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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

#211

Post by DubiousPusher »

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.

Yeah, this is a bit what I was getting at. But all I know about cattle comes from my family's cattle background in Eastern Montana and the high valleys of the SouthWest corner of the state. In both those regions, many cows are raised in naturally occurring pastures, eating native grasses, save oats which are sown as a cover crop.

However, my impression this is very unique and produces much less pounds of beef per acre than most places. The cattle breeds there are leaner and half wild. I'm hesitant to speak more definitively because I don't know specific statistics on how ranches in other regions differ. My impression is that the difference are substantial.

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

#212

Post by krrrh »

Doji wrote: post #175
greenshackle2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally our planet was once host to wild ruminants like Buffalo Not at anywhere near the density you find in modern agriculture. Domesticated cattle and pigs alone are 15x the biomass of all wild mammals combined. Wild ruminants are somewhat insignificant compared to that. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506

This article measures current biomass distribution. Given that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar changes, I'm not surprised by the result. Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no incre…

> I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well.

As you stated, this doesn’t need to be the case since a lot productivity gains come down to more frequent harvesting. The natural lifespan (not average due to low survival rates in the first year) of a Bison can be up to 18-20 years, while a typical beef cow is slaughtered at 18 months. Ruffed grouse have an average lifespan of 1.5 years or so, but can make it up to 7 years or more. Chickens are typically slaughtered at 8 weeks.

As for crops, large swathes of them replaced forest which were larger pools of biomass that still cycled into the atmosphere through decay and fire.

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

#214

Post by coryrc »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #158
yboris wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's that American aim of being #1 ("exceptional") in ways like "ethically good" or "world leader taking the world into a better future"? Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"?

> Why is it now "well, others are doing bad things, we may as well pollute the shit of the planet too"? Why is the burden on me? That's never been explained by all the climate religionists out there. When the west does something it's bad. When everyone else does it, they get a pass? We already did the industrial revolution. We already went through the long process. They have free wins - they don't need to design new…

For how much we spend, we can easily afford (aka minimal change to our lifestyle) to make electricity carbon-free in five years of we wanted to. We could charge trucking their true cost of road destruction and it would save us money and reduce CO2. We could allow dense housing neighborhoods (not force, just allow!)

There are many things we could which even save money, make people some happier, and help the climate... but we don't.

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

#215

Post by Doji »

belorn wrote: post #198
Doji wrote: post #125

A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…

The start of the carbon cycle is one which I have found to be very unpopular to discuss, and it has a direct connection to methane in the atmosphere. Artificial fertilizers is produce through a process which takes in natural gas as its primary ingredient. The process is also a major source for methane leaks, with a large variance in claimed contribution for the global methane pollution. For a large portion of the glo…

This is a very insightful comment, thank you!

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

#216

Post by krrrh »

eigenket wrote: post #199
Doji wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article measures current biomass distribution. Given that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar changes, I'm not surprised by the result. Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no incre…

60 million to 30 thousand is a rounding error, there are 1.5 billion cattle in the world.

Bison have never roamed outside of North America, so let’s look at local cattle numbers instead of worldwide populations if we want to compare.

There are 94.4 million cattle in the United States and around 4.5 million in Canada according to a quick web search.

A full grown Bison weighs 1600kg, and the average weight of a steer at slaughter is 600kg or so.

There was likely a dip between the virtual wiping out of Bison in the 19th century and the re-establishment of large herds of ruminants across the Great Plains via ranching, but in terms of biomass I think we can at least say that they are in the same ballpark.

(this puts aside the extirpation of antelope and deer species from large areas of their previous ranges. There were for instance 10 million elk in North America prior to European contact compared to 1 million today at 400-500kg fully grown).

(edit: according to statista your headline number of 1.5 billion is also off: “ The global cattle population amounted to about 989.03 million head in 2019, down from over one billion cattle in 2014.” — https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop... )

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

#217

Post by hinkley »

Doji wrote: post #125

A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…

> You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral.

All of modern agriculture and food science has been about turning inedible calories into edible ones (think: cooking meat with wood, baking bread). There is almost no food you eat that isn't touched by fossil fuels at some point in the process.

The cows are eating grain raised using anhydrous ammonia (made with natural gas) and processed using diesel/gas/electricity to be edible before the cow ever sees it. That cow is 'eating' all of those fossil fuels. Only silvopasture cows wouldn't be, but have methane emissions from those cows been studied?

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

#218

Post by josefresco »

Doji wrote: post #125

A common misconception which I frequently see when this topic arises is the failure to distinguish carbon cycles and one-way carbon emission. You exhale carbon dioxide. However, this carbon dioxide comes from the carbon in the food you eat, and the food you eat obtained it from the atmosphere. Thus, it's a cycle. As a system (ignoring food transportation, deforestation, etc.) it's effectively carbon neutral. By contr…

> distract from the root cause

It's all hands on deck dude. Do you think we have the luxury to focus on just the worst offender? People (society) can work on more than one problem at-a-time, it's not a "distraction" it's doing anything and everything we can to prevent extinction of our species. Meat consumption and the environmental damage caused by it's infrastructure AND fossil fuel usage need to be addressed, not one or the other.

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

#219

Post by Doji »

eigenket wrote: post #199
Doji wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article measures current biomass distribution. Given that Bison herds in North America has reduced from 60 million to 30 thousand, and I suspect other species have seen similar changes, I'm not surprised by the result. Also as a point of nuance, I'd like to say that I'm sure we have actually increased biomass density. If we had not, our farms wouldn't be doing their jobs very well. I'm not trying to say no incre…

60 million to 30 thousand is a rounding error, there are 1.5 billion cattle in the world.

You're comparing north america to the world, and the American Bison are only one species while cattle have displaced many species.

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

#220

Post by zackees »

titzer wrote: post #150
graeme wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that from cow herd size increases or other causes? OP’s point was that with q fixed herd size the amount of methane accumulating in an atmosphere is stable. Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world.

> Lakes don’t grow and grow and consume the world. No, they don't usually grow forever, that's true. But floods happen, and that's bad. Last time methane was this high it was millions of years ago, and Earth had no ice caps. We have already flooded the atmosphere with methane, and the consequences of this will take decades, if not centuries, to play out. Contrary to our current instant-gratification dopamine loops of…

Going to chime in here - ice ages cause extinctions, not warm ages.

We are in the knifes edge of too cold. A little extra green house gas to buffer out the ice age is a good thing.

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