I cannot accept the idea that grain fed, feed lot beef is more environmentally sound, despite the higher methane produced by grass fed animals.

These things do not exist in a vacume, and only looking at the methane produced is not the whole picture.

I feel that the soil disturbance, erosion, land clearing and the double /triple handling involved in grain based meat production create more problems than they solve, and encourages a centalised way of thinking about food production which i just dont feel comfortable with. The recent high fuel costs also make this system unsustainable.

The ideal meat and dairy production system for Australia (in my opinion) is for meat and milk to be produced, processed and consumed in the same area using best practice agriculture for the region. For example in the wheat belt, a lucern and minimum till grain based system, in the semi arid areas a well managed rangeland and fodder tree system, and in the high rainfall and coastal areas a permanent pasture based system.

The meat could then be slaughtered and processed locally, at the nearest regional center, providing more work, minimising transport costs (and minimising animal stress) and keeping money and workers in the local economy.

So from an animal rights perspective, from an economic perspective and a holistic environmental perspective i feel there is no comparison between an intensive, high input, high stress and low quality grain based meat production system and a high quality, low input, low stress, minimum input grass based system, despite this one negative environmental aspect. (methane)

(BTW, Im a ‘nat rat’ (natural resource manager), I live and work in the lower south east of South Australia. My wife manages a dairy farm and has a degree in Ag. production, just in case anyone is wondering what i have based my rather strong opinions on!)

I think there is a mistake some animal liberation activists make in addressing this question: to assume that it is necessary to halt all meat consumption. Obviously this is what vegetarian activists want, but I haven’t yet heard a convincing case that eating meat must stop altogether to have sustainable farming. In fact, most of our grain, vegetable and fruit farming remains far from sustainable.

As I’ve argued on James Woodford’s REAL DIRT blog, it would be counterproductive to environmentalists to adopt pro-vegetarian argumentation holus bolus because we would lose a large part of our potential audience. It’s hard enough to convince people that they need to take any radical environmental action, let alone become vegetarian as well.

Nevertheless, as I started out with, this is very useful information here nonetheless. Overall, Australians ought to eat far less meat to be sustainable and I think it’s just a matter of finding explainable, rational ways to bring that about. “planned downsizing of the livestock sector” is more or less what I think, too.

For the US, “Food-Miles and Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the US” Weber and Scott Matthews show that transport emissions are about 11% of total life-cycle emissions of food
in the US — and this is with huge distances involved in US supply chains.

Feedlots are not pleasant, especially when it is hot. People are doing estimates now on heat stress mortality increases in cattle due to increased heat. If you’ve ever smelt a marathon runner in melt down on a hot day (ketosis), you’ll understand what can happen, and the bigger the animal, the worse the problem.

Much of the soy and maize grown for grain fed beef is irrigated, cropping also requires more pest control and more soil disturbance than permanent pasture, adding to its overall environmental impact.

Huge amounts of fertilizer go to waste every year in both the dairy and piggery industry. The liquid waste is often pumped onto a sacrifice paddock, rather than spread on crops, thus becoming a pollutant rather than an asset.

Tighter nutrient cycling on farm, more use of slow release fertilizers and better use of agricultural waste products and crop residue would make a big difference.

Grass fed beef is a much more humane option too. The animals are able to behave naturally, so whether beef or pigs you get less vice behaviour.
Feed lot conditions are not pleasant. Add to that the fact that grass fed beef is much more healthy than grain fed due to high levels of omega 3 fatty acids and have much lower amounts of E. coli in their gut.

Good article though.

http://www.nt.gov.au/d/Content/File/Pigeon_Hole_Handbook_2007_screen.pdf

QDPI&F apparently are looking at whether kangaroo gut microflora can be adapted to work with cattle. Some wit said – “wouldn’t eating the roos be easier?”.

And yep – not all trees are a good idea. Albedo is an issue as well as carbon sequestration. So is consuming more water from catchments. Double edged sword.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/environment/plan-to-make-timber-industry-pay-for-rain/2008/05/10/1210131335198.html

However, this could all be a moot point, depending on the quality of Bala et al’s modelling. I just came across another paper of theirs, which explores a worst-case scenario. If you can, have a look at Australia 1971-2000 in their Figure 8. It does not inspire confidence. Barry, I’d love to hear your opinion of this.

Latitude-specific deforestation
experiments indicate that afforestation projects in the
tropics would be clearly beneficial in mitigating global-scale warming,
but would be counterproductive if implemented at high
latitudes and would offer only marginal benefits in temperate
regions.

Southern Australia is still temperate as far as I know, so whatever we are doing, it isn’t accurate to assert that the Bala study implies
we are “warming the planet” by our tree growing efforts.

(Hank#25) Yes, its a function of feed intake and feed type. Our AGO collects data on any farmed ruminants, be they deer or cattle. Feed type can make a large difference. This is one reason why some people have advocated a tax on livestock emissions rather than an emission trading mechanism. People seem to accept a motor vehicle tax based
roughly on size, but when people start to trade things, they demand
accurate measurements. I don’t understand why this is so, but that’s
what economists tell me.

(Luke#22) I was out on a little stream off the Bulloo river in
1991 with a friend. We walked down to the edge of the stream and it was obvious that a few pigs liked this place also, they had
trampled an area about 10m wide. My friend looked at the mess in disgust … “[expletive] pigs, bloody destroying the river bank”. Across the stream, 30m away, were about 50 cattle, they and probably many more, had trampled and flattened the bank as far as I could see — bend to bend, about 400m. My friend didn’t notice, just didn’t see it.

Hansen sees methane reductions as a way of buying time to implement CO2 reductions. The thing about methane reductions is that there are no technical issues. People know how to flare methane from mines, they know how to fix leaky natural gas pipeline and they know how to eat without any or with less meat

The problem is that we are not yet behaving as if we have a shortage of time. When we actually do behave as if there is a shortage of time then I’m sure we will implement every way possible of buying time (including reducing methane emissions). My point is that the methane in the atmosphere is helping to demonstrate the problem (and it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people need the problem demonstrated to them) but once humanity decides to act on the problem then the part caused by methane can be removed much more quickly.

Ask yourself which alternative would cause less damage: (1) x degrees of global warming caused by methane before serious mitigation or (2) x degrees of global warming caused by carbon dioxide before serious mitigation.

As I’ve written previously, it has been shown that in temperate latitudes, afforestation of grassland results in net increase of global warming, as the decreased albedo outweighs the CO2 sequestered.

Sorry to jump on this hobby horse again, but evidently this factor needs to be much more widely known than it currently is. Yes, I know there are other ecological benefits to planting trees (and Caldeira, Bala et al. are at pains to point this out), but their work (yet to be refuted AFAIK) that by planting trees in southern Australia, you are warming the planet.

So you’re happy to trust your food supply to Asia eh? mmmmm

Anyway – good luck if you can get a majority of voters to go with you.

(John#19) see #17

(Luke#20) Check page 73 in:

(n.b 10Mb download)
http://www.clw.csiro.au/publications/consultancy/2004/MDBC_stage2_report.pdf

Dairy water use in Murray Darling Basin almost doubled between 1995 and 2000/1, at the end of this period milk production and water use peaked at more than double that of rice and much more than cotton. Once the drought started to bite, then rice and cotton slowed or stopped planting, but cattle act pretty much like permanent plantings until farmers get desperate enough to destock. Of course, about half of Australia’s dairy produce is exported, so the $11 billion to rescue the MDB can be viewed as a subsidy to the dairy export industry.

Regarding weeds/ferals. You may call them weeds, a grazier would call them improved pastures. We now have 86 million sheep in Australia and we had 170 million in 1990, that’s 84 million less introduced ferals. The market did that, and it took no prisoners, it was brutal. That’s the way markets work, and nobody cares about the consequences except those on the receiving end. My preference is for a planned downsizing of the livestock sector. It could be paid for, eventually, by health care savings. The entire agriculture sector is tiny in GDP terms.

Nature quickly reclaims land that we leave behind, the result may not be to our liking, but I’m not sure that what we like matters all that much.

And think you can maintain yields with no nitrogenous fertilisers and herbicides? NOx 300x CO2 as GHG emissions. Good luck.

And you’re also happy enough to scuttle the entire rural sector? Or perhaps compensate them. You’ve already annexed their carbon in vegetation.

So are you guys prepared personally to under the necessary land management functions that are left? Or leave it to the weeds and ferals?

Your suggestion that we reduce or eliminate meat-dairy in our diets and economy will be labelled extreme, but there is some compelling logic there. It’s a no-brainer for those who believe that animal protein is not necessary for health, but the meat and livestock industries have convinced the great majority that without a kilo of carrion washed down with a litre of milk every day you’ll look like Mahatma Gandhi after a 40 day fast. And look what happened to him.

On the subject of protein, does anyone remember a great little book from the 70′s called “Diet for a Small Planet” ? The author presented an interesting argument that by combining different plant sourced protein (so-called “incomplete” proteins) one could easily achieve a “sum that was greater than the parts”, by which is meant half a cup of, say, brown rice plus half a cup of chickpeas might combine to have a more useful weight of useable protein than the equivalent weight of animal protein.

I guess it all comes down to education. We badly need a credible counter to the “feed the man meat” mob.

Not only would we reduce the the environmental impacts, but people would be a lot healthier.

Such an education programme could start with Miranda Devine who today in the SMH breathes new life into Lamarckian evolution by suggesting that a switch to meat-eating “by our ancestors” 2 million years triggered the heritable propensity to grow bigger brains.

But I suspect we’re not interested. So we’ll keep driving our cars and running the city lights all night, while sheeting home most of the responsibility on greenhouse to the bush.

At least with methane generated from beef cattle, the methane in the atmosphere can be reduced much more rapidly than anthropogenic CO2. For example, if the world suddenly got desperate about avoiding global warming and decided to immediately stop both CO2 and CH4 generation, the anthropogenic CH4 level would halve every 8 years while the anthropogenic CO2 level would take centuries to halve. Hence global temperature would continue to rise because the CO2 is still hanging around, while the disappearing methane would quickly reduce its climate forcing.

We could think of the issue in the following way. Suppose the only greenhouse gas was methane and we decided that the world had already reached a temperature high enough to make us decide to suddenly stop generating greenhouse gases. If we did this (when the only GHG was methane) then the climate forcing would halve in 8 years and global temperature would probably be falling within 8 years.

However, if CO2 was the only greenhouse gas, the global temperature would probably not be falling within 8 years of stopping generation and would almost certainly keep increasing for at least 20 years after being cut-off.

So CO2 is more dangerous than CH4 to the extent that its ultimate damage is greater relative to the damage that has already occurred at the time that we decide to seriously reduce GHG emissions.

(n.b. 315pp download)
http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/publications/synopses/_files/n35.pdf

You can calculate theoretical protein efficiency differences, but in practice they are irrelevant, if you get enough calories and you are eating normal food (ie., stuff that doesn’t come in packages), then you will get enough protein. Most people on 45 g of wheat-only protein stay in nitrogen balance (ie. are getting adequate protein) and this is well under the NHMRC recommended intake which is designed to
cater for the full range of the normal distribution. If you live on coke and chips, you will be deficient in many things, protein included.