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Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

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Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#201

Post by pavedwalden »

headbee wrote: post #193

Article from Wired on why algae isn't the silver bullet it's marketed as: https://www.wired.com/story/carbon-neutral-cows-algae/ Essentially, it's only useful for pasture raised cows (soy and corn fed feedlot cows already produce a fraction of the methane) and there's no practical way to add algae to pasture raised cows' diets. They also speculate that cows' microbiomes will adapt to the algae.

Thanks for supplying the fact-check I was looking for. I think I've been seeing headlines about this "discovery" for over a decade, always presented as if it's a promising new technique but obviously there must be some reason it hasn't caught on by now.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#202

Post by briandear »

m000 wrote: post #82
gambiting wrote: post #61

There is an incredibly important part of this that I feel everyone is missing. The grass eaten by the cows would produce exactly as much methane if it was just left to rot. It's not as if cows somehow produce methane out of grass that would otherwise just....turn into dust? None of those studies take this into account, they all just measure what comes into a cow and what comes out, but no one takes into account the a…

> None of those studies take this into account, they all just measure what comes into a cow and what comes out, but no one takes into account the amount of methane produced from the same feed even without cows involved. Nobody's missing anything. That feed wouldn't have been planted in the first place if it weren't for feeding the cows. And that would translate to less deforestation [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/…

So what would grow in that dirt instead? Nothing?

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#203

Post by bpodgursky »

titzer wrote: post #190
bpodgursky wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just isn't true. The Eastern half the US was heavily deforested by colonization, but that's really not true in the midwest. It was prarie. There are actually a lot of researchers who believe that the Native peoples were keeping the forests back via controlled burns, since grassland is better for hunting and agriculture, and the forests have regrown substantially _since_ most of the indigenous people died via dis…

Go argue with historians, if you like: https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/forestry/

Like, I'm not saying wikipedia is an infallible source of truth, but I'm not exactly arguing for ancient aliens here:

> In the Eastern Deciduous Forest, frequent fires kept open areas which supported herds of bison. A substantial portion of this forest was extensively burned by agricultural Native Americans. Annual burning created many large oaks and white pines with little understory.[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_savannas_of_Nort...

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#204

Post by bob29 »

lazide wrote: post #139
m000 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of those studies take this into account, they all just measure what comes into a cow and what comes out, but no one takes into account the amount of methane produced from the same feed even without cows involved. Nobody's missing anything. That feed wouldn't have been planted in the first place if it weren't for feeding the cows. And that would translate to less deforestation [1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/…

That seems wildly misleading? The rainforests that were there before certainly produce methane and other gases as things rot. Total biomass in a rainforest is generally stable - it is not really a sink over any significant timeframes. Plants take sunlight, use the energy from it to rip the oxygen off co2 releasing oxygen as a byproduct, and carbon to build themselves with. Unless rainforests have an ever increasing l…

>The rainforests that were there before certainly produce methane

Conditions on the forest floor typically facilitate aerobic decomposition which does not release methane. [1]

>If you want to lock up carbon, you need to take it from the plants and sequester it somewhere natural forces (rot, weathering) won’t break it back down again - like a house, or in a cave, or in a hypoxic environment.

Hypoxic environment is exactly the conditions methanogenic bacteria operate in to turn biomass into methane. [2]

> Converting atmospheric co2 (or methane) into plastic that gets buried in a landfill is net negative carbon balance for instance.

Except for the energy needed to convert the molecules, the energy needed to transport plastic to a landfill. Energy production and transportation both are powered by fossil fuels mostly.

[1]http://whatcom.wsu.edu/ag/compost/fundamentals/consideration...

[2]http://solarcities.eu/faq

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#205

Post by nkingsy »

Tepix wrote: post #135
beforeolives wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do if you want it to scale to large numbers of people. Affordable lab-grown meat (when we have it) and intermediate solutions like the one in this article (if it's indeed viable) actually work for everybody. Even if we assume that veganism is an okay choice for one's health, trying to convince people to go vegan won't get you very far.

Look at India. There you have more than a billion people who don't eat cows.

They do drink the milk

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#206

Post by briandear »

Tepix wrote: post #135
beforeolives wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do if you want it to scale to large numbers of people. Affordable lab-grown meat (when we have it) and intermediate solutions like the one in this article (if it's indeed viable) actually work for everybody. Even if we assume that veganism is an okay choice for one's health, trying to convince people to go vegan won't get you very far.

Look at India. There you have more than a billion people who don't eat cows.

How’s their carbon footprint?

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#207

Post by klmadfejno »

airhead969 wrote: post #168
klmadfejno wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could start by not representing people who eat meat as stereotypical fat redneck americans, which, in addition to just being baseline offensive, is hardly a dominant trait among people who eat meat.

Some of my extended family raise longhorns in Texas for tax dodge ("working farm") and social validation reasons. They are definitely obese, redneck Americans who chew tobacco and are months away from their latest stroke, heart attack, and/or cancer.

That's great for you. However, your extended longhorn family is not the only group of people that eats meat, and you come across poorly for making a straw man portrayal otherwise.

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#208

Post by incrudible »

sdenton4 wrote: post #165
lazide wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is native or not native important from a carbon balance perspective? Alfalfa still pulls carbon from the air when it grows.

Corn, people... American cows prominently eat corn. It is extremely fertilizer and pesticide intensive, and entirely engineered. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the fertilizers are also fossil fuel based.

> ...fertilizers are also fossil fuel based.

True, but these only account for 1% of energy demand[1]. Fertilizer is all about the nitrogen, not the carbon. The carbon for the corn is taken from the atmosphere.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...

Re: Red seaweed supplementation reduces enteric methane by over 80% in beef steers

#209

Post by toiletfuneral »

beforeolives wrote: post #115
valgor wrote: post #93

Not eating cows or drinking cow milk reduces your carbon emissions from cows 100%. You actually don't need technology or a start up to solve this issue!

You do if you want it to scale to large numbers of people. Affordable lab-grown meat (when we have it) and intermediate solutions like the one in this article (if it's indeed viable) actually work for everybody. Even if we assume that veganism is an okay choice for one's health, trying to convince people to go vegan won't get you very far.

I agree, we've created a culture where even smallest of inconveniences is literally impossible for anyone. Anyway lets just finish destroying the planet because of bacon memes or whatever.
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