6 ms·
you're right, this is greenwashing. I sell into the market sometimes and the hides are basically wasted unless you try hard to line up buyers. plus, if your bee
by clord 3y ago
you're right, this is greenwashing. I sell into the market sometimes and the hides are basically wasted unless you try hard to line up buyers. plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere. It's true that factory-raised beef is bad for the environment though, as they eat grains that are fertilized from oil via Haber–Bosch. It's also true that tanning uses lots of nasty stuff, but there is vegetable tanning which works well and sourced from nuts and stuff.
- etrautmann 3y agoI thought the issue was that cows produce a lot of methane which is 20x worse foe trapping heat than CO2?
- reportingsjr 3y ago> plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere This totally ignores the land use issue. Cattle absolutely decimate natural areas. e.g. significant areas of the midwest/great plain that were prairie with deep roots to store carbon are now pasture. Pasture grass has comparatively shallow roots and limited ability to store carbon.
- mech987987 3y agoHasn't the midwest host large herds of grazing buffalo for millenia? I think the last I read about this stuff, most cattle farmers want their grass to still be the old school deep-rooted stuff, if other grasses take over it is a symptom of overgrazing.
- padjo 3y ago> Hasn't the midwest host large herds of grazing buffalo for millenia? Only because humans killed all the megafauna at the end of the last ice age. The question now is if populating it with millions of cows for us to eat is the right thing to do.
- jononomo 3y agono, cattle grazing on land serves to regenerate the land.
- jmilloy 3y agoI think this is generally false. Cloven hooved animals regenerate prairie and topsoil if grazed responsibly.
- clord 3y agoTwo things: - Grazers improve the capacity of grass to carbon capture - Some land is ONLY able to grow grass. The alternative is desertification, and so livestock is the only option to produce food. edit: unless you bring in fossil fertilizers.
- jedberg 3y ago> you're right, this is greenwashing ... plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere Sounds like you might be doing a bit of greenwashing yourself. The carbon came from the atmosphere, but the cows make methane, which is much worse. Also they spoil the land and water. And also you're not counting the carbon used to actually raise them, like the gas in the equipment and the transport.
- rimliu 3y agoNow calculate the use of the agricultural machinery to get the same number of calories from plants. I have no idea how cows "spoil land and water". Have you seen a cow?
- jedberg 3y agoNo one ever said plant based food is carbon neutral. But it uses way less carbon than cows. And yes, I've seen a cow. Many. They spoil the land by trampling it and the water by having their excrement run off into it.
- jachee 3y agoOh man… wait ‘til you find out where fish excrement goes. No such thing as unspoiled water by that definition.
- nmlt 3y agoA single cow eats many times the calories it is worth before it is ready to be eaten.
- dijit 3y agoThats not how that works, just like the water cycle there is a carbon cycle. You can’t produce “more” greenhouse gases in a closed system, the system will ebb and flow; until you dig up megatons of carbon that has been stored for a few hundred millennia and insert it into that system. (same story with polar ice caps and the water cycle)
- boringg 3y agoI think what you are doing is definitely better than some of the specific agriculture feedstocks for cows that increase the enteric emissions of cows to make them grow quickly. That said it isn't carbon neutral - the digestive systems of cows produce methane from food. Methane is between 24- 29 times more impactful then carbon for global warming. Cows still have a signifiant impact on especially as a function of how large the industry has become. And to your point - wasting hides is also not great. Would be great if we were less wasteful in general.
- clord 3y agoI suspect that because of conservation of energy, methane is a highly reactive over the short term, but ultimately an insignificant element in the big picture IF you ignore the massive oil inputs humans are adding to the system. That is to say, methane on its own is not a reason to discourage digging up oil to make grain, which is used to feed cattle.