at all... "
Sure, stop subsidizing it. I'm all for it ;-)
That won't do much either, but at least we'll get that off the table. And I'm as anti-subsidies as it gets, because it prevents free market competition, with subsidies becoming yet another privilege for the incumbents and the rich. So yeah, let's get rid of that shit.
> It matters because convincing people to eat soy in the western world does absolutely nothing for the Amazon forest. It's a false narrative.
First, I think the reason to stop eating as much beef is because of the GHG impact of doing so. That occurs regardless of whether the beef is raised in Brazil or otherwise.
There is a global meat market, so convincing people in the Western world shifts the demand.
> That won't do much either, but at least we'll get that off the table.
Are you kidding? Removing the subsidies would have an absolutely massive impact on the affordability of meat and dairy, at least in the US. For every 30 cents of milk sold, the US govt pays dairy farmer the equivalent of 70 cents - ie. 70% of the earnings dairy farmers make are from subsidy.
If animal feed were not subsidized to the extent it was, meat would be significantly more expensive.
I strongly favor removing agricultural subsidies. Renewables are actually competitive enough now that they cost essentially the same, the problem is the switching cost requires up front capital.
I am pretty sure Amazon deforestation affects the rest of the world too.
While I don't completely agree with the need of deforestation of the country, I upvoted you because I agree with the rest of the message. Specially, I agree other countries are using the moral superiority card after getting a early start causing the current climate crisis.
Cow burps and farts are methane, which is a enormously potent greenhouse gas. The energy- (and water-) intensiveness of eating beef is significant too, no argument there.
> All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
I think you're on the money. This is the equivalent of us wanting to keep driving around in 2.5ton SUVs by justifying to ourselves that it’s a hybrid
That means that (ironically I guess) this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade.
I don't envy the researchers having to explain it to their kids later though.
It's true that methane has a much greater impact, but only in the short term. Long term, CO2 is much more dangerous. The methane that cow produces is recycled as it circulates through the atmosphere -> plants -> cows -> atmosphere cycle. Fossil fuel burning on the other hand is not. It's released from the ground and there's no way for it to get back there.
Nothing is ever black and white and to think that eliminating the animals as the food source would solve the problem is naive.
It's short term (12 years seems like before being reabsorbed) but this also means that we have this big static-ish chunk being renewed and absorbed in a cycle. If we reduce emissions then that static variable goes down and gives us more time on the other 100 things we need to figure out.
CO2 from fossil fuels can also be reabsorbed by plants. If you grow a forest, chop it down, bury the logs, then it's underground again. Although, not sure why you need it to be underground as long as it's not in the air.
It's not upon release. It's upon 2 decades of release.
Upon release that number is much higher, in the 100s of times, and after two decades it's close to zero.
Anyway, no, don't expect a large impact from this alone. Most of the methane emissions happen on the fossil fuel extraction and processing, not on agriculture. But it's something, and as a bonus it improves every other kind of efficiency too.
"this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade."
Now we only need to get cars 'n' lorries etc, ships and aeroplanes to eat the stuff and it's job done. Obviously, coal and gas fired power stations are already changing their diet and farting and belching less methane already.
The Great Barrier Reef is already de-bleaching and the Greenland icesheet has stopped melting.
How I wish this was the true picture, but unfortunately science paints a picture that is much worse:
Apr 7, 2020
'The scale of bleaching is enormous during global bleaching events,' according to Professor Hughes, 'the situation brings me to despair.'
The first recorded mass bleaching along the Reef struck in 1998, at the time the hottest year on record. Then again in 2002, 2016 and 2017, as more temperature records were broken.
The latest follows February’s unusually hot summer–resulting in the highest ever sea surface temperatures recorded on the Reef since controls began in 1900.
This is a small and positive win it seems, why do many disgruntled ?
People get very passionate about our food source being the cause for climate change but really, what about the real ultimate more severe causes?
Fracking, mining, burning coal and oil ? Nuclear and renewables makes these things obsolete, but we still need food.
Edit: Want to add I’m fully onboard with the east less meat crowd and minimising deforestation, but I can’t help feel we should focus on the bigger, more high value targets first? Worrying about food production feels more like a distraction ?
There's no need to focus on just one. However people are passionate about advocating for eating a plant based diet because it is so easy, relatively speaking. Getting fracking to stop at even just one site is a lot of work, but getting more and more people to stop eating animal products, because it's directly within their own control, is simple. Many are also passionate about it because there are other benefits that come with it - no longer needing to kill sentient beings (you probably wouldn't eat your dog, so why eat a pig who is of equal awareness and intelligence?) and as long as it's based on whole foods, eating plant based comes with a lot of health benefits compared to how most people's diet is (in the West or Western influenced - e.g. a lot of Koreans and Chinese have hugely increased their animal product consumption and started including animal products they didn't previously eat like cow milk cheese).
So again, we can work on more than one issue, but why there is strong passion behind diet is that it's a very direct action and comes with other positives.
It is not as simple as you think, and there is quite a bit of people cannot be healthy with such diet.
> Many are also passionate about it because there are other benefits that come with it - no longer needing to kill sentient beings (you probably wouldn't eat your dog, so why eat a pig who is of equal awareness and intelligence?)
Plenty of "sentient beings" are killed for crop farming. I am not even sure meat eaters cause more deaths than most vegans, specially if they are not pbd.
Do you realize that /more/ animals die from crop harvesting for feeding animals? Because if you aren't raising animals for food, you don't need to harvest crops for them. The net amount of crop deaths goes down.
Further, it's the fallacy of perfection - we can't stop all deaths, but we can do our best to get as many as possible unnecessary deaths to end.
Veganism is about what is practicable - i.e. what can be done in practice, not perfection.
I mean, if someone cares that much about real practical death reduction of sentient beings, they wouldn’t be vegetarian, they would eat grass fed beef.
One death for hundreds if not thousands of meals. That or seafood if you don’t consider shrimp sentient.
That's also fallacious thinking because you're knowingly murdering a being, i.e. it is a requirement that the animal is killed to eat it. But when practicing veganism, there is no requirement for murder. That is, while crop deaths may happen, it is not a requirement that it does. We could in fact engineer machines that don't kill animals while harvesting crops, and in fact "crop deaths" is wildly overblown by meat eaters as an argument. Statistically it is not significant.
What's further, you're wildly under estimating how much food the death of one cow would give you.
These are all super common arguments against veganism and easily disproven
> (...) while crop deaths may happen, it is not a requirement that it does.
Wait, so just because you consider that it is not a requirement, it is ok? The reality is another and veganism could be ending the world and you would be defending a best case scenario that doesn't exist?
> Statistically it is not significant
Have you ever worked in fields? I haven't spent significant amount of time there, but I have spend weeks in a farm owned by relatives. I don't know what you call significant, but the meat processing that happens there is not "not significant". Rodents, snakes, even foxes. And all that without counting insects.
> These are all super common arguments against veganism and easily disproven
I don't think so. You are just using some higher moral ground to defend your position: "I don't want deaths; yes they happen but they are not a necessity for my beliefs".
All that without considering the damage we could be making to the human race. We don't know the impact of large scale veganism on long term health.
No, I don't believe there's anything wrong with killing animals for food, I just like my dog more as a pet. I don't believe there's something morally wrong about killing one's pet for food, either.
I am not claiming you said so. But you've rather affirmed again, you have an emotional attachment to your dog, so you won't eat it, so your moral framework is emotional based and is logically inconsistent
No, I seem to not be communicating my thoughts properly. My moral framework is, "killing animals to eat is okay." I have no issues with it. My preference is to keep my pet alive because I do not need him for food and I like him better as a pet. I didn't say I wouldn't eat him: I would have no moral issues killing him for food, though I probably wouldn't much like it. If not for the fact that animals that die of natural causes aren't very tasty, I'd probably eat him when he died.
I'm saying that an emotional attachment doesn't affect whether I believe it's moral to kill him. It causes me to place a higher value on my dog such that I value him more alive as a pet than dead as food. Were I starving, I'd value him more dead as food. This value doesn't change whether or not it's moral to kill him.
As an analogue, I might have a car I like. The car could be worth more to me than its fair market value because of an emotional attachment, and that may mean I prefer not to sell it. If I'm in dire need of money, however, I'd probably sell it anyway.
Livestock agriculture is the leading driver of climate change AND biodiversity loss. It emits more GHG than all forms of transportation combined. Additionally, if we would let nature reclaim the land that's currently used for livestock agriculture, it has the potential to capture >100% of the CO2 emissions until 2050.
> Livestock agriculture is the leading driver of climate change AND biodiversity loss.
I am pretty sure that's not correct, not even close [1]. Transportation is the main driver of gas emissions (28%) followed by electricity production (27%) and industry (22%). Agriculture (livestock and crop) is <10%.
In most countries, livestock can graze in areas where cultivations cannot happen (Australia is a good example iirc) and can help with soil health.
> Additionally, if we would let nature reclaim the land that's currently used for livestock agriculture, it has the potential to capture >100% of the CO2 emissions until 2050.
Most of the food livestock consume are leftovers of human-grade crops. So we would still "need to" have that cultivations going and throw the leftovers anyways. Or most likely some company would find a way to feed humans that.
According to this[0] Our World In Data article, which is based on 2018 data, livestock (including fisheries) produces about 15% of all emissions, assuming that animal-based products account for about a third of the supply chain costs of the food industry:
Total food emissions: 26%
Direct livestock + fish: 31% of that 26%
Due to livestock land use: 16% of that 26%
Due to crops for animal feed: 6% of that 26%
Due to supply chain (1/3 of total): (18/3)% of that 26%
Total: ((31+16+6+(18/3))/100)*0.26 = 15.34%
And according to this[1] Our World in Data article, transport makes up about 16.2% of emissions.
The analyses can differ depending on how far you "travel up the chain" of production, but it appears that transportation and animal agriculture are within the same ball-park, plus or minus 5% perhaps.
> Most of the food livestock consume are leftovers of human-grade crops.
This is incorrect. Most livestock feed is soy, and humans can and do eat soybean meal. About 98% of soybean meal is used for animal feed and only 1% is used to produce food for people.[2] For soybeans as a whole, only about 6% grown worldwide are turned directly into food products for human consumption.[3]
I would like to see where that 98% really comes from, the links you posted talk about 70% (and most of that being consumed by poultry, not cattle). And even that seems excessive [1]. I would love to see a clear separation between the soybean. meal (leftover from oil and soybean grinding) and explicit feed grade soybeans.
Globally, GHG emissions from livestock agriculture make up between 1/4 and 1/3 of all GHG emissions (depending on the source, but here's a good one: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food). And this does not take into account CO2 sequestered by land that is already converted to cultivated land (i.e. not natural vegetetation) - so the potential of additionally sequestering carbon is much higher.
That's right that Australia doesn't have a lot of natural forests, but even there natural vegetation is better at sequestering carbon than land that has been converted to be used for agriculture. But if you look at this map here [0], you'll see that Western Europe, South America, Southern Africa and South East Asia all have great potential to capture CO2 if we let the natural vegetation regrow.
> Most of the food livestock consume are leftovers of human-grade crops.
No it's not. Furthermore, from a protein and nutrition stand-point, the plants we grow today are enough to feed the whole world.
> This seaweed won't even start solving this problem.
To the extent that the problem extends much further than level of consumption of cattle, that is true. But if widespread adoption of feed can effectively reduce methane emissions from cattle, as you said it targets one of the primary drivers - that's more than a start. This helps you visualize the impacts of various solutions, notice what happens when all other things held equal you drop methane - https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=45&...
> if we would let nature reclaim the land that's currently used for livestock agriculture, it has the potential to capture >100% of the CO2 emissions until 2050.
This is a moot point considering that trees and plant numbers could be increased in many other areas, particularly where they are felled in high numbers, and not all pasture land is appropriate for plant agriculture or otherwise.
There is a short-term battle and a long-term one. We do need to curb emissions in the short-term substantially, which will require innovation and policy changes. Long-term, the fact is land encroachment and destruction scales with the population; we all have an environmental footprint, and slightly increasing its efficiency will never outpace and counteract the impact of perpetual population increase. It's projected to curb more in the future as more of the global population gets lifted out of poverty, and access to contraceptives is more universal - however, this could be accelerated. There's no reason we can't quash global poverty further right now.
Almost 80% of the usable land is used for livestock agriculture. In which other areas do you propose to increase trees and plants?
This seaweed additive they propose is a distraction. Even if it would work, it's a band-aid at best. The real, more simple, cheaper and healthier solution is to make meat and dairy from plants directly.
What are you referring to when you say "usable land"? What means usable? Presumably you refer to agriculture and I'm not sure where your number comes from. 42 percent of the land acreage of Canada is covered by forests. This is the percentage forest cover by each State in the U.S. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_cover_by_state_and_terr...
> In which other areas do you propose to increase trees and plants?
Anywhere else appropriate.
> This seaweed additive they propose is a distraction
It's a solution, given that among the problems framed is the level of methane emissions.
> Even if it would work, it's a band-aid at best.
There has been research papers illustrating the impact of seaweed in cattle feed for years now - it works.
No one is framing this as the entire solution to global warming. If it can curb methane to that extent, it has a substantial impact.
> The real, more simple, cheaper and healthier solution is to make meat and dairy from plants directly.
We already have "alternative" products on the market which aren't that popular, but no actual lab-grown meat on the market. The "real" solution (to this minor subset of a larger issue) is one that exists, or could viably be cost-effective enough to consumers tastes. I see no suggestion that lab-grown meat would be cheap, or healthier, or simpler.
I'm not talking about lab-grown meat, I'm talking about plant-based meat and dairy. The most important thing to do is to creat plant-based meat and dairy alternatives that are better than animal-based products. It's hard but it's possible already possible today (e.g. see Impossible Foods).
Well, you can't just "let nature reclaim land", people own that and you can't force them to turn it into a nature preserve. There's a huge violation of private property rights implicit in your proposition.
If I don’t eat at least some meat, what do I eat ?
I’ve tried living mostly off soybeans and I can tell you, it was a depressing and miserable existence, at least for me.
I legitimately has no energy and felt depressed for a long time.
Yes I also ate other legumes. It just didn’t really work well for me. Maybe I’ll try again someday.
Even when I was vegetarian, I was freaking out about all the food that was imported and the emissions from that.
You’re kind of screwed if you do and screwed if you don’t. Which is the inspiration for my original post I guess. I don’t truly feel I can stop climate change via my diet.
I decided not to own a car and be more flexible with my diet instead...I’m much happier now.
Why would you live mostly off of soy beans? That sounds depressing indeed. As a vegan I have an even more varied diet than before. I eat all kinds of fruits, vegetables, beans, grains, nuts and seeds. And I eat 0% soy. I also hate tofu/soy/etc.
How is this any different from hybrid vehicles still burning FF? Yes, it makes it slightly better, but eating certain protein sources is a choice, whereas transportation infrastructure is an economically-limited choice.
Animal ag still causes:
- climate change
- inefficient allocation of calories and fresh water
- water, air, and ground pollution (lakes of poo, runoff into rivers)
- pandemic and other zoonotic disease accelerated evolution (many animals in close proximity, including humans and occasionally wild animals)
- increased food prices
- usual also including animal welfare and cruelty
It seems like putting a happy face on coal, smoking, asbestos, or DDT
If given two choices them being "stuck in discussions 'cause major perfect changes on a global scale are really hard and complicated to implement" and "anything that helps even if just a bit is welcome, incrementally we go further" I would pick the latter any day. The software patch culture in modern society should work better than unreal expectations with the type of education the average human being gets around the world.
Australia is not going to ban meat consumption any time soon. It is a positive step that they are at least bothering to try and mitigate huge potential sources of GHG emissions.
No one is asking to ban these things. Just tax them a lot, so that people will be encouraged to eat something other than steak/burgers every day. Instead, taxpayers subsidise beef and dairy farming, making the end product cheaper and more likely to be consumed.
All or nothing thinking has obviously not worked for addressing climate issues. Thus - you see all these more pragmatic solutions popping up.
You're not going to convince even 10% of the global population to convert to veganism in the next 10 years. I agree it would be great but the real world needs to be dealt with.
This is the only relevant element, and it's largely contingent on Methane emissions. Therefore, drastically reducing emissions is not just "slightly better", particularly considering their impact on climate change.
By which definition of "relevant" are animal cruelty[0] and pandemic-level diseases not included? COVID-19 is very "tame" compared to what's possible. There's a sense in which we're lucky that we got this pandemic as a practice round for something which we know has the potential to be much, much worse. This isn't controversial at all.
“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder — and ultimately impossible — to solve with ever more people.”
"I support Population Matters because I think if we keep on growing, we’re not only going to damage nature, but we’re likely to see more and more inequality and human suffering."
“One thing you can say is that in places where women are in charge of their bodies, where they have the vote, where they are allowed to dictate what they do and what they want, whether it’s proper medical facilities for birth control, the birth rate falls.”
“The human population can no longer be allowed to grow in the same old uncontrolled way. If we do not take charge of our population size, then nature will do it for us.”
“As I see it, humanity needs to reduce its impact on the Earth urgently and there are three ways to achieve this: we can stop consuming so many resources, we can change our technology and we can reduce the growth of our population.”
"Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment."
- Sir David Attenborough, naturalist and broadcaster, Population Matters Patron (born 1926)
I love bacon, burgers, hot dogs, fillet mignon, and porterhouse too, but I don't eat them because they're suicidal and omnicidal choices, like slurping down 256 oz. of HFCS, smoking 6 packs a day, or weighing 200 kg.
If there were really good Impossible Bacon, I would go for it.
We need alternatives that don't create more externalities than they solve, whether that means cultured means or substitutes.
Furthermore, I think you're right in the underlying sentiment in that we need leadership to make tough, "austerity-like" choices to outlaw certain things that are leading us towards certain doom because most people won't change unless they're dragged kicking-and-screaming. Easter Island had trees, North America had megafauna, the ancient world has slyphium and those are all gone now because of humans.
That's great and all, but it's fighting symptoms, not the underlying problem.
The underlying problem isn't cows emitting methane, the problem is too many people indoctrinated with the idea of eating all the animals, all the time. The amount of land, energy and ressources in general spent on producing way too many animals for eating is unreasonable.
"... the problem is too many people indoctrinated with the idea of eating all the animals, all the time."
The problem is there are too many people. Even if a person isn't eating meat, they still use a vast amount of other resources, especially if they adhere to a modern lifestyle.
I disagree, it depends on the lifestyle of the person. The richest 10% are responsible for 52% of carbon emissions[1]. If the only way to have a good life is to live like the richest 10% (or 50%) one could say we are too many people, but that does not have to be true, especially not in the future.
As societies become developed the resource consumption will increase. That metric of richest 10% includes the global population making over $35k - generally people living a modern lifestyle. Other countries are moving toward this modern lifestyle too. Look at India's and China's development over the past few decades - electronics, vehicles, air conditioning, etc. I don't see people willingly giving up those things.
The concern over CO2 is only a small part of the issue. You have the mining, refining, manufacturing, trash, housing, etc. Arable land is shrinking, trash output is high and takes up land, water scarcity is expected to be a major issue in the next 30 year - especially for agricultural areas like the western and middle of the US that use groundwater faster than it replenishes.
>As societies become developed the resource consumption will increase.
That was true for a long time, but not anymore, because resource consumption turned into over-consumption. We've been hitting limits pretty hard for quite some time (cf https://ipbes.net/global-assessment)
Development can't be becoming more unsustainable in an increasingly unsustainable world (like drug use does not extend beyond overdose).
Either societies will find ways to develop themselves differently, or they'll stop developing at all.
We're at 8 billion now and expected to peak around 11-12 billion. Even 25% increase in basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing would have a substantial impact. Especially if you couple that with shrinking arable land and projected water scarcity. Then add in the desire of developing nations for modern living - cars, travel, airconditioning, electronics, etc.
The rate of growth will decrease, but the total population will increase. Particularly in Western countries, where the impoverished immigrate to, and where people have a larger carbon footprint.
Plus there's no guarantee it will shrink.
> resource consumption
Technological innovation is such that we'd be increasingly more efficient with our resource use.
Marketing (and industry/capitalism behind it) created the demand which is now used as an excuse for producers to use more and more animals (which as we know creates more pollution and land/ecosystem destruction).
Even if they fix the gas emissions, there's still the manure problem. For example, in this tiny country of the Netherlands, in 2019 "the Dutch dairy farming sector produced 280.6 million kg of nitrogen excretions" [1]. That's _just_ the dairy sector, and _just_ the nitrogen component of the manure.
We can apply human ingenuity for decades to remedy symptoms, or we can instead decide that we have been moving in a fundamentally wrong direction in terms of using animals as consumable resources.
That's not to say that humans cannot get benefits from animals (such as free roaming chickens aerating and fertilizing land, goats grazing and clearing brush, etc.).
Unless someone's got an amazing idea how to change the mind of majority of population, deal with market changes of whole industry disappearing, deal with changes in the international markets, etc. ... I'm cool with spending some time managing the symptoms.
The global change in food consumption and managing the pollution are not incompatible with each other. We can do one whole working on the other.
We could start by removing subsidies so the actual prices become clear. When the actual price of meat has to be paid in the stores there'd be a shift, I guess.
If you look at the subsidies, they are typically in grants/payments to farmers. When the produce is exported, we are essentially subsidizing a foreign country with our tax money.
You can perfectly live on eating meat once or twice a week. Especially if your job isn’t that physically demanding. You reduce meat consumption to 1/7 if you do so. If most of us did that a lot of problems would be moot.
You assume that the only reason people eat meat is either sociological or physical workout.
You have multiple subsets of population that may find it more difficult to quit meat than the others.
For women (especially pregnant), meat is a source of Iron.
For people with adhd, there is a correlation with meat eating (and we can assume causation as well, since adhd is genetic). Meat is a source of vitamins that have been proven to help with adhd symptoms, and of course protein which helps with brain functioning in those cases.
Personally, I don’t do much sport, but I get occasional cravings so high that I could kill anyone who would want to prevent me from eating meat. Trying to figure out what is responsible, and which supplements can help, but still haven’t figured out.
With all the sympathy for animal suffering (my gf is a vegan fighter), just because you and some other people have it easy to quit meat doesn’t mean that it’s easy for all the rest.
I became a vegetarian over a decade ago and while it wasn't exactly easy, it certainly wasn't all that difficult compared to most of the other hard things I've done in my life. For instance, losing half my body weight (which occurred many years later because ice cream is vegetarian yo) was at least 2 orders of magnitude harder and maintaining that loss is a never ending battle. By comparison, getting out of bed to go to work is harder than maintaining my vegetarianism. Cutting back meat consumption to a mere 1 or 2 meals a week cannot be that difficult.
I also think all the talk of missing protein, iron, and vitamins is significantly overblown. Every blood panel I've ever had has been normal with iron on the high end and I can maintain an active lifestyle quite easily.
> just because you and some other people have it easy to quit meat doesn’t mean that it’s easy for all the rest.
Yeah but... so what? What's the point in only pursuing easy goals? Do you think we should have cancelled the Apollo program just because it wasn't easy?
Abandoning meat will be another milestone for mankind - even if it's just for our own long-term survival on this planet.
> For people with adhd, there is a correlation with meat eating
> I get occasional cravings so high that I could kill anyone who would want to prevent me from eating meat.
lightbulb moment
I would love to cut down on meat consumption for ethics/sustainability/health, but it's almost like my body knows it runs better on it. I get extra cranky, foggy, and tired if I don't have a pretty dense protein meal early in the day, ideally red meat. Can't do legumes due to allergies. Even like whey protein isn't the same as meat.
My iron levels are fine. Maybe it's one of the amino-adjacent compounds, like creatine?
I don’t think I was assuming, but it’s one if the most frequent misperceptions. It’s highly subjective indeed when it comes to your relationship with meat. But vegatarian meat replacements are getting ridiculously good, especially the last couple of years, if its just about the taste and texture.
And again, it’s not about dropping meat right now, it’s about seeing if you can cut down. Even eating it one day less makes an impact.
Just try it is what I am saying. See if there is something in your culinary palette that fills the appetite (and has no biological negative net effects)
> You can perfectly live on eating meat once or twice a week
but it wouldn't produce as much pleasure as eating meat every day. I dont think depending on people to be altruistic (and give up what pleasure they can get) is a good way forward.
That's a highly subjective statement. I eat well, and enjoy my meals, and I only eat animals about once per week, if any. I'm not missing anything. (I'm not a full-on vegetarian, and certainly not vegan.)
_"Meat is delicious"_ is a mindset. _"It's not a full meal unless there's meat"_ is an arguably marketing-induced mindset.
> That's a highly subjective statement ... I'm not missing anything.
exactly. You can do it. But based on empirical observation of what is happening in the world, there are more people who choose to eat meat rather than the existing substitutes.
idk but when I see the quality of the meat served at the cafeteria of my company I can clearly tell there is an issue, it's vile, I would probably not even give that to my dog.
Somehow people prefer eating the most disgusting piece of chicken/beef I've ever seen every single day of their week rather than go for the totally fine salad bar, which is cheaper and has a variety of cheese, nuts, salad, &c. or the vegetarian dish of the day
Even without cattle we arguably rely on an "unreasonable" amount of resources. It's a moot and subjective point, more people means more encroachment and destruction of land, more resource extraction and more emissions. We all have an environmental footprint, one which is larger in the West; now multiply it.
I still think that there is a simple explanation for the 'reduction in methane' effect, and that the plan has some severe loopholes
Raising cattle in a regular diet of seaweed for its entire life and expecting it to grow correctly is still uncharted territory. Are we pushing cow metabolism to the brink of famine?
Wild seaweeds are harvested and sold for several purposes:
1) To make agar-agar. A substance that is used (among other purposes) as a gut filler without calories in slimming diets and treatments for obesity.
2) As source of medical compounds. Seaweed, specially the red ones, have evolved a battery of chemical weapons to survive its many grazers. They are used to make antibiotics
So, the lack of methane emission... is maybe because the gut microorganisms that released methane have been killed after giving the cattle a cocktail of antibiotics?.
The problem is that cattle needs special gut microorganisms for surviving. They can not process cellulose into sugar without it. How can be (competitively) raised a cow that can not eat plants anymore? In a diet of fish or meat?
This is a serious point that should be explored, in my opinion. If this cows don't grow muscle fast enough (and will produce milk with a funny flavor), all the project is doomed from the start.
On the other hand there is an environmental impact to take in mind, seaweed is related with fisheries and marine production. Kelp grows really fast, but I had seen experiments removing other species of brown seaweed in some tidal rocks and it seems that it takes decades to return.
As seaweed has an economical value, either the farmers buy it at a higher price, or import if from the country that cultures million tons of seaweed each year (China). They could have problems to assure enough cheap seaweed for the cattle.
The cow meat raised in seaweed would be more expensive and with more waste and fuel consumption. Would increase also the dependency of third countries and external policies (that sometimes are not specially nature friendly), and wouldn't be so much sustainable as we think.
> I still think that there is a simple explanation for the 'reduction in methane' effect
Yes - your "still" suggests to me you think that it is a mystery (apologies if i misunderstand), whereas i believe it is reasonably well understood - it's bromoform, aka tribromomethane, which inhibits methanogenesis in bacteria [0].
So it is indeed a chemical weapon.
> Raising cattle in a regular diet of seaweed for its entire life and expecting it to grow correctly is still uncharted territory. Are we pushing cow metabolism to the brink of famine?
Well, we'll find out! There is an argument, with in vitro evidence, that stopping methanogenesis will increase animal nutrition, because the carbon that would have been lost as methane is available to make vital fatty acids instead [1]. There are studies on real animals which look good [2]. But it's only by trying it at scale that we'll really know.
Thanks for the info. It seems that tribromomethane is classified as a persistent carcinogenic, toxic by contact and also water soluble. Not good. That moves the discussion further, to a totally different, much darker, scenery: "Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that will cause canker if eaten".
I wonder what government agency would approve a known carcinogenic as okay to be used in meat production and how they will avoid to be sued immediately by the consumer associations.
> Well, we'll find out!
Find what?, how to be able to increase canker risk to meat eaters? I have the feeling that this is not a wise idea. Not even if the cattle would grow much faster.
The North Ronaldsay sheep[0] survive on a wholly seaweed diet and they are ruminants, so it is definitely possible (albeit with copper metabolism enzyme issues) for a ruminant to live on just seaweed. Also, CSIRO have been doing ag research since it's inception (over 100 years ago), so I'm sure they have tested this particular seaweed's impact on bovine digestion.
I see that is smaller than the other races, is more vulnerable to predators, have health issues if moved to pastures, and produces less wool (being smaller) and meat with a high iodine content.
This supports my former idea that there are serious obstacles to scale this solution to continental areas with the purpose of feeding people.
> I'm sure they have tested it
Would be interesting to see their results and publications about that, then.
The fact that there is a displaced goal here, is not a good signal.
When I hear about methane problem caused by cattle I see always people blaming cows. I'm just wondering... If cows are the problem, why they are doing research in sheep?
Is a different animal, with a different gut arrangement, producing a totally different dry faeces that are much less troublesome as cow faeces are.
I'm not expert in methane releasing, but if the results are than 'sheep release less methane than cows', or that 'small sheep release less methane than big sheep'... well; suddenly I does not feel so much revolutionary as before.
How many years were they trying unsuccessfully to sell this concept?
Production of the required quantity of seaweed is still a challenge, however the diet is not 100%. The seaweed only needs to be added a supplement to the existing diet. >2% to <10% has been found to be effective in eliminating methane emissions.
> Raising cattle in a regular diet of seaweed for its entire life and expecting it to grow correctly is still uncharted territory. Are we pushing cow metabolism to the brink of famine?
This is funny FUD. Are you aware of the circumstances that most cows are raised in right now? Chaining them down to a concrete slab for their whole lives and pumping them full of antibiotics and hormones is all kosher but feeding them seaweed instead of corn? Hold on there.
> Are you aware of the circumstances that most cows are raised in right now? chained for their whole lives, sad cow, sad cow, blah, blah
Sorry but I don't recognize your caricature. Is a little different in the reality, in my experience.
And by the way, I was not talking about morality, I was talking about metabolism. Asparagopsis is only one, among many other species of algae. Therefore you can expect several (more than one for sure) different collateral effects on bovine gut if you feed the cows a mix of marine algae
I was very skeptical whether this is scalable as up to two percent of the cows feed needs to be replaced with the sea weed and we simply do not produce sea weed at scale yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552
The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae per day. ~ 106 Million metric tons per year.
In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].
I would argue that the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions is to get rid of cattle. (Which is hard, I love beef and cheese).
Maybe “seaweed beef and dairy” will be a premium product but I doubt it will solve the problem on scale.
> I would argue that the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions is to get rid of cattle.
I agree, but as a former vegan I'm aware that there's an approximately 0% chance of getting a majority of the world's population to give up beef and dairy.
The future has to be with lab-grown meat. I know the technology is still nascent, but if we ever get it right then it has the potential to be one of the most transformative inventions in human history. I'm not sure how we can save the climate without it.
My partner is vegetarian / borderline vegan. It definitely had an impact on my diet as well. I don’t want everyone to become vegan or not consume dairy or meat anymore. Just reduce, reuse, recycle. Be more thoughtful about what you consume and how often. Try out alternatives.
If I eat beef once per week, once per month, I also am looking forward to and enjoying it way more than if I eat it every day.
This is market forces at work. Regulations and environmental science used to help to define the rules of the market are really a useful way to allocate resources. Worry less about telling people what they should do. Instead, think about how we can construct market rules to incentivize good behavior.
At least that's my two cents. It's fun to talk to friends about how to fix the world with a central planning mindset but there are a lot of smart people out there. Let them do their thing. Today's fads (lab grown meat) may or may not work out. Maybe the best solution hasn't come along yet.
"I'm not sure how we can save the climate without it [lab-grown meat]."
Why? It doesn't seem logical at all - I'm pretty sure there are more efficient and healthier ways to feed humans and it seems that the main reason for making lab-meat is to cater to our current habits and tastes. Maybe that's important enough, but perhaps you have more pros?
In summary, FutureFeed is working with several external suppliers to establish production. They expect to be able to improve the crop production over time.
One thing of note is significant reductions can be achieved with quite a low ratio of seaweed in the feed. Specifically they report that recent feedlot trials demonstrated over 95% methane reduction with seaweed inclusion at 0.20% of OM in the ration.
That is actually amazing! I just hope that it can be scaled and will be affordable.
I would still argue that we should look into reducing our consumption, as other environmental impacts like water consumption are still considerable. Anyhow: A step in the right direction!
What happens to that methane? Or maybe more accurately, what happens to the building blocks of that methane.
Those numbers do not show that we are reducing the output of methane by reducing the input of methane, but that the process itself is generating less methane from basically the same input.
There is no input of methane. The cows eat cellulose, and bacteria in their gut break the cellulose down into small molecules, including methane. Reduction in methane production can come from a reduction in the amount of cellulose broken down, or an increase in the production of other small molecules.
The other small molecules in question seem to be what are called "volatile fatty acids" (VFAs), which i think are more or less the same as "short-chain fatty acids" [0], and they're good for the animal.
Acetate and propionate are two main VFAs. A study on sheep [1] found that "Sheep fed Asparagopsis had a significantly lower concentration of total volatile fatty acids and acetate, but a higher propionate concentration.". If there's less methane and also less VFAs, then i assume less cellulose is being broken down. But more of the carbon from it is going into VFAs.
It would be good to have a study like this in cows.
Bromoform & co. is rather volatile and toxic. The nice feature about seaweed in this case is it has bromoperoxidase pathways, so the halomethanes are produced in low concentrations and bound in (I presume) cell membranes until digested, releasing it right where it's needed, in the fermenting stomach.
You'd have to engineer a digestible slow release halomethane source. Or just...grow it.
There are also deers and stuff here in Europe. ;) But I assume that wild animals are just available at a fraction of what people (want to) consume every year.
Deer are ruminants, too. There is no a priori reason to assume that their digestive system should produce any less methane than that of cows, when they break down cellulose.
> In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons.
I can add something about that.
Most algae production is Chinese and brown macroalgae.
Brown and red algae are really different creatures. It seems that brown are not even seen as plants currently and have moved to kingdom protista (something that could explain their strange flagellated spores), whereas reds are still plants, I think.
They are so far away phylogenetically, that is not reasonable to be interchangeable just because they are both "algae". Expecting a Phaeophycea having the same effect in cows as a Rhodophyta, would be like expecting Geraniums have the same chemical properties as tuberculosis.
We most probably would have: either none effect Y or a different effect X, still unknown
Second thing: Lets assume for a moment that the effect would be the same. Those 27 million tons do not exist. Of those 27 tons, around half are brown macroalgae, but -very important- this is probably fresh weight. Macroalgae are not sold fresh, they must be dried before to reach the market. Therefore we would't have a production of 15 million tons of brown algae. What we really would have is 4 million tons of dried brown algae to feed 1.5 billion of cows, that is a worse situation
Therefore we would need to start growing algae as crazy somewhere. We have three options.
1) At the sea
We would need to make room in extensive coastal areas, (some of those protected areas with a high biodiversity) to grow Asparagopsis.
Distroying valuable coastal areas that support coastal cities, to grow just sheeps would be increasing the risk and putting all of our eggs in the same basket economically. If the wool market sinks and the fisheries were turned into auxiliar activities around wool's industry, there are not other activities that could act as a buffer and save the day. Not to mention than extensive farmers employ much less workers than fisheries.
2) In tanks
As the ocean is a place with a million of unpredictable variables and trophic chains we probably would prefer to do it in laboratory. So we need to build many and learn how to do it. That is more easier to say than to do, because Asparagopsis is just one of two forms in a complex life cycle (the other was called Falkenbergia). So we need to learn how to grow two algae in one.
Can be done? Yes, but is several levels much more complicated that just trowing some seeds in a field and see fodder grow.
3) In other countries
We could also save ourselves all the headaches and left it to experts (i.e. import it). A few red algae are cultured in several Asian countries, specially Japan but they are seen as culinary delicacies and they control the amount of algae put in the market to keep prices high. So using it to make wool maybe would be like selling 100 dollar bills at 15 cents each. Not a really economically viable activity.
Is unclear how including cows in aquaculture would disturb the market or the geopolitics. I would expect an increase in the actual Chinese hunger of buying or silently grabbing as many sea bottom areas as they can.
Does methane have any known biological function out in the wild, perhaps with microbes putting it to use? It's hard to imagine such a large quantity of energy going unused by some organism out there. Is it pretty stable at room temperature and would just sit around forever? What became of all the methane all the various livestock have produced through the millennia?
The process is slow; a quick search says that methane persists in the atmosphere for approximately 9 years, at which time it becomes CO2. I'm not sure how many half-lives that is intended to represent.
Averaged over 100 years, it is 28 times more effective at retaining heat than CO2.
It also should increase productivity on all ruminants in theory.
I like this bit -
"While analysing the gas samples using gas chromatography (GC) there was a repeating scenario of a 10-20% methane reduction, until suddenly one sample showed no methane! At first it was assumed that there was a problem with the GC so the test was repeated, and when the same result was replicated we had our moment of discovery. Those results have reproduced on every subsequent test and the red seaweed Asparagopsis is the star performer."
Hold up its the disgusting things we're feeding cattle that's contributing to their immense environmental impact? HUH.
Maybe someday we'll realize that raising them in feedlots on 100% processed packaged food made fromthings like how they forage in nature is most of the problem as well, and if you raise them in distributed networks so they interact with their ecosystem instead of trampling it, and then not have to ship them 1000 miles to consumers, their emissions, and environmental impact DROPS.
Maybe then we'll start putting the chain together, and realize that its not beef itself, but rather the high fat, low vitamin, amalgamation of beef we now usually consume, due to these practices is what is ACTUALLY unhealthy for us to eat.
Cows do not eat 100% packaged food if they eat any at all. In fact, 80% of what cows eat cannot be eaten by humans.[1] If you could add seaweed to drastically reduce emissions not would be a win for everyone.
> They learned that most cow diets contain the following:
Grass: More than 50 percent of cow feed is actually grass (farmers call it hay and silage). While people often think dairy cows are fed a high-grain diet, in reality they eat the leaves and stems from corn, wheat and oats far more often than they are eating grain, like corn kernels.
Grain: Dairy cows do eat some grain, which usually makes up less than one-quarter of their diet. Some has been grown specifically for cows, and other types have been recycled after food or beverage production -- like barley that has been used first to brew beer.
The rest of a cow’s diet includes ingredients like almond hulls, canola meal (the leftovers from producing canola oil), citrus pulp (the leftovers from making orange juice and other beverages) and more. Here’s the cool thing: These products, which were once thrown away, are actually good for cows. Cows can “unlock” the energy and nutrients in these products that would otherwise go to waste.
How about this: I was on a dairy feedlot a week ago, watching them make rations. The ingredients going in included:
- Alfalfa hay (a legume crop which improves the soil)
- Corn & triticale silage (chop up the ENTIRE field, stalk, cob, and all, then ferment it a bit to improve digestibility)
- Corn cannery waste (all the leftovers after they make canned corn for people)
- Waste onions (cattle love these, they'll root through the whole ration to find them)
- Apple waste (pulp left over after squeezing apple juice)
- Potato waste (leftovers from processing potatoes for, that's right, people)
- Pea meal (broken bits of dried peas left over from processing for humans)
- Hop pellets (after breweries have used them for beer)
- Canola meal (leftover from making canola oil)
- They may have been feeding brewery waste grain, but I don't remember for sure
The first two are the only ones specifically produced for cattle. One of them improves the soil in a crop rotation, and the other is a pretty damn efficient use of plant matter vs. anything humans consume. They constitute a pretty good chunk of the ration, to be sure, but I do think HN tends to assume cattle are just fed big buckets of corn seed & wheat.
btw, I was visiting the feedlot, but they weren't just blowing smoke for the city slicker... I had worked there a decade ago, making the rations, and I fed all the same stuff then.
edit: there are effective software tools for building rations based on your particular nutrition goals, so there are dozens of different rations being made any given day. If the cannery doesn't ship any corn waste for a while, you just adjust the other ingredients until you hit your same target nutrition without it. It's impressive stuff.
There's kind of a barrier to entry for the layman because feedlots are generally out of the way, and they're not usually in the business of giving tours--they're busy places with lots of heavy machinery running around. It's a fascinating business, but you have to be ready for 6.5 day work weeks :)
One way to learn a bit more is from the actual industry's magazines, like Feedstuffs, which focuses particularly on livestock feed. Here's an article picked from the top of their beef nutrition section: https://www.feedstuffs.com/nutrition-health/byproduct-feeds-...
You are mixing up all sorts of issues in some sort of black-and-white thinking where good things are good in all respects and bad things are bad in all respects.
You have a very good question, and I wish this was covered better.
In their FAQ they explain that the actual fibrolytic microbes that digest cellulose in the rumen, produce CO2, H2 and other compounds but not methane. And then later the methanogenic microbes consume these and produce methane. I get the impression that the methanogenic bacteria are not needed in digesting cellulose, that they just "steal" part of the products from the earlier fibrolytic steps. And the chemical, bromoform, from seaweed only blocks this methanogenic metabolic pathway.
It is amazing the levels people go to in order to make something evil less evil. Just stop eating cow and drinking milk! Get some tofu and oatmilk. Many problems are solved, not just the methane emissions problem.
This is so awesome, I've been waiting to see if this would make it into commercial feed. This could be a big help if it can quickly become more of a standard.
Of course Big Meat and Big Dairy love pushing this narrative. These kind of "solution" let's them continue do what they are doing without fundamentally solving the problem.
It's like making more efficient internal combution engines. Sure, it's marginally better, but what it really does is distract from the real problem, which is: Burning fossil fuels. And the same is true for this seaweed cattle.
And this is assuming that it does really reduce methane emissions by 80%, which I wouldn't believe until it has been empirically demonstrated on a large scale.
They are not mutually exclusive. For all of recorded History people have enjoyed food, and there's so much culture surrounding food in all traditional societies on Earth.
That would be ideal, but of course less cost effective for farmers who want to grow them fat as quickly as possible using less land.
There are organic livestock farmers in the U.S. who rotate their cattle over various nearby-lands which helps fertilize it naturally, synergy with plant agriculture.
Animal farming creates vast damage because of how inefficient it is and seaweed won't address how much feed cows need or that the world is eating more and more meat as countries get richer:
> The energy efficiency of meat and dairy production is defined as the percentage of energy (caloric) inputs as feed effectively converted to animal product. An efficiency of 25% would mean 25% of calories in animal feed inputs were effectively converted to animal product; the remaining 75% would be lost during conversion.
> Whole milk: 24%
> Beef: 1.9%
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-efficiency-of-meat...
All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.