Obvious solution in our face, we fund research to preserve AGW causing industries

[Red Baron Farms]

Good points. The fact that both the grass-fed and grain-fed cattle were in a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) would seem to invalidate the findings. In any case, I'd like to see more than one study on this subject.

Another apparent flaw in the argument is that considerable energy is used to grow soy and corn, meaning a considerable output of carbon dioxide. Thus, merely by eating these crops, the cattle are consuming more energy and contributing greatly to greenhouse gases. Cattle and other ruminants don't really need these crops, since the bacteria in their fore-stomachs can break down just about any organic source. In Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappe mentioned an experiment in which cattle were fed cardboard soaked in urine, giving their bacteria an organic carbon source and a nitrogen source. While I'm not proposing such a diet for cattle, the experiment does drive home the fact that they don't need to be fed either corn or soy.

I'm also not sure what objection there can be to eating dairy products from grass-fed cattle. While one can point to dairy cattle being treated badly, with undue confinement etc., inhumane treatment isn't either a necessity or a given in the dairy industry. The same can be said for eggs from free range chickens.

Ironically CAFO beef is fed all kinds of nasty stuff like Cardboard, chicken manure and feathers, etc.... mixed with the corn and soy. So when a Vegan objects to the way cattle are destroying the environment or objects to the way they are treated. I have to agree. Any sane person would have to agree. The status quo really is unacceptable. The only reason it even exists IMHO is that most people don't really have a clue how bad it is, either for the animals or the environment...or themselves for that matter. That's why I said Tsukasa Buddha's argument does have some merit. The problem is when those arguments are attempted to be extrapolated to all meat. There is plenty of propaganda out there claiming that CAFO raised meat is just as healthy for us, and even more healthy for the environment compared to pasture raised/organic. It's easy to find. The meat industry is very powerful and they don't want people knowing how destructive their product is to the environment or human health. But I always get a chuckle when Vegans use Google and naively use Meat Industry Propaganda to justify elimination of ALL domestic animal foods, regardless of whether they are damaging/unhealthy or not. It's not the cows' fault they are being improperly and unethically treated, and that that causes them to be destructive. It's our fault for not respecting the nature of the cow. But there are some people that do respect the animals they raise. Joel Salatin comes to mind. Those animals don't destroy the environment, they restore it.

Here is one of my favorite quotes by Joel

"The pigs do that work (by rooting in the forest and that creates the temporary disturbance on the ground that allows germination for higher successional species.) And so it allows for those pigs to be not just pork chops, bacon, and that. But now they then become co-conspirators and fellow laborers in this great land healing ministry ... by fully respecting the pigness of the pig." Joel Salatin

And another that discusses the issue from a more social perspective:

"In our culture we view the pigs as just so much inanimate protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it. And I would suggest that a culture that views its plants and animals in that type of disrespectful, arrogant, manipulative standpoint will view its citizens the same way...and other cultures" Joel Salatin

And one from Sir Albert Howard, Father of Organic Agriculture, talking about removing animals from the farms and putting them in CAFOs:

“As the small trickle of results grows into an avalanche — as is now happening overseas — it will soon be realized that the animal is our farming partner and no practice and no knowledge which ignores this fact will contribute anything to human welfare or indeed will have any chance either of usefulness or of survival.” Sir Albert Howard

It seems to me that both Joel, Howard and many Vegans are looking at the same unethical social cancer that is our meat industry and rejecting it. The Vegans simply boycott it, and Joel fights to raise animals ethically. But the similarity is obvious.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

Again, if cattle used in dairy production are fed on grass, rather than on soy and corn, and are allowed to freely graze, I suspect they would pose a very minor GHG problem. Likewise, I suspect the same would be true for free range chickens raised for egg production. In both cases the food eaten by the animals is something we wouldn't eat, and it's converted into a high protein food with balanced amino acids.

Your suspicion is, well, unconvincing. It is obviously difficult to measure because grazing/pasture land might or might not have been converted, what the weather in the region allows (NZ can have outdoor animals almost exlusively), differing practices for "no True Free-Range/Holistic/etc.", and so on. Despite all these variables, I have never seen a study that found them to approach to anything near "very minor".

The use of pasture management practices that improve the nutritional quality of forage crops could reduce methane emissions from pasture beef by about 15 to 30 percent. However, some grazing lands would not benefit from these practices, so overall reductions in U.S. global warming emissions would be considerably less than 0.5 percent—or one-third of the 1.4 percent of emissions that now come from beef production by applying these practices where appropriate.

Linky.

There are few definitive studies of the net amount of greenhouse gas emissions from grass-fed versus confined-feedlot, grain-fed meat. Since pasture-raised cattle gain weight more slowly than grain-fed animals (an average of 25 percent slower in one recent study (Gurian-Sherman 2011), those animals take longer to reach slaughter weight and consequently emit more methane and nitrous oxide. Confined cattle gain weight much more quickly on their high-starch corn feed.

These higher emissions may be offset, however, by the carbon sequestration benefits that well-managed pasture systems can provide (Pelletier 2010). Rotational grazing and the application of organic soil treatments can have a significant impact on building up soil carbon in pastureland (Follet 2001, Conant 2001). Far fewer energy-intensive inputs are used in grass-fed beef production.

The climate impact of grass-fed animals depends on factors that vary greatly from one production system to another. They include: average weight gain and quality of forage (the slower the animals gain weight, the more methane they emit); the rate of soil carbon sequestration; and crowding (greater density of animals means more concentrated manure deposits and higher methane and nitrous oxide emissions).

Much more research is needed to determine the comparative climate impact of pasture-based versus confined feedlot systems.

Linky.

But with global warming, here's the inconvenient truth about meat and dairy products: If you eat them, regardless of their origin and how they were produced, you significantly contribute to climate change. Period. If your beef is from New Zealand or your own backyard, if your lamb is organic free-range or factory farmed, it still has a negative impact on global warming.

This is true for several reasons. Again, the biological reality of ruminant digestion is that methane is released. The feed can be local and organic, but the methane is the same, escaping into the atmosphere and trapping heat with impressive efficiency. Second, no matter the farming method, livestock makes manure that produces nitrous oxide, an even more awesomely impressive heat trapper. Livestock in the United States generates a billion tons of manure per year, accounting for 65 percent of the planet's anthropogenic nitrous oxide emissions.

Even poultry, while less harmful, also contributes. Ironically, data released in 2007 by Adrian Williams of Cranfield University in England show that when all factors are considered, organic, free-range chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming than conventionally raised broiler birds. That's because "sustainable" chickens take longer to raise, and eat more feed. Worse, organic eggs have a 14 percent higher impact on the climate than eggs from caged chickens, according to Williams.

"If we want to fight global warming through the food we buy, then one thing's clear: We have to drastically reduce the meat we consume," says Tara Garnett of London's Food Climate Research Network.

Linky.

The claims of Salatin and the Carbon Farmers of America seem to overlook many of the caveats raised by agro-ecologists about the limits of soil carbon sequestration. For instance, most experts agree that soil sequestration is only a temporary fix. In a best case scenario, newly converted pastureland can be projected to store carbon for a maximum of 50 years before it reaches a saturation point. More average estimates put this time limit at 25 to 30 years.

Pasture also has to be carefully managed and alternated. Otherwise, if done the wrong way, it can lead to overgrazing and desertification. Additionally, many regions and land types in the U.S. and abroad are not suitable for achieving sequestration through grazing. This includes some of the more arid lands in the American West and Midwest.

In fact, not only is there limited suitable pastureland available for maximizing carbon sequestration in the U.S., there may also simply not enough available land surface area to graze all the cattle needed to keep up with our current rate of beef and milk consumption. According to a 1997 report by Cornell University agro-ecologist David Pimentel, if all U.S. cattlemen switched to using only pasture-based production systems, consumption from animal protein derived from cows would have to drop from 75 grams to 29 grams per day.

In response to some of the extravagant claims of proponents of grass-fed livestock production, as well as the growing popularity of the companion local and organic movements, some researchers are releasing papers that criticize the carbon sequestration potential of grazing as overstated.

Not only that, some claim that confined, grain-fed production actually has the lower carbon footprint than its free range counterpart. This includes a report recently presented at the 71st Cornell Nutrition Conference entitled “Demystifying the Environmental Sustainability of Food Production.”

Specifically, the report referred to the larger methane emissions that occur due to enteric fermentation in cattle that are fed grass as opposed to grain. Part of this stems from the fact that grass-fed cows simply live a lot longer and so produce more methane over the course of their lifetime. However, it also seems that a grass-based diet also plays a role in inducing more methane release in cows.

...

Another paper by the USDA’s Agricultural Resource Service concluded that in the right region and when practiced properly, grazing farms have significantly lower greenhouse gas impact than confinement operations of similar size over the short term.

“Really, I don't think there is much difference in carbon footprint between grazing and confinement systems for the long term,” says Al Rotz, lead author of the paper. “Carbon sequestration can give a major reduction in the short term conversion to pasture systems.”

Linky.

EGGS from free-range hens produce more greenhouse gas than caged birds, a report has found, prompting calls for carbon footprint labelling for all food products in Australia.

A report for the Australian Egg Industry Corporation, which represents most egg farmers, found that producing free-range eggs increased carbon output by 20 per cent.

The main reason was that free-range egg production used more feed per kilogram of eggs produced than caged egg production, the report, half-funded by the federal government, found.

Linky.

I'm also not sure what objection there can be to eating dairy products from grass-fed cattle. While one can point to dairy cattle being treated badly, with undue confinement etc., inhumane treatment isn't either a necessity or a given in the dairy industry. The same can be said for eggs from free range chickens.

Bobby calves and male chicks are the most obvious inherent "humane" problems, though there are plenty of others. And "inherent" isn't really a good standard anyway, as economics leads to certain standards (certain mutilations without anesthetic, etc.). But this is an environmentalism thread .

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Tsukasa Buddha,
You are missing a few key factors. Insects and bacteria have many times more biomass in a pasture that animals. If the cow doesn't eat it ..decay will still happen anyway. Methane will still be produced. You are chasing a Red Herring that is the result of a carefully crafted misinformation campaign promoted by industrial meat producers to justify themselves vs pasture raised.

The only way to measure the NET effect on greenhouse gasses is to measure changes in SOC/SOM as well. Just measuring emissions is a fruitless endeavor. So what if an animal eats more grass? That grass would have decayed on the ground or been eaten by insects or burned in a fire if the cow hadn't eaten it. The thing that matters is how much carbon the plant has sequestered deep in the rhizosphere. That's how you tell if it is a system with net C emissions or net C sequestration. The surface short term carbon cycle is always nearly net 0. Whatever the cow emits into the atmosphere, it got that from the pasture plants that drew it out of the atmosphere. But deep in the soil instead of returning to the atmosphere, it turns to humus where it can be stored hundreds or even thousands of years.

A CAFO is a bit different though. Most of it depends on high fossil fuel energy and fertilizer inputs and the soils in the grain fields are deteriorating. Net effect there is a huge emissions source.

Again, be careful when trying to advocate Veganism with Meat industry propaganda. It is far better to simply say CAFOs are the single most environmentally destructive practice on the planet and try to get them eliminated. Then by being honest, you may get respect for an ethical Vegan agenda. It's real hard to promote an ethical Vegan agenda with the unethical meat industry campaign to eliminate their competition.

 

[TimCallahan]

One viable strategy would seem to be to collect the manure of dairy cattle and put it through a biogas digester to produce methane to be burned onsite to produce space heating, cooking and to generate electricity; then to use the residue - now with a higher than before nitrogen ratio - as a fertilizer. Put the grains produced into a fermenter, then subject them to distillation to produce ethanol, again to be burned onsite as fuel for tractors and other farm machinery. Use the remaining dry mash, again with a higher protein ratio than before, to produce flour and as a feeding supplement for grass-fed / range-fed animals. Such a strategy would be constantly recycling much of the carbon and using either none or very little fossil fuel.

BTW, eating unfertile eggs isn't going to harm any baby chicks.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

One viable strategy would seem to be to collect the manure of dairy cattle and put it through a biogas digester to produce methane to be burned onsite to produce space heating, cooking and to generate electricity; then to use the residue - now with a higher than before nitrogen ratio - as a fertilizer. Put the grains produced into a fermenter, then subject them to distillation to produce ethanol, again to be burned onsite as fuel for tractors and other farm machinery. Use the remaining dry mash, again with a higher protein ratio than before, to produce flour and as a feeding supplement for grass-fed / range-fed animals. Such a strategy would be constantly recycling much of the carbon and using either none or very little fossil fuel.

Utopian socialists often came up with intricate blueprints for a working society. Do you have any real world models/evidence/studies/etc.? Can these be food sources for the world?

BTW, eating unfertile eggs isn't going to harm any baby chicks.

Okay, but not what I was referring to. I was referring to quite born calves and chicks.

 

[TimCallahan]

Utopian socialists often came up with intricate blueprints for a working society. Do you have any real world models/evidence/studies/etc.? Can these be food sources for the world?
. . . (snip) . . .

I googled "biogas digesters and found a large number of sites. Here is tis what the Natural Resources Defense Council has to say on the subject.

Here is a site I found by googling "farm alcohol distillation and dry mash.

This is one of the sites I found when I googled farm distillation and dry mash + biogas digesters.

It would appear these are real and viable technologies as opposed to utopian socialist pipe dreams.

 

[r-j]

One viable strategy would seem to be to collect the manure of dairy cattle and put it through a biogas digester to produce methane to be burned onsite to produce space heating, cooking and to generate electricity; then to use the residue - now with a higher than before nitrogen ratio - as a fertilizer.

Fair Oaks Farms in Indiana produces compressed natural gas from its cows' waste and uses it to fuel their fleet of delivery trucks and farm equipment. This practice saves 1.5 million gallons of diesel and reduced CO2 emissions by 1.4 million metric tons.

http://www.usdairy.com/~/media/usd/public/dairypowercasestudy_renewableenergy.pdf.ashx

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

I googled "biogas digesters and found a large number of sites. Here is tis what the Natural Resources Defense Council has to say on the subject.

Here is a site I found by googling "farm alcohol distillation and dry mash.

This is one of the sites I found when I googled farm distillation and dry mash + biogas digesters.

It would appear these are real and viable technologies as opposed to utopian socialist pipe dreams.

The question isn't whether technologies exist, but what effect their implementation and widespread implementation would have in total, or even the possibility of said widespread implementation. There have been many alternative energy plans that turn out like this (electric cars, hybrids, ethanol, etc.).

http://www.usdairy.com/~/media/usd/public/dairypowercasestudy_renewableenergy.pdf.ashx

Dennis Smith, director of the Clean Cities program for the federal Department of Energy, said about 8,000 large-scale dairy and swine farms across the country could potentially support similar biogas recovery projects.

Linky.

And this farm is definitely not free range.

And again, look at corn ethanol. In whole life cycle this may or may not be all that great.

Traditional farms, which usually both grow plants and raise animals, recycle manure as organic fertilizer and thus bear the full cost of handling their waste. But large livestock operations can't do that. They put their manure — and there is a great deal of it — in huge piles or storage pools that often leak into nearby streams and ground water and exude stenches that make life miserable for neighbors. For them, manure isn't valuable fertilizer but a vexing disposal problem.

The stampede for power from manure gives these huge livestock operations a subsidized way to deal with this problem — and even gives them an incentive to expand. An article about methane digesters in The Des Moines Register quoted a farmer saying that doubling his dairy herd allowed him to justify the expense of a digester. This could well be a typical response, with manure power projects everywhere resulting in still larger herds and flocks.

But as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization noted last month, concentrated livestock operations threaten the environment and human health in a way that traditional farms do not. It is increasingly clear that traditional, smaller-scale farming is better than factory farms for people, animals and the environment.

Even manure power projects' immediate environmental benefits are dubious. Digesters, for example, don't make the manure disappear; instead, a manure slurry (which is sometimes larger than the original volume of manure) is left over and still has to be stored somewhere. Moreover, the slurry contains most of manure's original pollutants, researchers note. In other words, what comes out of a digester may be a bigger problem than what went in.

Methane digesters also fail to abate most environmental damage caused by concentrated animal operations, according to the Sierra Club. Farms with digesters still generally use large manure storage ponds, the main source of pollution problems. Incinerators, meanwhile, destroy the valuable components of manure and raise the specter of air emissions. While it's a nuisance on factory farms, manure as it is used on traditional farms greatly benefits soil fertility and tilth, increasing water-holding capacity, reducing wind erosion, improving aeration and promoting beneficial organisms. But many of these benefits are lost in burning. "Incineration destroys the nitrogen and organic material content of manure," reports the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The institute has calculated that "an electricity plant that burns 500,000 tons of manure in effect destroys $3 million in nitrogen."

The fossil fuels involved in hauling manure must also be considered. Incinerators, especially, are centralized and bring waste from farms for miles around, and then the resulting ash must be transported to a disposal site.

Despite President Bush's statement that biodiesel "is one of our nation's most promising alternative fuel sources," making biodiesel from manure is also unlikely to be an environmental gain. Burning biodiesel may increase a greenhouse gas, nitrogen oxide, according to the Energy Department. And the full environmental costs of biodiesel fuel include soil erosion and water pollution caused by growing the soybeans and corn used. These crops are now the leading cause of both nitrogen water pollution in the United States and soil erosion.

Using manure as power sounds like a good idea, but it's not. The energy that can be generated from manure is not worth the expense. And by lowering industrial animal operations' cost of production, subsidizing manure power pushes family farms further toward the brink of extinction. Our money would be better spent investing in truly sustainable, sensible ways of producing energy and food.

Linky.

 

[TimCallahan]

The question isn't whether technologies exist, but what effect their implementation and widespread implementation would have in total, or even the possibility of said widespread implementation. There have been many alternative energy plans that turn out like this (electric cars, hybrids, ethanol, etc.).

Linky.

And this farm is definitely not free range.

And again, look at corn ethanol. In whole life cycle this may or may not be all that great.

Linky.

So, basically, what you are saying is that, if you do it wrong, it won't work.

Bear in mind that I originally said that the methane extracted in biogas digesters should be used on the farm, and the remaining material should be used as fertilizer, again onsite. There should be no incineration of anything but the methane.

As to alcohol fuels, again, I said they should be used onsite to power farm machinery. I am not an advocate for using ethanol as an additive to regular gasoline. Nor am I a lobbyist for the ethanol industry. As to the dry mash, left over from brewing, if we want the cattle to be entirely grass-fed, we can make the dry mash into bread for human consumption. It can also be used as chicken feed.

 

[TimCallahan]

Tsukasa Buddha, something just occurred to me. I was bothered by this portion of the article you quoted in the OP:

On the environmental front, studies by Yan et al (2009) in Ireland used growth chambers to evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions from cattle with varying levels of forage and grain in the diet. Coupling these results with a 30% increase of harvest age of grass-fed cattle compared to grain-fed, it becomes clear there is a 500% increase in greenhouse gas emissions for each pound of beef produced from grass-fed compared to grain-fed cattle.

Here's the problem with that study that now seems glaringly obvious. Before European colonists and their descendants began spreading across the North American continent, vast herds of bison roamed the American plains. Yet, they don't seem to have contributed to the accumulation greenhouse gases, even though the article you quoted said that grass-fed free-range cattle contributed to such gases far more than those confined in feed lots.

Compounding this problem is that still today vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, large antelope and even elephant freely graze on places like the Serengeti Plains. Are the animals of the African megafauna, too, a major source of global warming? If they are not, then free-ranging grass-fed cattle are also not major contributors.

I suspect the study cited in the article involved a fair amount of extrapolation and may well have been slanted, with a pro-agrabiz bias.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

I suspect the study cited in the article involved a fair amount of extrapolation and may well have been slanted, with a pro-agrabiz bias.

No question about it. That's why I stated twice above that when advocating a Vegan agenda, one should be very careful to not use unethical Meat industry propaganda carefully designed to attack their competition.

There is nothing unethical with the meat industry funding a study. It is however improper to draw the type of conclusion that is being drawn from it. When an animal is in it's environment, it becomes part of the entire biosystem. Any conclusions that ignore this are by inevitably biased.

Yes pastured cows themselves do produce more carbon emissions, but the biosystem of a well managed pastured animal farm is a net carbon sequester, not a net emissions source. There are plants, insects, bacteria, fungi, small animals, soil, water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles to consider. Unless you take a systems thinking approach, you will never understand biology or a farm.

Much better to simply understand that an Industrial CAFO model, even the BEST industrial CAFO models, are the single most destructive environmental problem on the planet today. Focus on ending that and you eliminate a whole lot of harm from our culture. You might even pick up some allies along the way from the much larger organic movement. It wasn't all that long ago that the majority of the organic movement advocates also advocated large reductions of meat consumption. Many even were vegan, vegetarian and/or semi-vegetarians.

It was only after years of results where organic farmers found the soil, water, carbon, nutrient and energy cycles were all significantly improved by farm animals raised wisely and ethically that the trend slowed and mostly ended. We actually need those animals on the land where they belong.

I actually respect the Vegan idea to boycott all meat because most meat is raised unethically and in a manner destroying the environment. But eliminating all domestic farm species from the planet would cause a catastrophe as large or larger IMHO. Better to eliminate the industrial model and replace it with an ethical environmentally sound model. It can be done, and bickering between what should be allies in this fight is not helping get it done.

 

[TimCallahan]

According to this site wildebeests have extended their range and numbers in the last 50 years (from the site):

The wildebeest is one of the few African antelopes to have extended its range in the last 50 years. They numbered about 250,000 in 1960 and are thought to number 1.5 million today.

So, has this sixfold increase in the numbers of wildebeest contributed to global warming? I would say no; but if grass-fed cattle are a major source of AGW, then the same would have to be true for wildebeest.

ETA: To be fair, according to this site, cattle raised for beef are usually between 1000 and 1200 pounds at the time of slaughter, whil, according to the previous site, wildebeests only get to be about 600 bpunds in weight. So, beef cattle are twice the weight of wildebeests. Still, the combination of wildebeests, zebras, elephants and various types of antelope should be a considerable source of carbon dioxide and even some methane. Somehow, however, they don't seem to be a major cause of global warming.

 

[TimCallahan]

According to this site the contribution to AGG from agriculture is 13.5%, while forestry contributes 17.4%, and industry contributes 19.4%. According to Wikipedia agriculture contributes 12.5%, transportation 14.0%, industry 16.8% and power generation 21.3%. Given the rather low levels contributed by agriculture overall, according to these two sites, I'm a bit puzzled by 51% number in the OP.

Let me suggest that, along with shifting electrical generation away from fossil fuels, an overall strategy of energy conservation through efficiency, de-emphasis of meat in diets and birthrate reduction would be the best way to combat global climate change.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Tim,
Ok so you have that figure. Probably an estimate instead of a hard number. However, that is emissions yet again, with no discussion of the loss of the other leg of the carbon cycle that we humans have disrupted, sequestration into the soil. Look at my signature again, especially this part, "looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system."

With agriculture, it's not just emissions, it is the LOSS of a functioning ecosystem. One of those ecosystem services that was lost was the long term carbon cycle into the soil.

When you deforest an area or plow a prairie, you not only release emissions, you kill the ecosystems ability to sequester carbon from that land. At least with the current industrial models. And we have done it over most the planet.

"How can we continue to produce food from the land while preventing negative environmental consequences, such as deforestation, water pollution, and soil erosion?" Ramankutty said. Link

There are a few regenerative models of agriculture out there, but they are rare. Here is one.

Anything that actually builds topsoil (and there’s not many agricultural systems that do) is sequestering carbon. Meaning pasture cropping is, on top of everything else, a carbon sink technique. Which is in marked contrast to agriculture as we know it. Why pasture cropping is such a Big Deal

Notice the change when animals are added to an already great system? It completes the nutrient cycles and causes the land to regenerate. That means it sequesters carbon again like it did before we mucked it up.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

So, basically, what you are saying is that, if you do it wrong, it won't work.

Bear in mind that I originally said that the methane extracted in biogas digesters should be used on the farm, and the remaining material should be used as fertilizer, again onsite. There should be no incineration of anything but the methane.

As to alcohol fuels, again, I said they should be used onsite to power farm machinery. I am not an advocate for using ethanol as an additive to regular gasoline. Nor am I a lobbyist for the ethanol industry. As to the dry mash, left over from brewing, if we want the cattle to be entirely grass-fed, we can make the dry mash into bread for human consumption. It can also be used as chicken feed.

I have a feeling this is going to end up like the Holistic Management thread, but the onus is on you to prove your ideas are functional and practical on the scale we are talking about. If you think there is a "not doing it wrong", show it.

I suspect the study cited in the article involved a fair amount of extrapolation and may well have been slanted, with a pro-agrabiz bias.

Again, your suspicions mean literally nothing.

Tsukasa Buddha, something just occurred to me. I was bothered by this portion of the article you quoted in the OP:

On the environmental front, studies by Yan et al (2009) in Ireland used growth chambers to evaluate the greenhouse gas emissions from cattle with varying levels of forage and grain in the diet. Coupling these results with a 30% increase of harvest age of grass-fed cattle compared to grain-fed, it becomes clear there is a 500% increase in greenhouse gas emissions for each pound of beef produced from grass-fed compared to grain-fed cattle.

Here's the problem with that study that now seems glaringly obvious. Before European colonists and their descendants began spreading across the North American continent, vast herds of bison roamed the American plains. Yet, they don't seem to have contributed to the accumulation greenhouse gases, even though the article you quoted said that grass-fed free-range cattle contributed to such gases far more than those confined in feed lots.

Compounding this problem is that still today vast herds of wildebeest, zebra, large antelope and even elephant freely graze on places like the Serengeti Plains. Are the animals of the African megafauna, too, a major source of global warming? If they are not, then free-ranging grass-fed cattle are also not major contributors.

According to this site wildebeests have extended their range and numbers in the last 50 years (from the site):

The wildebeest is one of the few African antelopes to have extended its range in the last 50 years. They numbered about 250,000 in 1960 and are thought to number 1.5 million today.

So, has this sixfold increase in the numbers of wildebeest contributed to global warming? I would say no; but if grass-fed cattle are a major source of AGW, then the same would have to be true for wildebeest.

ETA: To be fair, according to this site, cattle raised for beef are usually between 1000 and 1200 pounds at the time of slaughter, whil, according to the previous site, wildebeests only get to be about 600 bpunds in weight. So, beef cattle are twice the weight of wildebeests. Still, the combination of wildebeests, zebras, elephants and various types of antelope should be a considerable source of carbon dioxide and even some methane. Somehow, however, they don't seem to be a major cause of global warming.

This is silly red herring, comparable to people who point out that people exhale CO₂ all the time. The quote in the OP clearly stated that it was referring to 51% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

According to this site the contribution to AGG from agriculture is 13.5%, while forestry contributes 17.4%, and industry contributes 19.4%. According to Wikipedia agriculture contributes 12.5%, transportation 14.0%, industry 16.8% and power generation 21.3%. Given the rather low levels contributed by agriculture overall, according to these two sites, I'm a bit puzzled by 51% number in the OP.

Wikipedia is not a source. That chart comes from the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research version 3.2, fast track 2000 project. I can't even find the 3.2 version of this document, and the 4.2. My quote in the OP clearly stated it was in response to FAO 2006 numbers, and how and why it expanded on them. The out you should be highlighting is that people are just doing grazing "wrong" and thus the plant devastation could be lowered. The other website is an education website that cites a book for the images. I can't find any more info than that. I am puzzled why you find these two almost random sources more credible than a study, but no matter.

 

[TimCallahan]

I have a feeling this is going to end up like the Holistic Management thread, but the onus is on you to prove your ideas are functional and practical on the scale we are talking about. If you think there is a "not doing it wrong", show it.

What exactly would you accept as proof?

Again, your suspicions mean literally nothing.

As others have noted, the study was done in a rather artificial manner and done by those in favor of the agrabiz method of feedlot fattening.

This is silly red herring, comparable to people who point out that people exhale CO₂ all the time. The quote in the OP clearly stated that it was referring to 51% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

No, it's not a silly red herring. In all cases we are talking about large herds of grass-fed mammals. If the bison did not constitute a great source of carbon dioxide, then why would free-range, grass-fed cattle constitute such a source?

Wikipedia is not a source. That chart comes from the Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Research version 3.2, fast track 2000 project. I can't even find the 3.2 version of this document, and the 4.2. My quote in the OP clearly stated it was in response to FAO 2006 numbers, and how and why it expanded on them. The out you should be highlighting is that people are just doing grazing "wrong" and thus the plant devastation could be lowered. The other website is an education website that cites a book for the images. I can't find any more info than that. I am puzzled why you find these two almost random sources more credible than a study, but no matter.

I'm equally puzzled as to why you see the study you cited as more credible than others.

That said, going back to the OP, you said that merely reducing the amount of beef eaten was a cop-out. Yet, the study you quoted said that a reduction in meat consumption would have a significant effect on reducing carbon emissions.

 

[TimCallahan]

. . . ( mega-snip) . . . That said, going back to the OP, you said that merely reducing the amount of beef eaten was a cop-out. Yet, the study you quoted said that a reduction in meat consumption would have a significant effect on reducing carbon emissions.

I reiterate: Any reduction in meat consumption should be something you'd welcome. Since it is unlikely you will convert the rest of us to a vegan way of life, what do you hope to accomplish with this thread?

 

[TimCallahan]

Today will be my last day of posting for a week. I'm going on a bus tours with the Skeptics Society, visiting Brice, Zion and the north rim of the Grand Canyon. I won't be back until June 20, and i probably won't post on that day. If, when I get back, I find there's no response to my two posts above, I'll assume this thread has died.

 

[Tsukasa Buddha]

What exactly would you accept as proof?

I don't expect proof of anything, but studies would be good evidence in my book.

As others have noted, the study was done in a rather artificial manner and done by those in favor of the agrabiz method of feedlot fattening.

There is only one "other", and which is "the study"?

No, it's not a silly red herring.

Yes, it is .

In all cases we are talking about large herds of grass-fed mammals. If the bison did not constitute a great source of carbon dioxide, then why would free-range, grass-fed cattle constitute such a source?

Whether or not wild large herbivores were a significant GHG contributor has no bearing on if large herbivores bred by humans and used in animal agriculture are a significant GHG contributor. You are reaching to make a connection that does not follow and that you have no data for the base premise. It is just irrelevant.

I'm equally puzzled as to why you see the study you cited as more credible than others.

You proposed (well, linked to an image I had to dig for the source for) one "other", a decade out of date. The one I have used the studies and data and was cited by the UN.

That said, going back to the OP, you said that merely reducing the amount of beef eaten was a cop-out. Yet, the study you quoted said that a reduction in meat consumption would have a significant effect on reducing carbon emissions.

I reiterate: Any reduction in meat consumption should be something you'd welcome.

Yes, the same way going from shooting twelve children a month to shooting five children a month would be a significant reduction. There is no reason to stop at that number, and just as much to be saved with each additional sparing. I shot a kid whilst he played in a basketball court and I did not imprison in a dungeon beforehand! Praise me, vegans!

Since it is unlikely you will convert the rest of us to a vegan way of life, what do you hope to accomplish with this thread?

World domination.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

I don't expect proof of anything, but studies would be good evidence in my book.

OK
Cenozoic Expansion of Grasslands and Climatic Cooling

Mountains, ocean currents, forests, and swamps have played an important role in regulating global climate for hundreds
of millions of years, but the truly novel event of the Cenozoic was the evolution and expansion of grasslands, with
their uniquely coevolved grasses and grazers.

Grasslands and their soils can be considered sinks for atmospheric CO2, CH4, and water vapor, and their Cenozoic evolution a contribution to long-term global climatic cooling.

There is your study.

Whether or not wild large herbivores were a significant GHG contributor has no bearing on if large herbivores bred by humans and used in animal agriculture are a significant GHG contributor. You are reaching to make a connection that does not follow and that you have no data for the base premise. It is just irrelevant.

In a way you are right. Because the modern way to raise large herbivores in in stockyards fed with grain. So they are disconnected from the land. In this case any coevolution of grassland and grazers doesn't apply and modern animal husbandry can be seen as a CO2 and CH4 emissions source. But it can be relevant if we remove all CAFOs and instead raised those animals using biomimicry. Mimic those extirpated and/or extinct large wild herds, and the grazer/grassland system can be seen as a sink, not an emissions source. And for evidence that domestic animals can be managed in a way that mimics these migrating wild herds and their grazer/grassland symbiosis:
Grazing management impacts on vegetation, soil biota and soil chemical, physical and hydrological properties in tall grass prairie

► We evaluated the impacts of multi-paddock grazing and continuous grazing.
► We measured impacts on soils and vegetation on neighboring ranches in three counties.
► Multi-paddock grazing had superior vegetation composition and biomass.
► Multi-paddock grazing had higher soil carbon, water- and nutrient-holding capacities.
► Success was due to managing grazing adaptively for desired results.

Since it is unlikely you will convert the rest of us to a vegan way of life, what do you hope to accomplish with this thread?

World domination.

I have no problem with your quest for world domination, as long as you don't muck the planet up for the rest of us. Plenty of other forces in this world mucking the planet up in their quest for world dominion, we don't need yet another to fight against. If you want a fight, then fight the CAFOs. I'd expect in that case you'd even have allies. But try to extirpate domestic animals due to your personal Vegan religious beliefs, even at the cost of huge ecological harm, and you'll find much resistance.