Also, we'd get seaweed flavoured beef! Wins all around.
Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
31–40 of 86 posts
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#32I wonder if it affects the flavor of the milk.
For sure it does. People in Europe pay a premium for "high mountains cow milk" ("Alpenmilch").
I had the impression that US milk has no taste but always thought it's just in my mind. But when I was in Colombia I met a guy from Switzerland who studied in Canada and said:"Oh wow, the milk here really tastes good like in Europe. Not like in Canada." So the milk in Europe and North America must indeed taste different. It is not just in my head.
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#33This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea. You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax... 2. h…
Of course the remaining sin being treating animals like a commodity, making them suffer, driving them around in crowded conditions for hundreds of miles...
It‘s not just the environment that suffers from our industrialized way to produce meat
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#34So the clarification is "from their burps". What does it do to the greenhouse gas emissions from their farts?
or getting the seaweed there, or growing enough seaweed
plus if they're all eating seaweed then they're probably caged (as opposed to out in pasture) which comes with other issues. Maybe they can be at pasture and eat seaweed from a trough but they're certainly not eating all their food from that trough then.
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#35What happens to the molecules that would have become methane: what do they become instead?
Methane is just CH4. I suspect it's not produced anymore on the partial-seaweed diet.
But it then it is diverted to other pathways. It could become meat, milk, or manure.
I don't think there's a lot of aerobic activity going on in the rumen, so at least we know that it isn't immediately turned into CO2 (even if that would have been a win, methane is 10 times worse a greenhouse gas).
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#36What happens to the molecules that would have become methane: what do they become instead?
> Enteric CH4 is a consequence of anaerobic fermentation of feed organic matter (OM) by a microbial consortium that produces substrate CO2 and hydrogen in a reduction pathway used by methanogens (Morgavi et al. 2010). Feed additives have been used to interfere with this pathway or otherwise reduce the numbers of functional methanogens.
(https://doi.org/10.1071/AN15576)
i guess that means they stay as co2 and hydrogen, but the paper also says that fermentation efficiency is decreased which ends up making the cows eat fewer molecules.
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#37This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea. You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax... 2. h…
That gets a bit more complicated though, greenhouse gas emissions through burping is just one of the many impacts cattle have on the planet: land usage, water usage, manure (harms water supplies, runoff, release gasses, etc), and then you have the knock-on impacts of all the feed that needs to be produced to feed them.
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#38This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea. You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax... 2. h…
Of course the remaining sin being treating animals like a commodity, making them suffer, driving them around in crowded conditions for hundreds of miles... It‘s not just the environment that suffers from our industrialized way to produce meat
yawn
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#39Really interesting, and potentially highly relevant to New Zealand where our many cows and sheep make up about a third of our emissions. Since cows produce quite variable emissions it sounds quite credible that some out of the box thinking like feeding seaweed could actually work in cutting emissions. > ( https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/science/greenhouse-gases/... ): Measurements of methane emission rates on shee…
this news has made the run once a year since I was in high school https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257589662_Methane_p... so there's something to it that doesn't add up. either the economics of producing enough algae make it infeasible, or other factors come into play like milk/meat taste or even what to do with pastures if they aren't used for pasturing, it's not like you can grow stuff there.
As to your last point, pastures could be used to plant forestry, which locks up carbon in timber.
Re: Feeding cows seaweed cuts 99% of greenhouse gas emissions from their burps
#40This is a perfect example of why "sin taxes" like the proposed tax on meat[1][2] to fight climate change are a bad idea. You need to tax the externality (greenhouse gas emissions), not an activity which currently causes such emissions, because then you don't have any incentives left (such as in this case) for industries to reduce those emissions. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/meat-tax... 2. h…
Of course the remaining sin being treating animals like a commodity, making them suffer, driving them around in crowded conditions for hundreds of miles... It‘s not just the environment that suffers from our industrialized way to produce meat
That's another good example. Tax that, and you create an incentive to either eat "dumber" meat like fish instead of pigs, or meat where you've avoided the "sin" altogether. Such as lab-grown meat.