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Feeding Seaweed To Cows Eliminates Methane Emissions (www.cbc.ca)
Dave Knott writes:
A Canadian farmer has "helped lead to a researcher's discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts," reports the CBC. "Joe Dorgan began feeding his cattle seaweed from nearby beaches more than a decade ago as a way to cut costs... Then researcher Rob Kinley of Dalhousie University caught wind of it." He tested Dorgan's seaweed mix, discovering that it reduced the methane in the cows' burps and farts by about 20 per cent. "Kinley knew he was on to something, so he did further testing with 30 to 40 other seaweeds. That led him to a red seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis he says reduces methane in cows burps and farts to almost nothing."
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it's not a small number," said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. "We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."
The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. "He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed."
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, so it's not a small number," said Kinley, an agricultural research scientist now working at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Queensland, Australia. "We're talking numbers equivalent to hundreds of millions of cars."
The researcher predicts a seaweed-based cow feed could be on the market within three to five years, according to the article. "He says the biggest challenge will be growing enough seaweed."
The real question is if this new feed costs the same or less than the current feed given to cows.
Am I going to pay a bunch of money for fancy seaweed and force my cows to eat it, or will I continue to let them graze my land that costs me nothing?
Decisions, decisions...
What does it do to the fatty acids in the beef?
Mammals are unable to relocate the double bond in fatty acids that we eat. (If you aren't up on this stuff, that is the omega number.) To make a long story short, the essential fatty acids in our bodies are the essential fatty acids in the feed that we raise our food with. Switching most of our beef and milk from grass to corn changed the balance that they eat and thus the balance that we eat. And it was probably unwise to do that without any understanding of what that would do (is doing) to us.
I don't care about methane one way or the other, but the long running chemistry experiment that is our food supply bothers me a little bit.
See that "Preview" button?
Yeah, another of those 'great scientific achievements'.
We eat cows. Cows are supposed to eat grass in order to produce the amounts of vitamin K2 that their calves and we need to deposit the calcium that's in our bodies into our bones, and not in our arteries and brains.
Thanks to the fact that cows and chickens are fed factory food on a large scale has already reduced our vitamin K2 intake by an order of a magnitude, which makes us effectively vitamin K2 deficient on a large scale.
Now let's feed them seaweed, so the vitamin K2 we get will reduce even further.
This will only increase the rate of cardiovascular and cognitive diseases even more.
Climate models that are calibrated to accurately 'predict' weather conditions in the past are not proven to be as accurate in predicting conditions for which they haven't been calibrated, so knowing very well that this will attract a lot of flak from the usual AGW-zealots, and acknowledging that my karma will be reduced based on their disagreeing with me--which means that slashdot effectively already does have the 'fake news' filter that facebook is only still talking about--I will not be compelled to hold back my opinion.
So there you have it: I'm not prepared to give up even more of my health in order to prevent some minuscule production of CO2.
Now can we please put those cows and chickens back on the pasture and yard? Thanks.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Because
1. The fats and proteins in meat are needed for our health. The human body does its best when it consumes low carbs and high protein.
2. It tastes good.
Please stop offering to poison me with a bad tasting poison. I eat my fruits and vegetables thanks but meat is an essential part of our diet that we evolved to consume.
Hippies like to argue that but the facts are what they are, from the types of teeth we have to the way our body uses fat cholesterol to make its hormones, generate energy and repair cell damage.
Most of their diet is grass while in pasture, hay over the winter, and grain when fattening them up for slaughter. Grass and corn grow very well with little help beyond planting and limited watering...the cows get most of that water from eating grass in their pasture and drinking from ponds in the pasture.
This is a romantic view of how cows are reared. The cows in our food chains are in fact fed almost entirely on corn and soy, and they don't have any pasture or ponds to drink from. Animal agriculture is in fact an industrial commodity produced using factory farming methods. The water problem lies in the fact that it takes all the fresh water that a cow drinks, plus all the water used to irrigate the 10-40 pounds of feed (for each pound of meat), plus the loss of fresh water in the supply that is polluted with their sewage. The EPA themselves estimate that 2,500 head of cattle produce the same amount of raw sewage as 411,000 people.