News Put down veggie burgers-Cows can solve the climate crisis

[Lou]

Put down that veggie burger. These farmers say their cows can solve the climate crisis | CNN

Danie Slabbert points toward the cattle that brought his farm back to life. Down the slope ahead of him, 500 black Drakensberger and mottled Nguni cows graze cheek by jowl.

www.cnn.com

I've actually done a little research on this topic and it does make sense. The one thing I am still trying to figure out is how much meat this kind of farming would result in if we ended feedlots. I've even asked Forest Nymph to figure it out. I've seen numbers between 3 and 33% of the current production levels. Which would mean to many omnis they could not afford beef. or at least not that much.

This reminds me of the Polyface farm that I read about in the Omnivore's Dilemna. If you are interested in this topic you can read a little more about it here.

Polyface Farm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"This farm is where Salatin developed and put into practice many of his most significant agricultural methods. These include direct marketing of meats and produce to consumers, pastured-poultry, grass-fed beef and the rotation method which makes his farm more like an ecological system than conventional farming. Polyface Farm operates a farm store on-site where consumers go to pick up their products."

Of course, there is nothing vegan about this. The animals are still slaughtered. But the concept of working with nature has great appeal to me.

 

[Nekodaiden]

Put down that veggie burger. These farmers say their cows can solve the climate crisis | CNN

Danie Slabbert points toward the cattle that brought his farm back to life. Down the slope ahead of him, 500 black Drakensberger and mottled Nguni cows graze cheek by jowl.

www.cnn.com

I've actually done a little research on this topic and it does make sense. The one thing I am still trying to figure out is how much meat this kind of farming would result in if we ended feedlots. I've even asked Forest Nymph to figure it out. I've seen numbers between 3 and 33% of the current production levels. Which would mean to many omnis they could not afford beef. or at least not that much.

This reminds me of the Polyface farm that I read about in the Omnivore's Dilemna. If you are interested in this topic you can read a little more about it here.

Polyface Farm - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"This farm is where Salatin developed and put into practice many of his most significant agricultural methods. These include direct marketing of meats and produce to consumers, pastured-poultry, grass-fed beef and the rotation method which makes his farm more like an ecological system than conventional farming. Polyface Farm operates a farm store on-site where consumers go to pick up their products."

Of course, there is nothing vegan about this. The animals are still slaughtered. But the concept of working with nature has great appeal to me.

Regarding the part I made bold: that's correct, there is nothing vegan about it, which is why I wonder why this is posted as "news".

The article contains a fair bit of propaganda as well (surprise surprise, it's corporate news!) with a take home message that is also false.

Animal manure is not needed to "enrich" soil. Neither are dung beetles. A number of green crops can be sown under the soil to add to it's fertility if it's to be used to farm, including the grass itself.

-Thus the cattle are not "replenishing the land" by eating grass. Dung isn't magical. It is just recycled grass that has gone through a cow's digestive system. It is no more useful to the soil than grass that is either cut and left to lay on the soil to degrade or grass that dies on that soil and biodegrades. Both manure and grass contain carbon, there is nothing special about manure in this respect to the soil.

Many farmers and scientists say that the chemical revolution came at a cost and they want to bring the soil back to life. They believe that living soil harnesses sustainable yields and will help the planet.

And to do that, they must combine cattle with crops.

Nope, no cattle necessary. Just stop using the sprays and start planting the crops needed, or sow crops like beans or mustard greens into the soil and plow them in as green crops to improve it.

I've done this in my own backyard. Every year for many many years I sprayed it with chemicals to kill the weeds. Now I've got lentils and potatoes growing there, and no manure was needed to get them to grow.

 

[Gaspard]

Of course, there is nothing vegan about this. The animals are still slaughtered. But the concept of working with nature has great appeal to me.

Well then I might remind you Apeal To Nature is a sophism.

 

[Vegan Dogs]

The article is full of unscientific nonsense. As the title states...just a few farmers trying to justify their business income.

First principle of independance of any views given is...missing. These people are earning from what they are promoting.

Dismissed as not valid.

If i got away with this kind of biased rubbish when i talk vegan pet foods...i would get nowhere....even when iprovide "peer reviewed scientific articles" I get rubbished ...so this article ? is total "xxxxxxx" apologies to bulls spouts of farmers earning from what they promote lol....hilarious if not tragic if anyone takes this seriously. This is not science...this is pseudo science spouts by non scientists of no credibility for reasons stated.

Pass on. REAL scientists would have put forward studies supporting such claims if they were valid...they are not...all peer reviewed professional scientific studies say the exact opposite of this nonsense.

ps without wasting my time providind reference links to real scientists saying the planet cannot be fed from pasture raised cattle...use some common sense please i suggest.

 

[Forest Nymph]

Uh this is complete and utter nonsense. Indigenous people in North America were complaining as far back as the 1500s about European ruminants destroying biodiversity. Obviously they didn't use the word biodiversity, but they meant native plants and animals. The reason there are no more elk in the Mattole Valley is due to cattle ranching.

Wild bison and antelope were "shot out" by cattle farmers. They didn't just disappear, they were driven away by the European cattle farmers, who competed with wildlife for grasslands.

These are the arguments that the grassfed people make, and those arguments have been roundly debunked by studies at both Harvard and Oxford. This is pseudo-science. It only "makes sense" if you haven't done any real research.

I won't argue against small particular areas being suitable to cattle farming. Maybe there are patches of South Africa where it's currently feasible. But this will be used as a blanket argument for grassfed cattle, which again is outdated and pseudo-science in the year 2020. Plants do NOT absorb enough CO2 to justify the amount of CO2e emissions released by cattle farming. Clearly, if this is being published in CNN it's nothing more than blanket-statement propaganda. If this was a Nat Geo in-depth article where they explained all this "cattle farming may be sustainable in very small amounts in very specific regions of the world" but this says some complete and utter BS and I honestly have an issue with the fact that you have no recent background in environmental science and you keep bringing up this topic like you have some personal reason. It's wrong. Just accept it.

 

[thinman]

Owl like to rest quietly whilst no one was watching.

 

[Forest Nymph]

Where I live are plenty of green fields with small number of cows and are grass fed except winter, we often drive through farm land, lots of corn and other crops.
Most beef in Canada comes from Alberta feed lots . . .

Not the green fields we see.

We do pass chicken sheds and never see outdoor chicken, I have visited someone who kept chickens for eggs and that was horrible.

I've always been moderate with eating meat, it's gross sometimes at the supermarket how people buy huge amounts of meat.

Grassfed has been debunked. It is not "sustainable." It's not. Cattle compete with wildlife for food, cattle farms are a major cause of global deforestation, and grasslands are not effective in mitigating the amount of CO2e emissions they produce, let alone absorb any excess already in existence. I live in an area with grassfed cattle too. One of the regions of my county is so overrun by cattle that they literally walk on the beach near the shore. Just because you see cattle freely walking around on grass doesn't mean it's ecologically sound. There are far too many cattle farms in the world, and in many places they exist in ecosystems where they don't even belong.

Nationwide shift to grassfed in the US would require even more cattle farms: Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population

In-depth study about greenhouse gas emissions and cattle farming https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fcrn_gnc_report.pdf

Look, the professor who teaches the introductory course to environmental science and management at my alma mater isn't vegan. He grew up as a hunter, in fact. But he is a wildlife biologist, he's not some biased *******, he has a scientific duty to teach the truth, and there are questions on his tests early in the semester and on the final exam about the impact of animal agriculture on the environment and the benefits of plant-based diets. This is especially essential to be taught to students early on in my county, which has a ton of "local grassfed" propaganda. We're way up in rural NorCal.

Even at my community college in LA, in our environmental science text book, there was a math table where you can compute the carbon footprint of your diet and animal products are the problem across the board.

This isn't a debate. It hasn't been a debate for a while, and I am honestly really tired of people pushing this stupid propaganda in mainstream media with these derpy headlines.

 

[thinman]

Presently, the moon appeared from behind a cloud and there, lying on the grass was hare.

 

[Vegan Dogs]

These small farms have existed in Ontario for generations, there are several small family farms still knocking about, just an observation.

look...if your comment is meant as it looks to support what is your unique situation for the rest of the world....it is very wrong is the point forest nymph made

what you are actually doing is boasting that you can do what you like and stuff everyone else because your lifestyle is not possible for 99 percent of the world population for food source

one has to quantify...to be sensible about advocating any lifestyle for the planet to others...there are 8 billion people nearly on this planet your little area of land in i forget where in the USA supported by plenty pasture land water and ok climate and never mind about the wild life of 1 million per year that the 1 percent pasture raised farm animals in the usa cause the deaths of...yes that is the number...1 million per year...killed shot wild life that is going extinct to protect the 1 percent only of usa pasure raised farm animals.

if this lifestyle were sustainable profitable for the USA alone then there would be more than just 1 percent of pasure raised farm animals. It is nonsense. it is not sustainable practical for even the usa food supplies let alone the rest of the planet.

fine...you like flying in private planes maybe too...the rest of the human population cannot...it is the same analogy for what you are talking about...1 percent of the USA farm animals can be raised on pasures killing 1 million per year wild life to protect them i add. The rest of the USA need factory farmed meat as does the rest of the world.

 

[Forest Nymph]

These small farms have existed in Ontario for generations, there are several small family farms still knocking about, just an observation.

Yeah these small farms have existed in Northern California for generations too. Their ancestors killed off the local wildlife to feed their cattle, killed off local indigenous culture, one tribe has all but disappeared and has been absorbed into other local tribes because of ruminant farmers, and those same farmers and ranchers replaced native vegetation with grasses. This makes zero difference to me that their grandpappy raised cows.

As an undergrad in enviro sci, I already had multiple studies collected on the impact of different foods - and the top five damaging foods are all animal products: cow being number one. Cow's cheese is the only non-meat in the top five, it's more damaging than a glass of milk because of the amount of milk required to make cheese. Things like goat's cheese are less harmful, as is limited quantities of eggs or milk (again, not cow's cheese, but milk).

Once I went to grad school, I learned even more devastating truths about what Europeans have done to the Earth in the past 500 years, because I also got some indigenous ecological knowledge and did more extensive studies on the history of cattle farming since the Middle Ages (back in the Middle Ages, when having a few cows wasn't destroying the planet we live on because there were significantly less of them). The environmental devastation we're living in and the harm to indigenous peoples on various parts of the Earth goes back further than 100 or even 150 years. It just increased exponentially with the industrial revolution.

Before 1900, there were already animals becoming endangered or going extinct. A lot of people who don't have a background in ecology or biology aren't aware of this fact. That's one of the reasons national parks and wildlife reserves were created in the early 20th century. Cattle ranching, hunting and fishing was already getting wildly out of control in the 1800s.

 

[Forest Nymph]

I also want to point out, FYI, that the only academic source cited in this article is from UC Davis, a California college well-known for promoting animal agriculture.

 

[Brian W]

I also want to point out, FYI, that the only academic source cited in this article is from UC Davis, a California college well-known for promoting animal agriculture.

Excellent point. Always check sources.

 

[thinman]

5 Proven Health Benefits of Milk

www.healthline.com

5 Ways That Drinking Milk Can Improve Your Health

 

[Brian W]

5 Proven Health Benefits of Milk

www.healthline.com

5 Ways That Drinking Milk Can Improve Your Health

There are other ways to get the same nutrition without the saturated fats. We don't need to breed cows.

 

[David3]

5 Proven Health Benefits of Milk

www.healthline.com

5 Ways That Drinking Milk Can Improve Your Health

Per the peer-reviewed medical journal, "The Lancet", about 68% of the world's population is lactose-intolerant: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(17)30154-1/fulltext . It doesn't make sense to recommend a beverage that most of the world's population has trouble digesting.
.

 

[thinman]

The Ayurvedic View on Drinking Milk | Maharishi AyurVeda

www.mapi.com

 

[Brian W]

The Ayurvedic View on Drinking Milk | Maharishi AyurVeda

www.mapi.com

Alternative medicine with its roots in religion is hardly proof of anything.

 

[silva]

Through the years I have succumbed to eating dairy and every single time would get a huge surge of mucus in my lungs, and my sinuses. Choking coughs, hacking, blowing my nose. I've never had digestive issues from dairy though, even though my mother said she was lactose intolerant.
And....my joints swell and ache

No reason for dairy from other species, and never for anyone but babies. Case closed

 

[thinman]

Alternative medicine with its roots in religion is hardly proof of anything.

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. Genesis1:29

Just threw that in coz such practitioners are vegetarian, I go more for Chinese medicine if needed.

Actually I drink organic soy milk. Interesting that in the documentary "Game Changers" there was that segment on erections during sleep. I notice that if I switch back and forth with cow juice that when having some soy I wake up with very hard woodies, with cow juice not so hard and sometimes it seems not having a woody. When drinking the soy (2 cups a day, one is chocolate) I get very hard during the night, I notice when waking during the night.

 

[Brian W]

Just threw that in coz such practitioners are vegetarian, I go more for Chinese medicine if needed.

Actually I drink organic soy milk. Interesting that in the documentary "Game Changers" there was that segment on erections during sleep. I notice that if I switch back and forth with cow juice that when having some soy I wake up with very hard woodies, with cow juice not so hard and sometimes it seems not having a woody. When drinking the soy (2 cups a day, one is chocolate) I get very hard during the night, I notice when waking during the night.

Sorry, I misunderstood your motives. Yeah blood flow is good with a vegan diet and there are some unfortunate/fortunate side effects (depending on how you look at it) because of increased flow. In so many ways I feel like I'm in my early twenties, even though I am 55.