Australian 'Super Seaweed' Supplement To Reduce Cattle Gas Emissions Wins $1 Million International Prize (abc.net.au) 72
SpamSlapper shares a report from The Australian Broadcasting Corporation: A company commercializing a CSIRO-developed, seaweed feed product, which slashes the amount of greenhouse gases cattle burp and fart into the atmosphere, has won a $1 million international prize for its work reshaping the food system. CSIRO-affiliated company Future Feed said it would use its Food Planet Prize winnings to create an international commercial fund to help First Nations communities generate income from cultivating and selling the seaweed.
Methane emissions from livestock make up around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and one cow produces on average as much gas emission as one car. "As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 28 times more potent in terms of global warming potential than carbon dioxide and lasts much longer in the atmosphere," the CSIRO said on its website. Future Feed director and CSIRO scientist Michael Battaglia said that when added to cattle feed, the product, which contains Australian "super seaweed" Asparagopsis, virtually eliminated methane from the animals' bodily emissions. "We know that just a handful [of the product] per animal per day, or 0.2 percent of their diet can virtually eliminate 99.9 percent of methane," Dr Battaglia said.
Methane emissions from livestock make up around 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and one cow produces on average as much gas emission as one car. "As a greenhouse gas, methane is about 28 times more potent in terms of global warming potential than carbon dioxide and lasts much longer in the atmosphere," the CSIRO said on its website. Future Feed director and CSIRO scientist Michael Battaglia said that when added to cattle feed, the product, which contains Australian "super seaweed" Asparagopsis, virtually eliminated methane from the animals' bodily emissions. "We know that just a handful [of the product] per animal per day, or 0.2 percent of their diet can virtually eliminate 99.9 percent of methane," Dr Battaglia said.
OK for human use too? (Score:4, Funny)
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You married a ruminant?
She's actually quite small compared to his mother.
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He basically called his wife a cow.
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Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:2)
Its weird that they have to come up with a solution to a problem that only exists for grain fed cattle. Grass fed animals do not produce nearly as much gas. Its the same for humans. Eating starchy foods like corn, beans, etc produce more gas than plants low in carbs like asparagus, almonds, and rutabaga. Considering the population growth of humans on this planet, isnt eating starchy foods going to amount to a lot of methane production as well?
Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:2)
At the end, you need a bit of grain to fatten them out.
While this adds to the emissions it is not a cause for concern.
Mucking about with animal food, however is very dangerous.
So we have potentially devastating effects of measures implemented to address a nothing burger.
And don't forget the elephant in the room. If people switch to eating properly, the world medical expenses will halve in a few years. The rainforest won't be converted to arable land for palm oil, bio fuels and grains.
LCHF in combination wit
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LCHF... Low Carbs, High Fructose?
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Considering the population growth of humans on this planet, isnt eating starchy foods going to amount to a lot of methane production as well?
The digestive process for ruminants is much different than humans.
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Only about 1/3* of humans actually produce methane[1] - the process is dependent on a specific class of microbe (methanogenic archaea) which *most* humans (about 65%-75%)* don't have in their guts (but cows do). Bovine digestive systems also spend a lot more time fermenting, so you get a lot more methane even compared to what you get from humans who do host methanogens in their guts.
The long fermentation time also give
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I imagine the reason for grain fed livestock is volume. I think the general ratio for free range cattle is something like 2 acres per head. It's one of the reasons that cows are a pretty inefficient source of protein (as opposed to pigs, which can basically eat anything). In the olden days, only the wealthy ate beef. The poor either ate chicken, pork or mutton (the latter from older sheep that had outlived any other particular usefulness).
To provide the amount of beef that most Westerners are accustomed to
Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost all beef in Australia is grass-fed.
They might get some grain briefly for fattening before going to market. But it is nothing like in the US.
https://theneffkitchen.com.au/... [theneffkitchen.com.au]
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Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:3, Interesting)
First, the seaweed is just a supplement/additive to normal feed. I can't find what proportion it is fed at, but it mustn't be much.
Second, most ranchers already supplement with a mineral mix, and the major component is salt.
Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:5, Funny)
HE READ THE SUMMARY! GET HIM!
Re: Ok, so what's the downside? (Score:3)
Yeah, anyone who doesn't know about salt licks should probably fuck off from this conversation immediately. I can see the cattle using it when they are pastured in the field closest to my work... It's pink.
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Many salt water plants and animals, have methods to extract a lot of salt from their systems. Seaweed and Salt Water fish, are not necessarily excessively salty after they have been cleaned up and processed.
It it is increased in sodium this being a supplement to the diet, I expect you can just lower the sodium in its other foods.
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I imagine, being seaweed 'n' all, that salt intake is going to increase dramatically. In cattle this is going to increase risk of salt toxicity, is it not?
These cows aren't going to live long enough for them to worry about an increase in bovine heart attacks.
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Actually, most life of all kinds has an internal salinity very similar to seawater - almost as though we all evolved from the same early sea-dwelling organisms whose biochemistry was tuned for that saline environment.
Marine and coastal life tends to have more robust processes to prevent excess salt from accumulating in their systems, while land-dwellers tend to be better at holding on to the salt they have, but the "optimal level" maintained internally tends not to be that different.
If your seafood tastes s
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You can even tear down and replace all the non-green buildings (her idea not mine)
There is a lot of language about upgrading buildings in the GND, but zip about demolishing them. So I think that yes, this is your "idea" and yes, you are a lying fuckwit.
And hey, guess what, upgrading all those buildings will also generate jobs and capital for the economy - enough to overcome the costs. Which is exactly how the original New Deal worked. You should try reading history sometime (or reading anything more substantial than GOP propaganda, really).
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If you think the green new deal would have only coat $900Billion, I have a bridge for sale you could use to charge tolls to raise said $900 Billion. You obviously did not read the plan very well. Its closer to $900 Trillion. You can even tear down and replace all the non-green buildings (her idea not mine) in Manhattan for $900 Billion. That idiot suggested as just one component, tear down EVERY non-green building and rebuild it from the ground up. A single building can easily cost $500 million to do. And where are we going to landfill all this demolition rubble when we level the entire country?
The reason I specified this project, is the $900 billion dollar price tag estimate would have only been for Project Cow Fart.
Not to be confused with Project Cow Burp, which would be another $900 billion.
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So you are opposed to paying 900 billion dollars, on projects that could help save trillions of dollars in the future.
Just in my small local area. Climate Change, has created harsher weather, that isn't common to my area, every year, we have crews doing major repair on a county highway, because these heavy rainstorms make a near by stream erode large chunks of land undercutting the roadway making it dangerous to drive. Costing our small community a lot of money to fix this problem for the safety of all th
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9/11 over 3000 lives were lost. Our nation for a little bit was unified and supportive on finding and getting back at a clear enemy. Today Covid is killing 3000 lives a day but there isn't a clear enemy, so a good portion of the population is just disregarding it and its seriousness.
So you are in support of human warmongering to continue in perpetuity as a "unified" justification for a planet to waste trillions upon trillions pitting humans against each other?
The only thing "clear" after thousands of years of pointless warmongering fighting over Yours and Mine, is questioning why the fuck we NEED a clear enemy to ignorantly stand in unity behind. From healing the planet to discovering new ones, just imagine where the entire human race would be if the last few hundred years were not wa
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Funny how one attack and everybody comes together, but have the same number of people (more, actually) die day after day for weeks on end and all we hear is, "Muh freedoms!" or "It's a hoax!" or "It's not that big a deal".
The same people who are now resisting common sense to wear a mask for a few minutes while shopping are the same ones who wholeheartedly agreed we needed to invade Iraq despite the attackers bein
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This project was managed at the Federal level. The CSIRO is a government-funded organization and successive Australian governments have funded science research for over 100 years.
The difference is that, by and large, Australians are in favour of science and technology and less likely to believe in conspiracy theories.
Plus, the CSIRO enjoys a positive reputation amongst the Australian populace, having been responsible for multiple world-leading inventions including atomic absorption spectroscopy, polymer
Greenwash (Score:3)
If this becomes mainstream , that likely means large scale agricultural farming of seaweed (probable ecocide) the logistics cost of transporting feed to the cattle farms. To think a company won a 1 million award for a product with such a massive oversight does not fill me with confidence that humanity has the intelligence to get us out of this climate catastrophe. We need to end large scale agriculture not stick a band aid on it , creating more ecocide in the process.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Greenwash (Score:3, Insightful)
Intensive non monoculture organic gardening can produce dramatically more yield than growing monocultures in gigantic fields. Problem is, those monocultures are necessary for gross machine cultivation, which drastically reduces the labor involved. But if we don't drive ourselves to extinction (or even just technological collapse) first, we will make robots which solve that problem.
End result, the planet could sustainably support even more people than are here now, if we can just make it that far.
Delivered calories (Score:2)
Human dietary needs can be sustained through a rather small plot of land, with the appropriate techniques. But yield doesn't tell the whole story; the cost of harvesting can't be ignored. Cost per calories delivered matters. And row crops harvested on a massive scale by machines produce the cheapest calories to humans.
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Cost per calories delivered matters.
Calories aren't all that matters about food.
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Option 3 is to reduce poverty and increase the middle-class which naturally brings down birth rates. Evidence of this is Japan and much of Europe. Its the civilized and human alternative.
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Incorrect ,
there is more land allocated for cattle than used for human habitation.
Re:Greenwash Culling has already begun (Score:1)
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We need to end large scale agriculture not stick a band aid on it , creating more ecocide in the process.
K, you try your approach, and they'll try theirs, and we can see which of you is more successful.
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Whoddathunk? (Score:1)
Bravo, and congratulations!
Re: Whoddathunk? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clever (Score:1)
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I've heard the "and lasts much longer in the atmosphere" bit before as well with regards to Methane. I think it was in relation to melting permafrost releasing methane pockets into the atmosphere. I wonder where it originally came from.
Re: Methane does not last longer in the atmosphere (Score:2)
Most methane breaks down fairly quickly. However, it breaks down into water vapor and CO2, so that is nothing to celebrate.
Methane is less persistent than CO2 (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Methane is less persistent than CO2 (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, but do you know what happens to most atmospheric methane?
Wait for it....
It is converted to CO2.
Methane emissions are like the atmosphere getting kicked for a few decades, followed up by centuries of getting punched.
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Methane emissions are like the atmosphere getting kicked for a few decades, followed up by centuries of getting punched.
Haha, I love it--an analogy that appeals to my violence and my stupidity.
We don't really know about long term effectiveness (Score:2)
The way this works is that it disrupts the components in the cattle's microbiome that produce methane. This may put evolutionary pressure on those microbes and the effect might not last.
Scaling this up to a solution that can be fed to a significant fraction of the cows on the planet is an enormous undertaking. I've seen what algae farms look like, and they're large relative to the volume of freeze dried product you put out. Then there is environmental impact of freeze drying and shipping.
It probably mak
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The way this works is that it disrupts the components in the cattle's microbiome that produce methane. This may put evolutionary pressure on those microbes and the effect might not last.
Is that how it works? I haven't read the paper, not even when it was originally announced several years ago. If instead of eliminating methane production it opens up a pathway for some other bacteria to metabolize the methane on the spot, it won't disrupt the microbiome in cattle. I don't know which method of elimination is actually happening.
I've seen what algae farms look like, and they're large relative to the volume of freeze dried product you put out. Then there is environmental impact of freeze drying and shipping.
This extract is made from a seaweed, not algae. Seaweed requires considerably deeper water in which to grow. So much deeper that farming it en masse is done in th
I see (Score:3)
So all the carbon stays in the cows, so the steaks might burn on the grill.
Skepticism from Agriculture (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if this will get any traction in the news media as an "alternative to eating less meat" or if the same drumbeat of "meat is immoral" will prevail.
There is great skepticism in agriculture around the idea that cows are a huge impact to global warming, and a lot of it has to do with the messengers. Farmers are seeing the same people who have been anti agriculture (which sounds dumb, but believe me a nonzero portion of the population thinks we could all feed ourselves with backyard gardens) now just swap the attack line of the day out for "cows are a huge part of global warming!" They look back at the previous arguments against cattle farming, such as "we could feed the world if we didn't have cows" (starving people hasn't been a problem of supply for a long time) or "American beef eating is destroying the Amazon" (which ignores a very complex geopolitical situation where many nations, like china, want a more neutral producer of grains and are willing to fund Brazil to be that producer).
The anti-meat lobby in particular should be understood as similar to anti-abortion groups: they fundamentally believe meat eating is immoral, and want to see it reduced to the smallest extent possible if not outright ended. That's not to say meat isn't over-consumed or that if Asia got the same taste for meat the west has it wouldn't be a huge environmental strain... but the current anti-meat push seems more like these legacy groups trying to capitalize on a popular issue to push their agenda rather than actual concern for global warming.
All that said, if I'm wrong and everyone is genuine in their global warming concern this should be fantastic news. As long as the stuff isn't $1000 a gram it should be trivial for most cattle farmers to incorporate it. Feedlots are already using lots of mineral supplements mixed into feed daily, this is as simple as throwing one more five gallon bucket into the machine. On pasture many farmers also give mineral supplements, this could probably be worked in there too. In fact, that should make grazed cows pretty hefty carbon sinks.... ruminants have been shown to sequester large amounts of carbon in properly rotated pasture, as I understand it by promoting root growth and extending the healthy microbiome deeper into the soil with the extra air and moisture those roots bring. The question was always whether that outweighed the methane output, and the recent research has been somewhere between slightly more sequestration than methane impact to moderately less sequestration than methane impact. But if they don't make any methane then they're doing nothing but locking CO2 away. At least in existing natural grassland that is nothing but win from a CO2 perspective. In someplace like the Amazon not so much... really if you want environmental justice advocate tariffs on Brazil and other ag producers that are doing the ag equivalent of strip mining. American/Canadian and European farming is much, much more environmentally responsible.
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I don't give two figs about livestock but I do think society should move away from using real meat. The simple fact is that real meat is quite expensive and deeply subsidized. However, plant based replacements are far cheaper, can actually be more healthy, and lasts longer. Add on top of that the reduced land use, eliminating livestock health issues while enabling the possibility of total automation and you got a real winner. Removing the impact on the ecosystem is just icing on the cake.
Meat is obsolet
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Unfortunately, since those people mostly only have a tiny fraction of the per-capita consumption of the "Western" nations, eliminating that half of the world's population would only drop consumption by maybe 20-30%. And it wouldn't last long as Westerner's would colonize as soon as the fallout died down, increasing their population growth and wasteful consumption. We might not even wait that long, since the Western world would be inundated with all the fallout as well, so what's the difference, may as wel
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You think there are no white people in these areas?
That's racist.
There are very few places left on the planet that are ethnic monocultures.
Try harder troll.
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Kudos to Kinley. He deserves the award. Anything that brings down GHG has to be appreciated.
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Can't speak for the USA but IIRC, Australia started researching this in the 1980s, before the USA began a global policy of climate-change denial. So I'm wondering why it took 30 years to be approved.
If a cow farts in the forest? (Score:2)
That is the question.