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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

#231

Post by tomnipotent »

asciimo wrote: post #227
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 may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time. Absolutely surprised. Do you have science to back up this claim? ... That goes back more more than a couple decades?

Per capita red meat consumption has been declining in the U.S. for decades from ~130lbs/yr in 1960 to 112lbs in 2020. At the same time, chicken went from 34lbs/yr to 113lbs so overall meat consumption has actually increased.

https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/about-the-industry/st...

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

#232

Post by LetThereBeLight »

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…

Let's not forget that all the grain those cattle are eating were grown in nitrogen fixed soil produced via fossil fuels. Nor that roughly 40% of the world's crops are used to feed cattle. Or the other detrimental environmental effects to the land such as feedlot runoff that pollute streams and rivers. The environmental impact of raising cattle is by no means something we should ignore.

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

#233

Post by hinkley »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #222
hinkley wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).…

The Haber process which you mentioned is really key here. It uses a lot of natural gas - more interesting than cow methane might be using nitrogen fixing bacteria or crop rotation (legumes) to reduce it's usage.

I'm not sure what it does to their methane output, but can't you feed legumes straight to cows? You definitely can to chickens and pigs.

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

#234

Post by PeterisP »

xphilter wrote: post #148
jhayward wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coal and oil come from carbon captured during the Carboniferous period, before the evolution of species of bacteria and fungi that could digest the lignin in plants. Coal and oil formation is not being fed by plant life today. The carbon in plants is recycled rather quickly in to the ecosphere.

Fair. So then I would augment my comment to focus just on soil production in the wild. Not all of the plant debris is being composted. It gets buried too.

IMHO any plant debris that gets buried in the soil is - in the long term - also composted, only its breakdown is slower.

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

#236

Post by PeterisP »

bookmarkable wrote: post #23
j-pb wrote: post #6

I guess everything helps, but we put so much effort into the problems with easy solutions, that could be invested into the difficult stuff. Livestock contributes to 15% of all greenhouse gasses. But the solution is easy, cheap, and only midly inconvenient. Going vegan. This has the added benefit of protecting threatened ecosystems in the rainforrest and seas. We could then spend that energy on the difficult stuff. Fa…

The world is not going to go vegan. Humans eat meat. No greenhouse argument will ever change this. This is worthwhile research, as is cultured meat and other options. Evolving the tech of raising and cultivating animal protein to eat is important work.

IMHO price (or price/"performance") is a serious consideration for the actual food choices of many people, much more in practice than what they would say it is.

Currently, meat substitutes are effectively a premium product - however, if (when?) they would be available at half the price of animal protein, then I believe meat consumption worldwide would decrease a lot even if people's preferences would not change. Cultural norms would shift eventually, but that's slow, and price changes can happen and affect change much faster.

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

#237

Post by jillesvangurp »

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 are half right about that. It also matters how these gases are released. Intensive cattle farming involves a lot of CO2 and methane that has more to do with supply chain of the food for the animals than it has to do with the animals themselves. Think soil erosion due to tilling (which emits massive amounts of C02 & methane), fertilizers, pesticides, etc. needed to compensate for that. Transporting of the animal food and the rest of the supply chain. And getting rid of the excrement and methane.

Compare that with regenerative farming where if done right, the cattle actually captures more carbon in the soil than is released as co2 or methane. Even just having animals not taking a leak where they dump their manure makes a difference. Amonia is nasty and gets created when you mix the two. That's why cattle farms smell so nasty: it's the urine and manure mixing when they shouldn't.

Same steak but completely different from a sustainability point of view. Expensive but tasty. Might actually scale if farmers were incentivized to try this. There's no shortage of land to restore.

Feeding cattle seaweed might help a little. But maybe let's not intensively farm oceans to feed land animals. That sounds like a net loss.

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

#238

Post by brnt »

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…

Even more precise: gasses in the atmosphere convert and stabilize at an equilibrium concentration, depending on their marginal rate of production versus conversion. Therefore, an increased production van lead to an increased equilibrium level.

Also biomass is a better proxy, and here the presence of cattle has increased significantly.

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

#239

Post by vkou »

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 may be surprised to learn that cattle herd size has remained relatively stable over time.

It hasn't, though. You need to be comparing pre-industrial herd sizes (Which fed less than a billion people) to modern herd sizes (Which feed nearly 8 billion people.)

The per-capita beef consumption was not 8 times larger back then.

It's true that there were large herds of wild ruminants wandering around, hundreds of years ago. However, the increase in the biomass of domesticated cattle vastly overshadows the decrease in biomass of all wild land animals.

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

#240

Post by Maursault »

sandworm101 wrote: post #134
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…

There are more pounds of live cattle today than there ever were wild bison. There are close to 94,000,000 cows in the US right now.

I apologize in advance for my bad math. Please adujust and correct if any have the inclination. Thank you.

My Google results say 94.4M cows in the US. Assume a quarter of those are milk cows, leaving 70.8M beef cattle. Assume a ratio of 1:1 cows to calves, leaving 35.4M adult cows for slaughter. 1000lbs. of cow will will average around 430 pounds of retail cuts. So, with 1/4 lb. servings, one cow will feed 1720 people. Contrary to beef sellers' belief that eating red meat every day is good, one should not consume more than 3 portions of beef a week if one hopes to live to old age. Population of US is 328.2M people, assuming they all eat precisely maximum amount of beef a week to remain healthy, that is about 51.2B servings (let's say 1.4 lb. each serving) of beef a year consumed, which is about 7.4M cows per year. There appears to be a needless surplus of 28M head of cattle.

So many things bother me about the cattle industry. The horror of it, the cruelty, the waste, the destruction of wild habitat, the environmental impact, the greed, and the bullshit idea that we as a society need to do anything to preserve the way of life for rich ranchers (such as the Bundy's, et al).

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