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 energy efficiency of meat and dairy production is defined as the percentage of energy (caloric) inputs as feed effectively converted to animal product. An efficiency of 25% would mean 25% of calories in animal feed inputs were effectively converted to animal product; the remaining 75% would be lost during conversion.
All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.
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 are getting. If they respond by stopping eating meat, then great - not the best choice, but a step in the right direction. If they respond by stopping to care where their food comes from then not so great.
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.
That is a crazy high efficiency, when you think about it. A quarter of all food this animal receives through its entire life ends up as milk. The rest is used for growing cells, keeping it alive and warm, moving around.
Back of the napkin says that I've eaten my bodyweight in food in less than 2 months.
Without excrement from animals you need synthetic fertilizer, whose production causes massive production causes massive environmental damage eg emissions and algae bloom.
> 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.
Quite a bit. Most of the deforestation you are mentioning happens for monocrop cultivation, from which livestock consume (mostly) the leftovers. That's usually hidden in data by using total weight, but the reality is that 86% of the dry matter consumed by livestock are not edible by humans [1].
>All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Both are compatible. You can be against the Amazon deforestation and pro-reduction of emissions of current cattle. Most of the beef consumed in the US (~90%) is raised in the US.
> Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.
Ahhh... No, thanks. It will also be vastly worse for my health.
Cattle responsible for 15 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that humans cause."
It's the methane, chickens are much less damaging. The outsided damage cattle does is because if the biochemistry in the stomache, which this feed addresses (Lamb is terrible too, but less popular)
At the end of the day this is signalling. We all know that the best thing we can do is eat a local, veg-friendly (vegetarian/vegan) diet. That also doesn't mean that people are going to do it, or can. But at least it's one form of a step in the right direction.
War doesn't have to be waged and won in a single battle. Every little step helps if it truly reduces emissions.
Good questions. As someone who's enjoyed eating beef for most of my life, I feel compelled to recommend Impossible Burger "meat" as a legitimate alternative. No, it's not exactly the same, but it is delicious (unlike, say, Beyond Burgers, which taste to me like a failed experiment).
Thats an interesting question for sure. Would need to be calculated against the current energy needs, hopefully an increase in seaweed feed leads to a decrease in soy bean farming.
I'd rather eat the seaweed or soy directly, but this could be an improvement.
> How much could this reduce the total environmental food print of cattle?
Poore and Nemecek did a pretty comprehensive survey of the climate impact of different foods https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 in 2018. Their underlying data suggests that methane accounts for about 38% of the total CO2 equivalent impact of beef herds. So if this is true, beef would still be highly damaging, but materially improved over where it sits now.
I don't think it's fair to call this a mere distraction when you account for the sheer impact of methane on climate change. Quibbling about energy efficiency is besides the point. Play around with this - https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p1=45&...
Re "Amazon deforestation" — those lands haven't been deforested because of the western country's consumption of meat, they've been deforested because people are starving, and they need to put food on the table, and be lifted out of poverty.
And countries, such as Brazil, are only now doing what the western countries have been doing all throughout the 19th and the 20th century. I know this sounds terrible, but you have no right to demand that Brazil stops the deforestation, and in fact you have no sway either, because you are not buying the result of their agriculture anyway.
If western countries want the deforestation of the Amazon to stop, the cold, harsh reality is that they should subsidize the price for it.
---
As for making personal changes, if eating soy makes you feel any better, sure, do that, but stop shaming people for eating meat. Because in the large scheme of things, switching from meat to soy does mostly nothing for the environment.
The reason is that, going vegan, as an individual, only saves you a couple of $ in CO2 emissions per year. That's right. All of your efforts are only worth a couple of $ per year in CO2 emissions. And even if you think that's worth it, those emissions would be re-allocated to industry anyway.
Also, ironically, the behavior of people going green changes. If you have an electric car, for example, you might feel the need to ride it more, to make more trips. Because it's cheaper, and you've been a good citizen, you've earned it. And when that happens, and it does, your net emissions might not go as low as you'd think. Never mind that the subsidies for electric cars are yet again subsidies for the rich.
Go carless first, then we can talk about not eating meat ;-)
---
Real change will come from technological progress. It always came from technological progress. Remember whales? Whales were not saved by political activism, by individuals refusing to use whale oil. Whales were saved because cheap replacements for whale oil became available.
Ironically, renewable energy might not be very green at all. Maybe we should address the fact that solar panels are super inefficient, taking up massive land use, and their recycling is super expensive. Instead of investing more in nuclear energy, money is being diverted on solutions that may in fact be worse for the environment than cleaner fossil fuels (e.g. gas).
We are currently unable to replace fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives, because "renewable" energy isn't up to snuff, and because of nuclear-phobia, which prevents investments in nuclear power.
But sure, let's all eat soy, that will save the planet.
Cow burps and farts are methane, which is a enormously potent greenhouse gas. The energy- (and water-) intensiveness of eating beef is significant too, no argument there.
> All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
I think you're on the money. This is the equivalent of us wanting to keep driving around in 2.5ton SUVs by justifying to ourselves that it’s a hybrid
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.
This is a small and positive win it seems, why do many disgruntled ?
People get very passionate about our food source being the cause for climate change but really, what about the real ultimate more severe causes?
Fracking, mining, burning coal and oil ? Nuclear and renewables makes these things obsolete, but we still need food.
Edit: Want to add I’m fully onboard with the east less meat crowd and minimising deforestation, but I can’t help feel we should focus on the bigger, more high value targets first? Worrying about food production feels more like a distraction ?
There's no need to focus on just one. However people are passionate about advocating for eating a plant based diet because it is so easy, relatively speaking. Getting fracking to stop at even just one site is a lot of work, but getting more and more people to stop eating animal products, because it's directly within their own control, is simple. Many are also passionate about it because there are other benefits that come with it - no longer needing to kill sentient beings (you probably wouldn't eat your dog, so why eat a pig who is of equal awareness and intelligence?) and as long as it's based on whole foods, eating plant based comes with a lot of health benefits compared to how most people's diet is (in the West or Western influenced - e.g. a lot of Koreans and Chinese have hugely increased their animal product consumption and started including animal products they didn't previously eat like cow milk cheese).
So again, we can work on more than one issue, but why there is strong passion behind diet is that it's a very direct action and comes with other positives.
Livestock agriculture is the leading driver of climate change AND biodiversity loss. It emits more GHG than all forms of transportation combined. Additionally, if we would let nature reclaim the land that's currently used for livestock agriculture, it has the potential to capture >100% of the CO2 emissions until 2050.
How is this any different from hybrid vehicles still burning FF? Yes, it makes it slightly better, but eating certain protein sources is a choice, whereas transportation infrastructure is an economically-limited choice.
Animal ag still causes:
- climate change
- inefficient allocation of calories and fresh water
- water, air, and ground pollution (lakes of poo, runoff into rivers)
- pandemic and other zoonotic disease accelerated evolution (many animals in close proximity, including humans and occasionally wild animals)
- increased food prices
- usual also including animal welfare and cruelty
It seems like putting a happy face on coal, smoking, asbestos, or DDT
If given two choices them being "stuck in discussions 'cause major perfect changes on a global scale are really hard and complicated to implement" and "anything that helps even if just a bit is welcome, incrementally we go further" I would pick the latter any day. The software patch culture in modern society should work better than unreal expectations with the type of education the average human being gets around the world.
Australia is not going to ban meat consumption any time soon. It is a positive step that they are at least bothering to try and mitigate huge potential sources of GHG emissions.
All or nothing thinking has obviously not worked for addressing climate issues. Thus - you see all these more pragmatic solutions popping up.
You're not going to convince even 10% of the global population to convert to veganism in the next 10 years. I agree it would be great but the real world needs to be dealt with.
That's great and all, but it's fighting symptoms, not the underlying problem.
The underlying problem isn't cows emitting methane, the problem is too many people indoctrinated with the idea of eating all the animals, all the time. The amount of land, energy and ressources in general spent on producing way too many animals for eating is unreasonable.
"... the problem is too many people indoctrinated with the idea of eating all the animals, all the time."
The problem is there are too many people. Even if a person isn't eating meat, they still use a vast amount of other resources, especially if they adhere to a modern lifestyle.
Marketing (and industry/capitalism behind it) created the demand which is now used as an excuse for producers to use more and more animals (which as we know creates more pollution and land/ecosystem destruction).
Even if they fix the gas emissions, there's still the manure problem. For example, in this tiny country of the Netherlands, in 2019 "the Dutch dairy farming sector produced 280.6 million kg of nitrogen excretions" [1]. That's _just_ the dairy sector, and _just_ the nitrogen component of the manure.
We can apply human ingenuity for decades to remedy symptoms, or we can instead decide that we have been moving in a fundamentally wrong direction in terms of using animals as consumable resources.
That's not to say that humans cannot get benefits from animals (such as free roaming chickens aerating and fertilizing land, goats grazing and clearing brush, etc.).
Even without cattle we arguably rely on an "unreasonable" amount of resources. It's a moot and subjective point, more people means more encroachment and destruction of land, more resource extraction and more emissions. We all have an environmental footprint, one which is larger in the West; now multiply it.
I still think that there is a simple explanation for the 'reduction in methane' effect, and that the plan has some severe loopholes
Raising cattle in a regular diet of seaweed for its entire life and expecting it to grow correctly is still uncharted territory. Are we pushing cow metabolism to the brink of famine?
Wild seaweeds are harvested and sold for several purposes:
1) To make agar-agar. A substance that is used (among other purposes) as a gut filler without calories in slimming diets and treatments for obesity.
2) As source of medical compounds. Seaweed, specially the red ones, have evolved a battery of chemical weapons to survive its many grazers. They are used to make antibiotics
So, the lack of methane emission... is maybe because the gut microorganisms that released methane have been killed after giving the cattle a cocktail of antibiotics?.
The problem is that cattle needs special gut microorganisms for surviving. They can not process cellulose into sugar without it. How can be (competitively) raised a cow that can not eat plants anymore? In a diet of fish or meat?
This is a serious point that should be explored, in my opinion. If this cows don't grow muscle fast enough (and will produce milk with a funny flavor), all the project is doomed from the start.
On the other hand there is an environmental impact to take in mind, seaweed is related with fisheries and marine production. Kelp grows really fast, but I had seen experiments removing other species of brown seaweed in some tidal rocks and it seems that it takes decades to return.
As seaweed has an economical value, either the farmers buy it at a higher price, or import if from the country that cultures million tons of seaweed each year (China). They could have problems to assure enough cheap seaweed for the cattle.
The cow meat raised in seaweed would be more expensive and with more waste and fuel consumption. Would increase also the dependency of third countries and external policies (that sometimes are not specially nature friendly), and wouldn't be so much sustainable as we think.
I was very skeptical whether this is scalable as up to two percent of the cows feed needs to be replaced with the sea weed and we simply do not produce sea weed at scale yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552
The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae per day. ~ 106 Million metric tons per year.
In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].
I would argue that the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions is to get rid of cattle. (Which is hard, I love beef and cheese).
Maybe “seaweed beef and dairy” will be a premium product but I doubt it will solve the problem on scale.
Does methane have any known biological function out in the wild, perhaps with microbes putting it to use? It's hard to imagine such a large quantity of energy going unused by some organism out there. Is it pretty stable at room temperature and would just sit around forever? What became of all the methane all the various livestock have produced through the millennia?
It also should increase productivity on all ruminants in theory.
I like this bit -
"While analysing the gas samples using gas chromatography (GC) there was a repeating scenario of a 10-20% methane reduction, until suddenly one sample showed no methane! At first it was assumed that there was a problem with the GC so the test was repeated, and when the same result was replicated we had our moment of discovery. Those results have reproduced on every subsequent test and the red seaweed Asparagopsis is the star performer."
Hold up its the disgusting things we're feeding cattle that's contributing to their immense environmental impact? HUH.
Maybe someday we'll realize that raising them in feedlots on 100% processed packaged food made fromthings like how they forage in nature is most of the problem as well, and if you raise them in distributed networks so they interact with their ecosystem instead of trampling it, and then not have to ship them 1000 miles to consumers, their emissions, and environmental impact DROPS.
Maybe then we'll start putting the chain together, and realize that its not beef itself, but rather the high fat, low vitamin, amalgamation of beef we now usually consume, due to these practices is what is ACTUALLY unhealthy for us to eat.
It is amazing the levels people go to in order to make something evil less evil. Just stop eating cow and drinking milk! Get some tofu and oatmilk. Many problems are solved, not just the methane emissions problem.
This is so awesome, I've been waiting to see if this would make it into commercial feed. This could be a big help if it can quickly become more of a standard.
Of course Big Meat and Big Dairy love pushing this narrative. These kind of "solution" let's them continue do what they are doing without fundamentally solving the problem.
It's like making more efficient internal combution engines. Sure, it's marginally better, but what it really does is distract from the real problem, which is: Burning fossil fuels. And the same is true for this seaweed cattle.
And this is assuming that it does really reduce methane emissions by 80%, which I wouldn't believe until it has been empirically demonstrated on a large scale.
[+] [-] seanwilson|5 years ago|reply
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 energy efficiency of meat and dairy production is defined as the percentage of energy (caloric) inputs as feed effectively converted to animal product. An efficiency of 25% would mean 25% of calories in animal feed inputs were effectively converted to animal product; the remaining 75% would be lost during conversion.
> Whole milk: 24%
> Beef: 1.9%
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-efficiency-of-meat...
All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.
[+] [-] jazzabeanie|5 years ago|reply
It's not as simple as eating meat = bad, but that's the message most people are getting. If they respond by stopping eating meat, then great - not the best choice, but a step in the right direction. If they respond by stopping to care where their food comes from then not so great.
[+] [-] pkphilip|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] chii|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wodenokoto|5 years ago|reply
That is a crazy high efficiency, when you think about it. A quarter of all food this animal receives through its entire life ends up as milk. The rest is used for growing cells, keeping it alive and warm, moving around.
Back of the napkin says that I've eaten my bodyweight in food in less than 2 months.
[+] [-] scns|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tassl|5 years ago|reply
Quite a bit. Most of the deforestation you are mentioning happens for monocrop cultivation, from which livestock consume (mostly) the leftovers. That's usually hidden in data by using total weight, but the reality is that 86% of the dry matter consumed by livestock are not edible by humans [1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22119...
>All improvements are good, but I'd like to know if this is more than a distraction to make people feel better about continuing to demand products they know are damaging the environment (e.g. Amazon deforestation).
Both are compatible. You can be against the Amazon deforestation and pro-reduction of emissions of current cattle. Most of the beef consumed in the US (~90%) is raised in the US.
> Industrial farmed animals aren't eating grass, they're eating crops like soy. If you find soy milk and soy-based meat alternatives decent for example, consider eating those directly instead of products from soy-fed cows - it'll be vastly better for the environment with seaweed or not.
Ahhh... No, thanks. It will also be vastly worse for my health.
[+] [-] tlarkworthy|5 years ago|reply
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150401084157.h...
Cattle responsible for 15 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that humans cause."
It's the methane, chickens are much less damaging. The outsided damage cattle does is because if the biochemistry in the stomache, which this feed addresses (Lamb is terrible too, but less popular)
[+] [-] cik|5 years ago|reply
War doesn't have to be waged and won in a single battle. Every little step helps if it truly reduces emissions.
[+] [-] chrisweekly|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svrtknst|5 years ago|reply
I'd rather eat the seaweed or soy directly, but this could be an improvement.
[+] [-] crazycanuck|5 years ago|reply
Poore and Nemecek did a pretty comprehensive survey of the climate impact of different foods https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987 in 2018. Their underlying data suggests that methane accounts for about 38% of the total CO2 equivalent impact of beef herds. So if this is true, beef would still be highly damaging, but materially improved over where it sits now.
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|5 years ago|reply
I would but: all the meat alternatives here in Tasmania are more expensive than beef!
The only thing that gets a pass is tofu at $8.00 a kg, which is competitive with chicken and imported Basa.
[+] [-] gridlockd|5 years ago|reply
A cow can turn soy into highly nutritious and palatable food, so the resource usage is justified.
Having said that, if you want to eat like an antique slave, be my guest. Have a pint of Soylent(tm), it’s on me.
[+] [-] lucioperca|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_user|5 years ago|reply
And countries, such as Brazil, are only now doing what the western countries have been doing all throughout the 19th and the 20th century. I know this sounds terrible, but you have no right to demand that Brazil stops the deforestation, and in fact you have no sway either, because you are not buying the result of their agriculture anyway.
If western countries want the deforestation of the Amazon to stop, the cold, harsh reality is that they should subsidize the price for it.
---
As for making personal changes, if eating soy makes you feel any better, sure, do that, but stop shaming people for eating meat. Because in the large scheme of things, switching from meat to soy does mostly nothing for the environment.
The reason is that, going vegan, as an individual, only saves you a couple of $ in CO2 emissions per year. That's right. All of your efforts are only worth a couple of $ per year in CO2 emissions. And even if you think that's worth it, those emissions would be re-allocated to industry anyway.
Also, ironically, the behavior of people going green changes. If you have an electric car, for example, you might feel the need to ride it more, to make more trips. Because it's cheaper, and you've been a good citizen, you've earned it. And when that happens, and it does, your net emissions might not go as low as you'd think. Never mind that the subsidies for electric cars are yet again subsidies for the rich.
Go carless first, then we can talk about not eating meat ;-)
---
Real change will come from technological progress. It always came from technological progress. Remember whales? Whales were not saved by political activism, by individuals refusing to use whale oil. Whales were saved because cheap replacements for whale oil became available.
Ironically, renewable energy might not be very green at all. Maybe we should address the fact that solar panels are super inefficient, taking up massive land use, and their recycling is super expensive. Instead of investing more in nuclear energy, money is being diverted on solutions that may in fact be worse for the environment than cleaner fossil fuels (e.g. gas).
We are currently unable to replace fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives, because "renewable" energy isn't up to snuff, and because of nuclear-phobia, which prevents investments in nuclear power.
But sure, let's all eat soy, that will save the planet.
[+] [-] gamblor956|5 years ago|reply
Most deforestation is to grow crops. Cows generally eat grass unless they have no other options.
[+] [-] glangdale|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryndbfsrw|5 years ago|reply
I think you're on the money. This is the equivalent of us wanting to keep driving around in 2.5ton SUVs by justifying to ourselves that it’s a hybrid
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] headmelted|5 years ago|reply
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 the great climate war mom?"
"I made cow farts less stinky."
"But seriously what did you do?"
groan
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
People get very passionate about our food source being the cause for climate change but really, what about the real ultimate more severe causes?
Fracking, mining, burning coal and oil ? Nuclear and renewables makes these things obsolete, but we still need food.
Edit: Want to add I’m fully onboard with the east less meat crowd and minimising deforestation, but I can’t help feel we should focus on the bigger, more high value targets first? Worrying about food production feels more like a distraction ?
[+] [-] triyambakam|5 years ago|reply
So again, we can work on more than one issue, but why there is strong passion behind diet is that it's a very direct action and comes with other positives.
[+] [-] shafyy|5 years ago|reply
Livestock agriculture is the leading driver of climate change AND biodiversity loss. It emits more GHG than all forms of transportation combined. Additionally, if we would let nature reclaim the land that's currently used for livestock agriculture, it has the potential to capture >100% of the CO2 emissions until 2050.
Some recommended reading:
https://blog.yeticheese.com/eating-local-has-tiny-environmen...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00603-4
https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6392/987
Edit: This seaweed won't even start solving this problem.
[+] [-] jamil7|5 years ago|reply
> but I can’t help feel we should focus on the bigger, more high value targets first?
I don't buy this line of thinking as it makes the assumption that a society can't tackle or talk about multiple issues at once.
[+] [-] hexbinencoded|5 years ago|reply
Animal ag still causes:
- climate change
- inefficient allocation of calories and fresh water
- water, air, and ground pollution (lakes of poo, runoff into rivers)
- pandemic and other zoonotic disease accelerated evolution (many animals in close proximity, including humans and occasionally wild animals)
- increased food prices
- usual also including animal welfare and cruelty
It seems like putting a happy face on coal, smoking, asbestos, or DDT
[+] [-] caiobegotti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bparsons|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|5 years ago|reply
You're not going to convince even 10% of the global population to convert to veganism in the next 10 years. I agree it would be great but the real world needs to be dealt with.
[+] [-] czottmann|5 years ago|reply
The underlying problem isn't cows emitting methane, the problem is too many people indoctrinated with the idea of eating all the animals, all the time. The amount of land, energy and ressources in general spent on producing way too many animals for eating is unreasonable.
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
The problem is there are too many people. Even if a person isn't eating meat, they still use a vast amount of other resources, especially if they adhere to a modern lifestyle.
[+] [-] blunte|5 years ago|reply
Marketing (and industry/capitalism behind it) created the demand which is now used as an excuse for producers to use more and more animals (which as we know creates more pollution and land/ecosystem destruction).
Even if they fix the gas emissions, there's still the manure problem. For example, in this tiny country of the Netherlands, in 2019 "the Dutch dairy farming sector produced 280.6 million kg of nitrogen excretions" [1]. That's _just_ the dairy sector, and _just_ the nitrogen component of the manure.
We can apply human ingenuity for decades to remedy symptoms, or we can instead decide that we have been moving in a fundamentally wrong direction in terms of using animals as consumable resources.
That's not to say that humans cannot get benefits from animals (such as free roaming chickens aerating and fertilizing land, goats grazing and clearing brush, etc.).
[+] [-] tchalla|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slothtrop|5 years ago|reply
Fixed it for you.
Even without cattle we arguably rely on an "unreasonable" amount of resources. It's a moot and subjective point, more people means more encroachment and destruction of land, more resource extraction and more emissions. We all have an environmental footprint, one which is larger in the West; now multiply it.
[+] [-] pvaldes|5 years ago|reply
Raising cattle in a regular diet of seaweed for its entire life and expecting it to grow correctly is still uncharted territory. Are we pushing cow metabolism to the brink of famine?
Wild seaweeds are harvested and sold for several purposes:
1) To make agar-agar. A substance that is used (among other purposes) as a gut filler without calories in slimming diets and treatments for obesity.
2) As source of medical compounds. Seaweed, specially the red ones, have evolved a battery of chemical weapons to survive its many grazers. They are used to make antibiotics
So, the lack of methane emission... is maybe because the gut microorganisms that released methane have been killed after giving the cattle a cocktail of antibiotics?.
The problem is that cattle needs special gut microorganisms for surviving. They can not process cellulose into sugar without it. How can be (competitively) raised a cow that can not eat plants anymore? In a diet of fish or meat?
This is a serious point that should be explored, in my opinion. If this cows don't grow muscle fast enough (and will produce milk with a funny flavor), all the project is doomed from the start.
On the other hand there is an environmental impact to take in mind, seaweed is related with fisheries and marine production. Kelp grows really fast, but I had seen experiments removing other species of brown seaweed in some tidal rocks and it seems that it takes decades to return.
As seaweed has an economical value, either the farmers buy it at a higher price, or import if from the country that cultures million tons of seaweed each year (China). They could have problems to assure enough cheap seaweed for the cattle.
The cow meat raised in seaweed would be more expensive and with more waste and fuel consumption. Would increase also the dependency of third countries and external policies (that sometimes are not specially nature friendly), and wouldn't be so much sustainable as we think.
[+] [-] leipert|5 years ago|reply
I was very skeptical whether this is scalable as up to two percent of the cows feed needs to be replaced with the sea weed and we simply do not produce sea weed at scale yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552
The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae per day. ~ 106 Million metric tons per year.
In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].
I would argue that the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions is to get rid of cattle. (Which is hard, I love beef and cheese).
Maybe “seaweed beef and dairy” will be a premium product but I doubt it will solve the problem on scale.
[0]: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf, page 24, table 7
[+] [-] dkdbejwi383|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jxramos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
Methane is high in calories so it should intuitively increase the productivity, which they currently think is true but unproven -
https://research.csiro.au/futurefeed/faq/
It also should increase productivity on all ruminants in theory.
I like this bit -
"While analysing the gas samples using gas chromatography (GC) there was a repeating scenario of a 10-20% methane reduction, until suddenly one sample showed no methane! At first it was assumed that there was a problem with the GC so the test was repeated, and when the same result was replicated we had our moment of discovery. Those results have reproduced on every subsequent test and the red seaweed Asparagopsis is the star performer."
[+] [-] dkrudy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jonplackett|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparrc|5 years ago|reply
Hard to imagine that they are actually planning to roll this out on a large scale with that level of investment.
[+] [-] valgor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shafyy|5 years ago|reply
It's like making more efficient internal combution engines. Sure, it's marginally better, but what it really does is distract from the real problem, which is: Burning fossil fuels. And the same is true for this seaweed cattle.
And this is assuming that it does really reduce methane emissions by 80%, which I wouldn't believe until it has been empirically demonstrated on a large scale.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] happyjack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajharrison|5 years ago|reply
Anyways, go vegan.