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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."
"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)...
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?
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?
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.
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.