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

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

#181

Post by lizknope »

nradov wrote: post #176
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 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…

There are around 300 million vegetarians in India. That is close to the population of the United States. Whatever health problems you think they may suffer from it isn't the ability to procreate.

I gave up meat 6 years ago. All of my non subtle clinically diagnosed health problems went away.

I did it because I couldn't think of killing animals anymore and the wonderful side effects of obesity, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure all went away.

I'm never touching meat again.

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

#182

Post by wartijn_ »

jamil7 wrote: post #140
jazzabeanie wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 72% of all deforestation in Queensland and 94% in the Great Barrier Reef catchment areas is a direct result of land clearing for beef production. Edit: One source was missing. https://www.wilderness.org.au/images/resources/Beef-Deforest... https://www.…

Can you point out from where in that report you've got those numbers? I couldn't find them.

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

#183

Post by floren »

jamil7 wrote: post #174
floren wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's kind of a barrier to entry for the layman because feedlots are generally out of the way, and they're not usually in the business of giving tours--they're busy places with lots of heavy machinery running around. It's a fascinating business, but you have to be ready for 6.5 day work weeks :)

One way to learn a bit more is from the actual industry's magazines, like Feedstuffs, which focuses particularly on livestock feed. Here's an article picked from the top of their beef nutrition section: https://www.feedstuffs.com/nutrition-health/byproduct-feeds-...

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

#184

Post by lxmorj »

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.

Any plan that relies on self-imposed austerity measures of billions of people from disparate groups is doomed to failure. We need to quietly change the math behind the scenes by internalizing externalities legally - long enough for green tech to get enough investment dollars to be cheaper than dirty tech even if those rules change later.

This is mostly already happened with solar / wind power, though we need some improvements on battery tech to get grid-scale adoption. The levelized cost of wind is lower than any alternative, and solar is getting close. I’m sure the situation has improved in the last two years, but here is a report from 2018:

https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o...

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

#185

Post by bluntfang »

zucked wrote: post #169
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You at least see how hypocritical that is, right? The Western world got to fulfill our gluttonous desires -- now, when it comes time for the developing world to get their turn at the table, we wag our fingers and say "Sorry, that's bad for the planet!"

I don't see the hypocrisy. We did stuff one way. then we learned new stuff about how we do stuff, so we decided that we should change. It's fairly normal for an individual to grow and learn from their mistakes, why do you have to call "hypocrite" when it's time for the society to grow?

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

#186

Post by bluntfang »

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…

>Do you really think those people don't know it's possible to live healthily as vegetarians?

Yes! I actually do think that! Anecdotally, almost every time someone, especially the 50+ crowd, finds out I eat a vegan diet they ask "are you getting enough protein?!". My answer is usually "do you think about how much protein you're eating right now?" and the answer is always no, people don't think about their diets period, even the easy tracking stuff like macronutrient intake. Given the obesity epidemic going on in the US right now, many people don't know how to live healthily as omnivores.

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

#187

Post by danimal88 »

pkphilip wrote: post #71
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…

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.…

The regenerative ag conversation is really overhyped. Its a way to justified the continuation of an industry plagued by environmental issues and ethical issues. The numbers don't work out in terms of how much land would be needed to effectively use regenerative ag at anything close to current meat consumption and there is still no agreement on whether it actually even works, mostly just meat industry advocates sitting behind flimsy science with a friendly sounding non profit sitting in front of the meat groups.

The idea that we need to slaughter cattle to regenerate land is pretty flawed if nothing more because if this was actually effective, we could simply reintroduce bison and other animals that are natural to a given local and not need to constantly pump meat out of that same land. Meat production will slowly decline as consumers have more ethical, environmentally friendly, cost effective, healthy, and savory enough alternatives. Impossible and Beyond are the mvp and this is only going to accelerate. Especially if we are eventually start to price GHG.

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

#188

Post by TeMPOraL »

nradov wrote: post #176
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 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…

I post this hesitantly because it's probably some subtle bias (possibly selection/observation bias), but: the vegetarians and vegans I know personally, they all look borderline unhealthy and seem to lack energy in a subtle ways. Also, my wife sometimes watches cooking vloggers, and I can usually tell at a glance whether the particular tuber is a vegan/vegetarian blogger or not: the ones who are also give this impression of health problems and lethargy. This observation makes both of us hesitant to go vegetarian (though we try to reduce the amount of meat we consume).

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

#189

Post by doytch »

wartijn_ wrote: post #182
jamil7 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 72% of all deforestation in Queensland and 94% in the Great Barrier Reef catchment areas is a direct result of land clearing for beef production. Edit: One source was missing. https://www.wilderness.org.au/images/resources/Beef-Deforest... https://www.…

Can you point out from where in that report you've got those numbers? I couldn't find them.

Page 7: Beef production is the leading cause of deforestation and land clearing in Australia. A recent GIS analysis undertaken by the Wilderness Society found that 73% of all deforestation and land clearing in Queensland is linked to beef production.16 This figure is likely to be an underestimate of the beef industry’s contribution due to the conservative methods used throughout the study. That result is consistent with the Queensland Government’s official tree‐cover reports which regularly attribute over 90% of the state’s forest and bushland destruction to replacement by ‘pasture.’17 Similarly, Australian government data ascribed 72% of national deforestation in 2016 to grazing.18 There are numerous scientific articles that identify cattle grazing as a key driver of deforestation, particularly in Queensland which has the largest cattle numbers in Australia.19

---

I will note, I've noticed people sometimes saying "well, you can't grow anything else on that land!" as a defense for animal agriculture. Maybe /we/ can't grow any /crops/, but nature can thrive in such spaces. I think given what we know about Climate Change, it should go without saying that we shouldn't bulldoze every forest and bushland and farm on it in any way we can.

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

#190

Post by bagacrap »

dsirola wrote: post #165
headmelted wrote: post #3

Worth noting that methane is up to 84 times as damaging as CO2 in the atmosphere upon release. ( https://www.edf.org/climate/methane-other-important-greenhou... ) That means that (ironically I guess) this has the potential to be just about the biggest bang-for-buck weapon we have against climate change in the next decade. I don't envy the researchers having to explain it to their kids later though. "What'd you do in…

It's true that methane has a much greater impact, but only in the short term. Long term, CO2 is much more dangerous. The methane that cow produces is recycled as it circulates through the atmosphere -> plants -> cows -> atmosphere cycle. Fossil fuel burning on the other hand is not. It's released from the ground and there's no way for it to get back there. Nothing is ever black and white and to think that eliminating…

CO2 from fossil fuels can also be reabsorbed by plants. If you grow a forest, chop it down, bury the logs, then it's underground again. Although, not sure why you need it to be underground as long as it's not in the air.
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