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In reply to the discussion: Do you enjoy beef? You're directly contributing to climate change. Beef is the new SUV. [View all]TexasProgresive
(12,157 posts)There are about 150 species of ruminants, some domestic and others wild. All produce and emit methane gas in the process of breaking down fibrous plant matter in the rumen. I think that if we got rid of all domestic livestock; cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, reindeer and yaks that the empty grass lands would be filled with wild ruminants such as the various type of deer, antelope etc. I don't like that much of the beef in this country is fed high concentrations of corn, but I believe the higher production of methane is coming from grass (high in fiber) that must be fermented in the rumen for the animal to utilize it as food.
Off topic: Feed lot practices are what has lead to e.coli that is resistant to our stomach acids. Heavy feeding of grain concentrates causes the rumen to be in a chronic state of lactic acidosis. Over crowding in feed lots causes the cattle to ingest fecal matter which will contain e.coli. The e.coli evolves to survive in an acid environment and the result is an e.coli that can survive the stomach acids to end up in the small gut where it can pour toxins directly into the blood stream. That is bad, but I think feeding high concentrations of grain generates less CH4 than grass. The production of grain for feed will have a higher carbon foot print from fossil fuel use than grain in the form of CO2 and CO.
Cattle and methane: More complicated than first meets the (rib) eye
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/wahlquistMethane.html
By Asa Wahlquist
Posted on 17 August 2012
Filed under Agriculture, Food
A lot of people, amongst them Britain's Lord Stern and Sir Paul McCartney, argue that eating less meat could help save the planet. But there is a growing body of evidence that it is not simply a case of less meat means less heat.
Most of the world's farmland is grassland. For reasons of rainfall, soil type or topography it can't be ploughed and it should never be irrigated. The only way to produce food from grasslands is to graze ruminantsanimals like cows, sheep and goatson it. Most mammals, and that includes humans, cannot digest grass. But ruminants possess several compartments in their stomachs. One, the rumen, houses microbes that can digest grass. The problem is that this microbial digestive process also produces the greenhouse gas methane as a by-product.
Methane is a potent, if short-lived greenhouse gas. It is given a global warming potential rating of 25 times that of carbon dioxide, though it has a lifetime of 9 to 12 years in the atmosphere, compared with carbon dioxide which can last more than 100.
Some sectors of the community have leapt on this information, arguing that eating less beef, or not eating it at all, would be better for the environment. But this raises several questions: what happens to the grasslands that are no longer grazed?