Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80% • Hacker News Board

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#171

Post by zucked » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #123

chii wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My recent observations of HN is that many here take their own experience, and extrapolate that they are common and therefore anybody else could've also done it, and would be willing to. But there's empirical evidence that not many people want to stop eating meat. Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians. Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetaria…

I routinely encounter people who believe it is not possible to live healthily as vegetarians. I hired a developer who was a Hindu a couple of years back and half my team could not believe that he had never eaten meat, in part because he was very active and healthy.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, is it not? I am in the camp that we've over indexed on meat products in the weest(we eat too much of it) but I also believe that knife cuts both ways.

Humans evolved eating meat - just a whole lot less of it than we do today. It was a luxury, something you got once in a while, when an animal could be caught. I believe if we all went back to this intake level (90% vegetarian) we, and the planet, would be better off.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#172

Post by iratewizard » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:34 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #129

chii wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> continuing to demand products the demand will always be there. Humans like to eat meat. I doubt very many will give up the privilege, esp. when others are not. So any solution that improves the production of meat should be a good outcome. Ideally, lab grown meat (of the same quality and taste as from a cow) with low emissions is the best, but we aren't anywhere near that level of tech yet.

> the demand will always be there. Humans like to eat meat. I doubt very many will give up the privilege, esp. when others are not. I guess that's why we're all doomed to a broken planet. As long as we keep using "well, no one else is going to change" as an excuse we'll inherit the world we deserve.

There will always be someone telling us we're "doomed to a broken planet." Some people aren't going to subscribe to your brand of Catastrophism or your solution to the problem.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#173

Post by kiliantics » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

bparsons wrote: post #146

hexbinencoded wrote: post #130

How is this any different from hybrid vehicles still burning FF? Yes, it makes it slightly better, but eating certain protein sources is a choice, whereas transportation infrastructure is an economically-limited choice. Animal ag still causes: - climate change - inefficient allocation of calories and fresh water - water, air, and ground pollution (lakes of poo, runoff into rivers) - pandemic and other zoonotic diseas…

Australia is not going to ban meat consumption any time soon. It is a positive step that they are at least bothering to try and mitigate huge potential sources of GHG emissions.

No one is asking to ban these things. Just tax them a lot, so that people will be encouraged to eat something other than steak/burgers every day. Instead, taxpayers subsidise beef and dairy farming, making the end product cheaper and more likely to be consumed.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#174

Post by jamil7 » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:37 PM UTC

floren wrote: post #170

jamil7 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source doesn't look especially reliable coming from a US Dairy website, it mentions a survey from 2008 but doesn't provide a reference.

How about this: I was on a dairy feedlot a week ago, watching them make rations. The ingredients going in included: - Alfalfa hay (a legume crop which improves the soil) - Corn & triticale silage (chop up the ENTIRE field, stalk, cob, and all, then ferment it a bit to improve digestibility) - Corn cannery waste (all the leftovers after they make canned corn for people) - Waste onions (cattle love these, they'll root…

Thanks for sharing your experiences, I want to take a look into it more.

> but I do think HN tends to assume cattle are just fed big buckets of corn seed & wheat

I wasn't making the assumption but I see conflicting arguments all the time on this issue both in discussions and in papers.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#175

Post by pvaldes » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

kortex wrote: post #121

fiblye wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like if we can manufacture the active chemical (bromoform) without seaweed, it'll be much more scalable. Then there's also an even crazier idea: create a massive sea in the middle of Australia and use that for seaweed farming.

Bromoform & co. is rather volatile and toxic. The nice feature about seaweed in this case is it has bromoperoxidase pathways, so the halomethanes are produced in low concentrations and bound in (I presume) cell membranes until digested, releasing it right where it's needed, in the fermenting stomach. You'd have to engineer a digestible slow release halomethane source. Or just...grow it. How hard can it be to scale se…

> How hard can it be to scale seaweed farming?

Really hard, trust me. Coastal areas and sea platform tend to have a high level of occupation.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#176

Post by nradov » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #120

dannyw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been cooking with and eating plant based meat every once in a while for a year now. I don’t even think about it. It’s meat to me now.

My recent observations of HN is that many here take their own experience, and extrapolate that they are common and therefore anybody else could've also done it, and would be willing to. But there's empirical evidence that not many people want to stop eating meat. Look at how few vegetarians there are, compared to non-vegetarians. Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetaria…

I think most of us think it is possible to live healthily as vegetarians, but much more difficult. Meat from other mammals contains almost all the nutrients we need in a convenient and properly balanced format. In particular the protein quality and digestibility is higher than in most plant sources.

For those of us who are active athletes, there are a lot of anecdotes about people who tried vegetarian or vegan diets and found they had trouble recovering from workouts or healing from injuries. I suspect many vegetarians suffer from subtle, sub-clinical nutritional deficiencies and that makes me hesitant to give up meat.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#177

Post by bluntfang » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

jazzabeanie wrote: post #91

seanwilson wrote: post #11

How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle? I.e. including all the energy used to grow the crops they eat, the deforestation to make room for the crops + cattle, the waste the cows produce. Animal farming creates vast damage because of how inefficient it is and seaweed won't address how much feed cows need or that the world is eating more and more meat as countries get richer: > The energ…

In Australia a significant amount (can't remember the specifics) of cattle is raised on land that is unsuitable for crop production. My own experience confirms this. I've seen many cattle farms around Queensland - some with low stocking density and no deforestation, others very poorly managed with no trees at all or full of invasive species. It's not as simple as eating meat = bad, but that's the message most people…

> It's not as simple as eating meat = bad,

But it really is that simple at the scale we're producing meat. Factory farming is bad, and it will never be sustainable to produce the amount of meat we need to feed the world.

I have no doubt that free range grass fed beef is fine, but that's not where the majority of people are going to be able to get their meat.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#178

Post by nradov » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

zucked wrote: post #171

Ensorceled wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely encounter people who believe it is not possible to live healthily as vegetarians. I hired a developer who was a Hindu a couple of years back and half my team could not believe that he had never eaten meat, in part because he was very active and healthy.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, is it not? I am in the camp that we've over indexed on meat products in the weest(we eat too much of it) but I also believe that knife cuts both ways. Humans evolved eating meat - just a whole lot less of it than we do today. It was a luxury, something you got once in a while, when an animal could be caught. I believe if we all went back to this intake level (90% vegetarian) we,…

On average ancient hunter-gatherers got about 30% of their calories from meat. But it varied widely by location. People living in colder areas ate more meat because there often weren't any edible plants to be found.

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#179

Post by pvaldes » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #45

seanwilson wrote: post #11

How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle? I.e. including all the energy used to grow the crops they eat, the deforestation to make room for the crops + cattle, the waste the cows produce. Animal farming creates vast damage because of how inefficient it is and seaweed won't address how much feed cows need or that the world is eating more and more meat as countries get richer: > The energ…

> Whole milk: 24% That is a crazy high efficiency, when you think about it. A quarter of all food this animal receives through its entire life ends up as milk. The rest is used for growing cells, keeping it alive and warm, moving around. Back of the napkin says that I've eaten my bodyweight in food in less than 2 months.

> A quarter of all food this animal receives through its entire life ends up as milk

You are not doing the math well. Milk is 87% water, so we should include both, what the animal drank and ate.

What you have after removing the water would be the real conversion factor (dried food to dried milk).

Re: Australia to produce seaweed cattle feed that reduces methane emissions by 80%

#180

Post by pkphilip » Thu, Sep 24, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

cbernini wrote: post #159

pkphilip wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sustainable farming, livestock plays a very crucial role. This is particularly true for organic and natural farming. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/agriculture/organic-live... So looking at a single metric (methane emissions) doesn't do this topic justice. Also, live stock grazing (if done properly) can also be a method of regreening environments. https://news.mongabay.com/2020/08/though-forests-burn-agrofo.…

You're talking about manure usage here, not meat consumption. You don't need cattle for regenerative agriculture. Compost can do just fine in this case. Also if you want to boost nitrogen on the soil you can do by using FAA (a KNF entry) based on fish, instead. Anyways, the second link you sent says that they have controlled grazing to prevent the cattle from destroying new growth. As the text says: plants can do it…

Overgrazing can and does cause problems but controlled grazing can actually fight desertification and has been used: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-livestock-gra...

The organic and natural farming methods used in parts of Asia - especially India, utilizes livestock for much more than just manure.

You should look up Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) by Subhash Palekar.

Quoting from this site:

https://www.civilsdaily.com/news/zero-budget-natural-farming...

The “four wheels” of ZBNF are ‘Jiwamrita’, ‘Bijamrita’, ‘Mulching’ and ‘Waaphasa’.

- Jiwamrita is a fermented mixture of cow dung and urine (of desi (Indian) breeds), jaggery, pulses flour, water and soil from the farm bund.

- This isn’t a fertiliser, but just a source of some 500 crore micro-organisms that can convert all the necessary “non-available” nutrients into “available” form.

- Bijamrita is a mix of desi cow dung and urine, water, bund soil and lime that is used as a seed treatment solution prior to sowing.

- Mulching, or covering the plants with a layer of dried straw or fallen leaves, is meant to conserve soil moisture and keep the temperature around the roots at 25-32 degrees Celsius, which allows the microorganisms to do their job.

- Waaphasa, or providing water to maintain the required moisture-air balance, also achieves the same objective.