WILearned
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Do Cows really worsen the Environment?
🕑 Added 2021-02-28 07:10:47 +0000 UTCI've gotten really interested in this topic of cows' effect on the environment lately. I remember watching Cowspiracy a while back and just being blown away by the numbers. I remember finishing watching that and just thinking "Oof, the planet is doomed."
Then I met Peter Ballerstedt a couple years back and he made a lot of really great points about how Cows are actually beneficial to the planet. I mulled on that information for a long while, wanting to make a video but putting a lot of pressure on myself to make it perfect cause I thought it was a really important topic. So I took the noble path of procrastinating on it until I forgot about it and just recently got back into it.
Anyhow, here's some things I've discovered so far: (Also, feel free to add any comments, questions, or point out things I might have missed. I want to make sure my understanding is solid from all angles before posting any sort of video.)
Marginal Land vs. Arable Land - Can’t make food? Use cow. 🐄
Many people ask why not use the land to grow food for humans?" Because you can't.
-Around 30% of land on the earth is agricultural land (useable for the purpose of making food, the rest is, from a food perspective, junk).
-Take 2/3rds of that that agricultural land. That is "marginal land."
- Marginal land is not suitable for growing crops for human consumption, due to soil quality or not enough water et cetera. So what can you do with it?
-You can have cows graze on the cellulose on this land (again, this land is not suitable for growing edible crops), and turn that cellulose into protein and various nutrients humans need.
Ruminant Upcycling - Cows turn junk into food. 🐄+🗑️=🥩
-33% of that agricultural land mentioned above can be used for crops. (Nice.) This is called "arable land."
-Though, for every 100 lbs. of human food that comes from crops on this land, 37 lbs. of byproducts are generated.(S)
-You have to dispose of these byproducts, most of them can be fed to cattle and turned into human edible food.
-For example, with baby corn, you have the edible portion (the “corn”) and the husk. There’s a lot of husk, and we can’t eat it. However, an adult large cow can consume 45-50 kilograms of these husks per day.(S)
-Worthless cellulose + Cow = Human Food
But, cows are taking our food. 👿🥨?
Let’s take a look at the United States.
-There are 750,000 ranches in the united states, about 50 cows per ranch.
-There are 1,400 feedlots in the united states.
-All cows spend the majority of their life on pasture, eating mostly grass. We can’t eat that.
-In the last 4 months of their life, they go off to get “finished,” where they may be fed grain, corn etc.
-Greater than 90% of what grain finished beef cattle eat is not in competition with human food supply.
Cows are taking all the water! 🐄👿💧!
-There’s a number floating around that just in the U.S. , livestock production consumes 34 trillion gallons of water per year. -What is not mentioned is how that 34 trillion number is calculated.
-That number includes what is called “green water.” Green water is rain.
-From Mekonnen & Hoekstra, 2010
-”98% of the water required for beef is the amount of water needed to grow feed, forage or grasses that cattle eat [over their lifetimes]. …In grazing systems [grass fed and grass finished], over 97% of the water related to feed … is predominately green water.” (S)
-Also, cows urinate.
-Does anyone say the biggest consumer of water is the wood industry? I bet it took a lot of rainwater to grow the tree for that wooden chair you’re sitting on.
Whatever, let’s get rid of animal agriculture XXX= ?
-First, the whole process of food production would be more inefficient because we couldn’t up cycle food byproducts by feeding them to a cow.
-Then, we can’t use the marginal land, and would have to focus on growing crops in the 1/3rd of agricultural land that is arable. That probably won’t be enough so…
-You’d have to plow grasslands, which contributes significantly to N20 and C20 emissions.(S)
-We would become more reliant on synthetic fertilizer.(S)
-Global manufacturing of ammonia accounts for 1.2% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions(S), 83% of ammonia production is for synthetic fertilizer.(S)
-The Haber-Bosch reaction, the main industrial process used today to produce ammonia for synthetic fertilizer literally emits more CO2 than any other chemical reaction.(S)
-This paper claims that as high as 7% of the total CO2 emissions on the planet could be eliminated by phasing out the Haber-Bosch process.
-The Haber-Bosch reaction, which runs at “temperatures around 500 °C and at pressures up to about 20 MPa, sucks up about 1% of the world’s total energy production.”(S)
-For now I won’t even get into the fact that tospoil, which we need to grow crops, is rapidly degrading …and that ruminants restore the topsoil.
To talk about methane (cow burps), you need to understand the Biogenic Carbon Cycle:
-Methane has stronger warming potential than CO2 so cow burp is bad, right? Well...
(1)Plants capture carbon from the atmosphere via photosynthesis
(2)Cows eat the plant, take that carbon.
(3)Cows burp out that carbon in the form of methane (remember methane is CH4 - Carbon, 4 Hydrogens)
(4) 10-12 years later, Methane is broken down back into carbon dioxide and water via hydroxyl oxidation.
(1) Plants capture that carbon from the atmosphere… the cycle repeats.
-These carbon molecules are the same molecules that were in the plant the Cow ate. It's a natural cycle.
-What this means is that a cow will add a certain amount of methane to the environment, but it will not increase. That is, as part of the biogenic carbon cycle, cows will not add additional methane to the environment if your herd size stays the same.
-Compare this to a car: The car burns fossil fuels, adds carbon to the air. The car is part of no cycle, so every time you are adding carbon to the air. Every time you drive your car, you will add additional carbon to the atmosphere. If the number of cars on the planet stay the same, they will still continue to add additional carbon to the atmosphere.
Comments
LeifP
have you seen this... https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Hey Maximiliano, - this is a good point I'll have to look into, I heard the "eating mostly grass" part from people in the United States so it's possible they were only referring to American practices. -I think the upcycling point is often overlooked when people talk about "just feed it to humans" - the nutrition you get from a cow who ate corn is going to be far higher than the nutrition a human would get from just eating the cow. -I might be missing your point on the water, but my understanding is that using greenwater isn't really an issue, but the real concern is when people take water from groundwater reserves to water things like almonds in California. Thank you,
Maximiliano Chiossi
I don't think I agree at all with the issue of "All cows spend the majority of their life on pasture, eating mostly grass". Last time I checked, in developed countries they are fed with rations, that contain corn, soy, and other stuff like that, but little to no grass. The problem is that if that is the case, humans can eat that corn, soy, and the rest directly, without the need to "pass them" through the cows. This would be not only faster, but also thermodynamically more efficient, in addition to being easier and requiring much, much less work. As for what you say about "green water", I don't know why that would be a problem. There's no such thing as waste water or such, so if you take any fresh water out of nature for something else, that can be a problem.
