Cattle can still be part of a green wind of change
There was a time when cattle were just viewed as simple animals grazing their way through grass and hay, producing beef and milk and we all lived in harmony with them.
In recent years, cattle – or more specifically the methods of feeding and managing them – have become the number one enemy in the fight to slow climate change.
According to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, domesticated animals emit about five per cent of total human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, although that rises to 14.5 per cent when transport, production and other processes are taken into account.
Globally, cattle account for 60 per cent of livestock emissions – so 60 per cent of five per cent – and 40 per cent of that is in the form of methane, which lasts less time in the atmosphere but is more potent than CO2 as a factor in global warming.
So yes, burping cattle do produce methane and yes, reducing that methane would have an impact on global warming. But the outcry against the cattle industry is highly disproportionate when you consider the impact of other sectors and, importantly, the part farm animals can play in improving the environment.
And what seems to have escaped the notice of all the cattle critics, or has been lost in the shouting, bellowing rage that some people have towards cattle and their owners, is that farmers are making big efforts to reduce the impact of their animals.
Feeding food that reduces methane production, changing grazing patterns, breeding cattle that reach slaughter size earlier, and so emit less methane over a lifetime, even putting masks over cattle’s faces that prevents the methane reaching the atmosphere.
Cattle breeders are creatively responding to target of reducing emissions.
But what also needs to be recognised and used as a counter argument is the good that cattle and other livestock do. They graze on the plants that are nature’s way of dealing with carbon emissions.
Those plants create cellulose, which the human body cannot digest.
That cellulose, in the form of grass and plants is turned into beef and milk – high quality nutrients that provide essential food for the human race.
In the process of turning forage into beef and milk, cows produce methane, but this breaks down naturally and is reabsorbed by plants.
In this way, grazing animals are an essential part of a natural cycle.
And two additional benefits of livestock grazing the land is the manure they put back into the soil and the manner in which grazing animals open up the sward to let new growth emerge.
If we combine the good that cattle and other livestock do with the efforts farmers are making to reduce methane emissions, then it will not be long before the veil of misinformation is finally lifted and we realise the part that cattle can play in the fight to stabilise the climate.
