I like chickens more than people. They are wonderful little beings. They make me so incredibly happy as they run around and peck at each other.
Nature sequesters carbon. If you are farming within the natural limits of your land you shouldn’t be generating much carbon at all.
All these people have a hard time imagining an old timey farming. Pre Industrial Revolution. There are plenty of natural farms around to this day. Tons of farmers, honoring traditional farming practices.
Does a tractor emit more CO2 than a dog Shane? When it comes to herding animals?
Let’s compare 3 farms and please explain to me which one has the least amount of CO2 per pound of beef. You are incorrect and I shall demonstrate it, and I’d love to hear your theory on why you are correct given this context.
Farm A: Natural farm, no fertilizer inputs, no feed inputs, rotating pastures, butchered on site, sold to a local market. Pastures have been historic farms and landscape consists of healthy native plants. Farm A uses a solar power and gets water from a local spring or aquifer.
Farm B. A start up funded by the Brazilian government, gifted 100 acres of rainforest, burned it down and added grass seed and fertilizer. Purchased corn from a different South American country to finish the product. Had the beef shipped across the country for slaughter, had the beef shipped across the world for sale. The land is still surrounded by some rich forests, but the grazed part is severely depleted and bordering dead.
Farm C. A feed lot in California. Cows are shipped in, water is shipped in, cows stand in dirt and erode the soil for most of their life. The land is barren and cannot take in any CO2. Cows are at a density of 100 head per acre. Standing shoulder by shoulder shitting. shit is transported out to local farms, cows are sold regionally and slaughtered locally.
Which one of these models generates the least amount of CO2 emissions per pound of beef
There are a lot of really interesting opinions here on this sub. Anthropologists must come together and renounce their evidence of ancient hunting practices and accept what ever your opinion is. Got it. Everyones an environmental scientist/ agricultural expert/ anthropologist on here.
Would you care to back that up with a study comparing farms and farm practices? Like you’re telling me how cows are raised is completely independent of the CO2 process. There’s no difference between. Farm A: Natural farm, no fertilizer inputs, no feed inputs, rotating pastures, butchered on site, sold to a local market. Farm B. A start up funded by the Brazilian government, gifted 100 acres of rainforest, burned it down and added grass seed and fertilizer. Purchased corn from a different South American country to finish the product. Had the beef shipped across the country for slaughter, had the beef shipped across the world for sale.
Yes certainly no difference here. Both of these farms are the same in terms of emissions…
Different farming practices use different techniques and tools and all have very different carbon output. That’s part of the equation of carbon production. Some farms are good at carbon sequestration and some are resource intensive.
I thought you stated buying local wouldn’t save that much CO2. I was stating that it would save more CO2. Having local farms will always make sense logistically
Farmers co op shares a central processing and distribution facility. Beef travels 30 minutes in and out to final destination. It all happened in a local region it’s local.
Cow raised 10 miles from my house. Killed on farm butchered on farm. I pick up cow and drive it 10 miles to my freezer. Cow sits in freezer for 1 year with other frozen farm products.
What are you talking about? I’m so confused at what you think buy local means?
Right… elk, buffalo and deer are all prolific grazers. Cows do have a higher impact on the land as they are not natural. That’s why greed is the real issue here. The bad farming practices are greed based.
I’m in a state that sustainable harvests deer to manage the population. We consume the meat and everything. We sustainable harvests cows too! Unlike those disgusting feedlots in central California we have happy cows.
This graph compares a beef farmer in brazil who just burned down the Amazon for an oversized heard and shipped the beef to the USA with my neighbor who owns a historic farm and has 1 cow per acre
Chickens are wonderful pets. They eat bugs and poop fertilizer. As a farmer I can tell you your land can sustain chickens, just like it can sustain hundreds of other native birds.
I’m guessing these stats are focusing on a cow farm that cut down a forest versus a cow farm that exists on a prairie. the carbon cycle on most land can handle a certain amount of cows.
I just really hate how these all demonize small scale farmers. Having a couple dozen chickens is much different than having 500,000 chickens. Agricultures byproducts and environmental impacts range widely.
If I buy half a cow from my neighbor, it doesn’t travel, it gets processed locally. The ecological foot print is different than me getting a cow from Brazil.
hasn’t even been 300 years since we had giant herds of buffalo roaming this country. We removed mega fauna and replaced it with a different species.
I really think that’s methane stat is exaggerated because it pretends like the planet wasn’t covered in cows before we started killing everything.
Right which goes back to another point I’ve made about mega fauna which naturally occurred around the world before humans made them endangered. For example, the great buffalo herds that used to roam the USA. They are a natural part of the carbon cycle and have been for millions of years. You can sustainably harvest red meat from the environment. Same as you can fish or any other protein out there.
It’s just cheaper and more profitable to destroy the environment. There’s nothing wrong with consuming red meat. There’s a whole lot wrong with modern farming practices. All that soy and almond milk is an environmental tragedy as well. Just not a carbon related one.