Cows That Burp Less Methane to Be Bred 366
Canadian scientists are breeding a type of cow that burps less, in an attempt to reduce greenhouse gases. Cows are responsible for almost 75% of total methane emissions, mostly coming from burps. Stephen Moore, professor of agricultural, food and nutritional science at the University of Alberta, hopes the refined bovines will produce 25 per cent less methane. Nancy Hirshberg, spokesman for Stonyfield Farm says, "If every US dairy farmer reduced emissions by 12 per cent it would be equal to about half a million cars being taken off the road."
Grass (Score:5, Informative)
Or you could have cows eat grass [google.com] which does the same thing, and has nutritional benefits for the consumer. I know, it's radical.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Or put them back on their natural grazing diet. They only output so much gas because they're not eating what they naturally would.
That would, in turn, force us to raise and eat fewer cows.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Furthermore. Most animals don't have the 4 stomach system using anaerobic bacterial digestion. That's what makes the methane.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
There have been animals around on earth a long time
Not all animals are ruminants. Ruminants release methane due to enteric fermentation. Ruminants are a relatively development on the evolutionary tree. Furthermore, our large population of them in modern times is sustained only through high density industrial agriculture. For example, probably the greatest natural landscape for large grazing herd animals today are the Serengeti and Masai Mara plains. Combined, they only support 1.5 million wildebeest. Even the massive bison herds that once spread across the entire great plains numbered at only 60 million. We raise, what, 1.3 billion cattle?
History has never seen anywhere close to as many ruminants on the surface of the earth as we have today. Thank modern industrial agriculture for that.
Feed them what nature intended (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy alternative (Score:3, Informative)
1) As people have already said, there weren't *nearly* as many cows around before we started making them a major part of our diet
2) The cows that *were* around ate grass. Feeding cows corn, as farmers tend to do, fattens them up but gives them much more gas.
Re:Eat Mor Chikin? (Score:3, Informative)
Attention grammar nazis: In case you're not from the U.S., or don't have one located near you, "Eat Mor Chikin" is an advertising slogan [chick-fil-a.com] used by Chick-Fil-A, a chain of quick-service restaurants that specialize in chicken sandwiches, in their advertising and commercials, which feature cows, who, of course, can't spell.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Eat Mor Chikin? (Score:1, Informative)
Actually, your Wikipedia link says pork is white meat.
Bad article. This entire subject is FUD. (Score:2, Informative)
Cows do not produce 75% of total methane emissions. It goes
1. Wetlands
2. Rice fields
3. Ruminants
You don't here a lot about altering or doing away with 1 or 2. The oceans are also major contributors. Lets keep those too.
A major point that is never mentioned in these articles is that all of the methane generated by ruminants is from carbon that is already in the carbon cycle. The half a million cars that are "displaced" are generating their methane from carbon previously sequestered in fossil fuels. Additionally the current American cattle herd is around 100 million and declining. About were some estimates put the bison herd in the 1800s.
There is plenty wrong with our current system of agriculture. The environmental aspect of it can be dealt with by more informed farmers and consumers. We need to move away from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and corn culture and towards sustainable local farms. The article states that animals should be fed a higher energy diet (i.e. corn). The energy costs of producing that diet are astronomical as compared to a grass fed diet. The number one energy cost in producing a lb of corn is the Natural gas it takes to make the synthetic fertilizer. Guess what, the extraction of natural gas is an major methane contributor.
Lets put our focus on producing our food in a more sensible manner. People intuitively know that cows as a methane source is ridiculous hence the jokes. There are so many bigger environmental and ethical problems that we need to tackle in our food industry. Its these half truths get people side tracked away from the real issues. Go meet your farmer and make sure he's raising your food in a manner that you deem acceptable.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easy alternative (Score:1, Informative)
Thing is that cows are carbon neutral.
Irrelevant -- not all carbon is created equal. False -- growing grain for cattle consumption is not carbon neutral.
And carbon methane only has a half-life in the atmosphere of about 7 years
That's on the low end of estimates, and really, that's not a good argument. Particulate matter in the atmosphere has an even shorter atmospheric residence than methane, but would you like the world if we removed all particulate control filters from power plants and vehicles? Methane is raising our total forcing. If we stopped emitting it, the problem would go away faster than the problem of CO2 forcing if we stopped emitting it, but that doesn't change the fact that it still is causing problems as long as we keep emitting it.
Ice core records show that the abundance of CH4 in the atmosphere has ranged from around 400ppb during glacial highs to around 700ppb during interglacials during the last 650,000 years. Do you know what it is now? As of 2005, it was approximately 1,774 ppb. That's about 30% of the forcing of CO2.
Why is that we seem to have such a hard time divorcing the science from the politics and pseudoscience?
Why is it that people who denounce elements of global warming as pseudoscience have near universally not read a single peer-reviewed paper on the topics that they denounce? If you want to "focus more on science and less on politics" -- read the science!
Re:Less but... (Score:3, Informative)
Just because they burp less doesn't necessarily mean they produce less methane... "We made a cow that burps less. However, it farts more."
If you read the article it states that it's not that they just "burp less" it's that they actually produce less methane.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:5, Informative)
Thing is that cows are carbon neutral.
Not when they're fed corn that was shipped, using fossil fuels, halfway across the country to get there. (Let's not even go into the fact that this corn was produced using artificial fertilizer, derived from petroleum, and sprayed with pesticide--you guessed it, more petroleum. And the fact that the cow itself, after being processed, will be shipped halfway across the country again to reach your dinner plate--fossil fuels.) Also, cows are ruminants: they're supposed to eat grass. Grass is free, and its energy comes from the sun--not long-dead dinosaurs.
If all farmers farmed more locally and closer to organic practices, cows would be a lot closer to being carbon-neutral.
Problem already solved (Score:3, Informative)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/06/08/omega-3s-in-a-cows-diet-provide-a-health-boost%E2%80%94to-the-atmosphere/ [discovermagazine.com]
So other than making lots of money from selling a low-methane breed, I really don't see the point, we already have the solution to the methane problem, we were just feeding them wrong.
Forgetting feedlots? (Score:2, Informative)
High methane from cows is a symptom of the problem, which is that most beef is from feedlots. Not only is the huge amount of waste produced by the feedlots a large methane source, but also the fields that are used to grow the feed (mostly corn). This article (print version: http://www.motherearthnews.com/print-article.aspx?id=150244 [motherearthnews.com]) explains that conventional feedlot agriculture emits carbon dioxide and methane both on the fields and the feedlots, while rotational intensive grazing sequesters carbon and emits much less methane.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:3, Informative)
You got the sixty million right, but are an order of magnitude out on the current population of cows. Here's my comment to Salon magazine 2 years ago on this subject: :35 lb up to numbers above
Here are my calculations, with references, courtesy of google and an hour of my time. Thanks also to the USDA and PBS.
Size of national herd, all cows and calves: 106 million.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-07-20-2007.txt [cornell.edu]
Number on feed (multiplying their GHG impact): 11 million.
(in short, they are only on feed near The End.)
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/cofd0907.txt [usda.gov]
Number of bison they ecologically replaced, bison that ALSO produced GHGs:
60 million.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay8.html [pbs.org]
OK, so because of the 11 million on feed, the 106 million cows have the GHG impact of a good 120 million grass-fed, so they have double the "natural" level produced by the bison?
But wait! Or, rather, weight:
Bull bison (37% of herd): 1800-2500 lb.
Cow bison (45%): 900-1200 lb.
Calves (18%)
sources:
Herd composition:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-541X(198907)53%3A3%3C593%3ACOBPEW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R [jstor.org]
Weight:
http://www.gunpowderbison.com/Kids%20Corner [gunpowderbison.com]
So the TONNAGE of natural ruminants on the North American plains can be calculated from the above numbers (giving calves half the average of cow and bull) to be an "average bison" weight of 1559 lb. Times 60M, is 46.8 megatons.
The US herd is lighter because it's mostly younger than a natural one; we slaughter cows at 2 years, bison live 20, so a higher proportion of the total is calves.
My first reference also notes that just 33M of that national herd is over 500 lbs. Conservatively giving them all the full adult weight (from wikipedia, "cattle") halfway between 1300 and 1900 lb, and the average of the other 74M that are under 500lb, conservatively, at 400 lb...we get a total tonnage of beef at 41.2 megtons.
Bottom line: there are fewer tons of beef now than there were of bison in the 19th century. Beef eater's disturbance of the natural methane balance is zero, indeed it may be NEGATIVE.
Maybe not; 41.2MT is only 12% less than 46.8MT and my whole-hour of research may have missed a few things. Also, the amplification of GHG output by the 10% of the herd that's on feed is a factor. I'm willing to call it even, although my weight numbers were quite conservative.
So, there's no GHG impact at ALL, compared to the original, natural state. At least not in North America -- but what was the former methane production everywhere that are now cattle ranches? Most ranching is done where there was an equivalent animal before. And even swamps and rainforests have quite a bit of decomposition that produces methane.
Until you do that part of the calc - the previous GHG load from the former "natural" environment, you don't have a calculation, you have HALF a calculation.
Re:Easy alternative (Score:3, Informative)
Modern agriculture (ie Fertilisers, pesticides, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, antibiotics, posilac, et al.) is far "greener" than organic farming will ever be. I know this because I work in Agricultural research.
Modern fertilizers and pesitcides enable greater crop yeilds/acre, meaning less acres need to be planted, meaning less acres need to be driven by tractors both harvesting & planting. Organic production actually requires you pull out the tractor and appy fertilizer and pesticides more frequently (Organic doesn't say you can't, it only says you can't use specific ones becuase without both no one would be able to grow enough organic corn to feed their organic chickens) becuase it forces you to use fertilizers and pesticides that don't work as well. It also forbids the use of roundup ready crops that require a fraction of the fertilizer and pesitcide applications and can be planted without tilling the soil.
Tilling the soil is the single largest reason for nutrient leaching from soil into surface water when it rains. The tilling breaks up the soil, airing it out, and making it easier for rain to wash away important nutrients, thus requiring greater applications of fertilizers (See where I'm going with all of this?).
CAFOs enable producers to manage larger heards more efficiently, with a greater attention to detail. Some one that works with weanling pigs all day every day will have a better eye for which pigs are struggling than a farmer that only spends part of their day with the weanling pigs, and the rest of the day spread across the growers, finishers, boars, 1st and 2nd parity gilts, sows, and the farrowing house. It's akin a doctor specializing in one particular field of medicine instead of forcing them all to be General Practitioners.
Posilac (trade name for recombinant bovine somatotropin or rBST) enables farmers to use less cow, and as a result less feed, to produce the same volume of milk. That kind of math shouldn't really need explanation or defending, but the organic movement forbids the use of posilac, despite it being molecularly identical to the naturally occuring bovine somatotropin normally found in milk. Milk from these cows contain BST at the same concentration and cannot be differentiate from milk from cows not injected with rBST. The fact that tests have been done where rBST and purified 'normal' BST have been injected into human tissue and proved to be too dissimilar to interact with the receptors for human sotmatotropin seems not to faze anyone for some reason.
Sub-theraputic use of antibiotics both prevents clinical, as well as sub-clinical infections and is primarily used in animals predisposed to infections due to stage of development (weaning comes first to mind). They also prevent the need to use much larger doses of theraputic antibiotics, and help animals grow more efficiently as less of the energy and nutrients in animal feed go toward growing bacterial populations and more goes toward growing the host animal. None of the data coming out of the EU in the wake of their complete ban of sub-theraputic antibiotics has shown any reduction in the prevalence or distribution of antibiotic resistance genes. My belief is that's because most people don't interact with farm animals on a regular basis, but they do go to doctors offices and hospitals where antibiotics are abused to a shameful degree (and all the bugs there can colonize humans, where many bugs that colonize pigs or chickens cannot colonize humans. The internal environment is too dissimilar.)
However, since I'm one of only a handful of people on
Please let my pessimism be wrong for once.