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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."
Seaweed tastes so bad that it makes them puke when the farmer is not looking. That's why they're no longer farting. The guy will come back in 6 months saying all his cows died of hunger and he doesn't understand why.
lucm, indeed.
Someone please forward this article to Elon Musk.
Can we at least feed the seaweed to our elderly uncles at Thanksgiving to cut down on their burps and farts?
"Then researcher Rob Kinley of Dalhousie University caught wind of it."
Shouldn't that be "noticed the absence of wind?"
I couldn't resist. I've been waiting years for this opportunity (note my account name)...
The real question is if this new feed costs the same or less than the current feed given to cows.
Eating less meat would help GHG reductions.
We like meat. People like you are such killjoys. Please, just go away, you whiny little bitch!
What incentive does big ag have to do anything to reduce their environmental footprint? They have a get-out-of-jail-free card for emissions, fresh water usage and water system pollution, food poisoning, antibiotics abuse, employee and animal abuse, and land degradation. They're richly subsidized to be the world's greatest pollution offenders.
Fucking cows are polluting the planet. Acid rain and global warming and turning forests into wasteland. I say we kill and eat those fuckers!
I can finally eat surf-and-turf while only harming one animal. Take that, vegetarians!
"Please pay no attention to all the extra emissions from growing, harvesting, processing, and transporting!"
...weed cures farts?
The ENIAC Demo Competition
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...
"Ruminant animals are responsible for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions globally". Not really. The *responsibility* is on the humans who are growing cows for food (and other industrial uses). Eating less meat would help GHG reductions.
The problem is not growing cows for food, the problem is how it's done. If people stop eating meat, whatever they eat instead will be grown as irresponsibly because it's human nature to chase profit and cut corners.
You may have this romantic vision of a few hippies tending to a garden with rain water (greener pastures and all that), but look at where the GMO started - it's the people who invented that who will feed you if meat is gone.
lucm, indeed.
There are ~100 million cows in the US.
They each eat about 24lbs of food a day.
Doesn't say what proportion of that has to be seaweed, but even if it's just a pound a day, that's 100 million pounds of seaweed every day. 36.5 billion pounds a year.
Annual global seaweed harvest was 28,000 metric tons (61,729,433lbs) in '88 according to Wikipedia.
And there are lots more cows around the rest of the world (upwards of 1.5 billion).
People think *I'm* crazy as a vegan. But take note, according to this pro-meat article, livestock accounts for 20% of greenhouse emissions. Should be worrisome to anyone consuming cows or dairy...that's a lot we could cut out very quickly if the will existed.
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?
The only way to solve man-made climate change is to tax average people an exorbitant amount.
And give it to the already exorbitantly rich, because that's the whole scheme behind this AGW-hype.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
What's the vitamin K2 or precursors of the seaweed in question? What's the typical route for materials in cow food to K2 in cows?
The problem is indeed growing cows for food, no matter how it's done. If people stop eating meat and instead ate the vegetables fed to the animals, the efficiency of the food supply increases 10 to 40 fold (depending on who's number you use). A pound of beef takes 10 to 40 pounds of feed, an absurd amount of fresh water, a huge expanse of land, countless antibiotics, and the transportation of elements within the system (feed to cows, cows to processing plants, etc). Why not just skip the middlemen and give humans the vastly-more-efficient feed?
No. Ruminants are responsible for 20%. Cows are not the only ruminants on the planet.
Did you hear the story about how cows were once the dominant and most intelligent creatures on earth? Then they devolved, and are now just a ruminant of their one time greatness.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
Run-on sentence much? Anyway, for about the bazillionth time, climate != weather.
The AGW people are not zealots, they're scientists, and those who understand how science works. What you seem to interpret as zealotry is actually a genuine concern for the future of the human race.
All models are a compromise, because they attempt to express in mathematics and algorithms the essential parts of a complex real world. They can make wrong predictions in both directions. But the practice of science works to correct this by observing discrepancies and producing better models. And guess what? Models keep improving, and they are becoming quite accurate:
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat...
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/c...
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-g...
Whether you accept what the models say or not, the essential take-away is that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gasses, and humanity is responsible for adding a significant amount of them to the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Enough to cause a problem that we must face and solve, or risk significant global hardship. Temperature is trending upwards. Polar ice is melting. Sea levels are rising. These are observed facts.
And maybe, in fact perhaps quite likely, efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will be a net benefit for economies, rather than a hardship.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
You could be stuck in a confined area with self-righteous bacon-loving "bro" farts...
The problem is indeed growing cows for food, no matter how it's done. If people stop eating meat and instead ate the vegetables fed to the animals,
That's just it. Very few "vegetables" are eaten by cows. 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. I grew up on a vegetable farm. The corn rows took very little maintenance, but the juicy vegetables like tomatoes and cucumbers took a lot of time and water.
The studies that say beef needs 1000+ gallons of water per pound, while vegetables only need 100-500, don't take into consideration that the cows get most of that water from eating grass in their pasture and drinking from ponds in the pasture. Water for vegetables is mostly coming from a well or dammed river.
If you switched all acreage currently growing field corn for cows, and instead planted all the various vegetables, you would need to use a lot more water to irrigate them, and a lot more labor to tend to them.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
A pound of beef takes 10 to 40 pounds of feed, an absurd amount of fresh water, a huge expanse of land, countless antibiotics, and the transportation of elements within the system (feed to cows, cows to processing plants, etc). Why not just skip the middlemen and give humans the vastly-more-efficient feed?
The bulk of the food cows are eating is unfit for human consumption. You couldn't feed it to people even if you wanted to. Our digestive system is completely different and can't be "upgraded" to work like that of a cow.
Calories are not all equals, otherwise we could just feast on corn sugar all day and be healthy.
If you want to be a vegan because you feel sad thinking about animals being slaughtered or because you have a craving for foliage, knock yourself out, but stop peddling that bullshit that's been around since the hippies.
lucm, indeed.
And guess what? Models keep improving, and they are becoming quite accurate:
That is exactly totally beside the point.
Models are calibrated in a subset of their variable space, i.e. a subset of weather, oops, my bad, climate conditions from the past.
Stating that they are 'improving' inside that subspace is in no way any indication of their accuracy in a totally different part of the variable space, namely some apparently dramatically different subspace where the state of the system is supposed to reside in the future, including the dynamics with which the state of the system arrives in that region of the variables space.
So, for me, there is no scientific basis to believe the predictions of the IPCC et. al.
However, I do agree that it is better if we, humanity, clean up the mess that we create, i.e. the waste and other by-products from our oxidative processes.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
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.
That's how it is in the USA but some other countries are different.
Our digestive system can't digest corn and soy? That's what cows are fed in industrial agriculture.
Again your are misleading people with your carefully crafted misinformation. For the record, here's what cow eat:
In the beef cattle diet, common roughages include hay, silage and grass. Silage is a crop that has been preserved in a moist, succulent condition by partial fermentation in a tight container (silo) above or below ground. The majority of the food cattle eat comes from this type of feedstuffs.
Much less grain is needed in the cattle’s diet than roughage is. This is because grains fill cattle energy needs more than it fills their stomachs. Cattle are fed more grain the older they get. They gain weight faster when they are on higher amounts of grain. This is how cattle are finished off before they go to market.
http://animalsmart.org/species...
Now why don't you go have a feast of those delicious roughages - that's the bulk of that "40 fold" figure you mentioned - with maybe a small side of grain that was for the most part rejected by beer brewers or left over in the process of cleaning grain destined for human consumption; then you can come back here and educate us about the marvels it did for your digestive system.
lucm, indeed.
Most cited human ailments like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, etc are caused by eating too much sugar, which comes from plants, and not from eating meat.
I want you to go to your room and think about what you've done.
If eating grass-fed beef is so important, then why are there so many healthy vegetarians?
There's nothing worse than being stuck in a confined area with a bunch of righteous vegetarians farting.
I am a vegetarian, and I have to admit this is true. There are benefits to being a vegetarian, but increased flatulence is a minor problem. Fortunately, I work in a private office with a window.
Totally untrue and a gross false equivalence fallacy.
Climate models are numerically imprecise and approximative computer models with parameters that have been tweaked with data sets from the past, representing a limited region in the multidimensional state space in which the climate variables can reside.
The predictions by those models are based on approximations, guesses--no matter how expertly estimated--and extrapolations by mathematical approximative functions.
I hope I don't need to explain what is the difference between that kind of models and real physical models, it's huge.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Ask a paleoanthropologist and they will tell you that you are full of shit about the lifespan of early humans.
One issue that may be of interest is fossil records show many examples of humans and neaderthals and analysis shows that many were likely to have died at an older age due the observation of common age related dental issues (such as ground-down and missing teeth) and arthritis. Unfortunately fossil records are rare so it isn't possible to determine the average age related issues, and even if there were many more fossil records, they cannot determine cancers or cardiovascular issues from fossil remains.
As mentioned by other posters, refined sugar and other refined carbs have been identified as a likely candidate (potentially more significant than saturated fats from meat) for many of these diseases, but the jury is current out on that topic.
The reason prehistoric man was attributed with short life-expectancy was because of high infant mortality and childhood deaths (disease and other mortality risks). If we factor those things out, prehistoric man is estimated to have lifetimes similar to those in the 16th century humans. These extrapolations were done by a few decades ago in scientific studies of isolated hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and South America before there was significant contact between these isolated groups and modern society (unfortunately that they are difficult if not impossible to repeat now because of widespread cultural contamination).
You can take these with a few grains of salt, but it tracks with estimates done over historical times (where they have better information) that factoring out infant/child mortality effects, the lifespan of humans has been pretty constant until the industrial revolution when people started living a bit longer. Post-childhood causes of deaths that limit life-expectancy have changed greatly over time. In the hunter-gatherer society external injuries dominated the deaths, in the agricultural society the prevalence of infectious diseases dominated, it wasn't until the industrial revolution that cardiovascular diseases dominated, but as we move to a "high-tech" society cancers now dominate over cardio-vascular disease.
Since our diets have changed since the earlier part of the industrial revolution, I don't think we are eating *less* meat than we were before during the industrial revolution (where we were collectively much poor-er and couldn't afford much meat) so I'm not so sure it is conclusive that meat is the cause of all this cardio-vascular disease during the industrial revolution, and I'm not sure it's a cause of the current cancer epidemic either. Personally, I suspect generally higher calorie diets and less exercise for cardio-vascular disease prevalence and prior-generational under-reporting combined with increased industrial pollution for the modern cancer prevalence. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect many will agree with that assessment.
Climate models contain plenty of physics. And those from 10-15 years ago have successfully predicted the increase observed over the last decade. Not only that but they also predicted the warming in individual locations, the increased weather extremes, etc.
Every model is an approximation of the real world with some degree of accuracy. These ones are useful and give insight into the most important physical mechanisms at work.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I wonder if Buffalo pollute as much as cows? I think we need a 5 year, 3.6 billion dollar study on this.
Sure. The color and flavor will be a bit weird to them, but who knows... they may like it.
Note, however, that this just reduces methane and doesn't eliminate the actual fart. The paper also doesn't say whether it has any effect on the amount of methyl mercaptan, which is what actually makes your elderly uncles' farts smell so bad, so the only benefit may be fewer uncles lighting their farts at the table.
If you eat plenty of green leafy vegetables you'll get your K1. As for K2, fermentation of that plant matter in your guy transforms some of that K1 into K2, and Bob's your uncle.
As for the anti-AGW argument, grass-fed beef as a smaller CO2 footprint than feedlot fattened beef, so your argument that the "AGW zealots" are trying to ruin your health. Grass fed beef is more expensive per pound of course, but another plus is more of the money goes to the farmer.
Adding a macroalgae to cattle feed is an interesting proposition from a carbon standpoint. Macroalgae are often quite easy to cultivate; it's done in aquaculture to provide feed in shellfish hatcheries. I've seen it done, you basically need the culture, water, and fiberglass tanks. It's something that could conceivably be done by small scale farmers, or on an industrial scale and used in feedlots, if the numbers can be made to work out. From a AGW standpoint replacing Methane with CO2 is a very good thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No, it's the observational view. Cattle are not raised through their first couple of years on grain in a large building. I live surrounded by cattle farmers and their cattle spend the bulk of their time standing out in the pasture chewing grass and mustard and drinking from a standing pool with the occasional stroll to the trough for some of the dietary supplementals. All anyone has to do to see this is get in their car and drive the Midwest. You're being disingenuous, treating the last 4-6 months of their lives in a feed lot as if it describes their entire life 2-3 year life.