Green Cows? Can that Be?
We all know that cattle and other ruminant animals have wind problem, mainly belches but definitely from both ends. Their wind issue is about greenhouse gases not manners. Methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
There has been a lot of research happening on reducing this windy issue. So how green is a “green” cow? Most of the research into improved dairy farming is about improved genetic techniques and growth hormones. People don’t like that either.
It is like the dilemma over nappies –which is worse filling landfills with disposable nappies or to wasting water and energy washing cloth ones? I have 2 daughters and one is in each camp and having used cloth ones for my kids (a long time ago when there was little choice) I much prefer babysitting with the disposable ones available!
Another problem is the biofuels dilemma – if we make more fuel from crops to reduce oil consumption, are we really worse off by using up too much land, pesticides, fertilizer and tractor fuel in the process? And starving some people into the bargain? And driving Orang-utans to extinction? I would love to get bio fuel made from algae grown on sewage farms. We are not short of shit.
OK Back to Cows
• 1944, In the U.S. dairying 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 million cows.
• 2007, it produced 186 billion pounds of milk from 9.2 million cows.
That is a huge reduction and the volume of methane and nitrous oxide emissions has halved in that time. . Manure output is also down 24%. So the total carbon footprint for dairy production shrunk by about 41%.
BUT the cost was increased use of the growth hormone recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST) and using this on a million cows would further reduce carbon emissions equivalent to planting 300 million trees or taking 400,000 cars off the road. The European Union, a leader in the effort to curb climate change, bans the hormone because consumers don’t want this type of hormone in their food.
Another way to reduce methane from cows is to feed them fish oil which comes mostly from small fish already threatened by overfishing. Fish oil also reduces the fat content of milk, so that you need more cows to produce the same amount of cheese
Personally I like to eat food that has been fed on “natural” foods and I have actually never seen cows going out to catch and eat fish. We have already had horrific examples of that can happen when cows are fed meat.
There are some pretty tricky trade offs here. And I’d like to see the figures for cattle that just craze on unimproved pastures,
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June 23rd, 2009 at 10:25 pm
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