citation. Things differ a bit depending on exactly what kind of environment you’re looking at but that’s still the rough ballpark. Yes, non-pasture farming looks different – but the area used to grow soy now would still sequester carbon, and it’d still be released back into the atmosphere by animals that eat it. Forests etc. aren’t bottomless CO2 sinks.
The intensity of dairy and beef farming is magnitudes beyond what any natural population of cattle would look like.
I don’t think you have a proper picture of what a natural ruminant population looks like. To give you a proper sense, Imagine a galloping Bison herd stretching, in a not exactly thin line, from horizon to horizon.
There’s green stuff to be eaten. As long as that’s there, the population of animals eating green stuff increases. Simple as that. It’s part of the natural CO2 cycle, to go ahead and say “let’s ‘fix’ the natural CO2 cycle so we don’t have to fix the man-made one” is ecologically naive.
A close to natural “population density” of cows is in the magnitudes of 1 cows per hectare of green land. Factory farms have hundreds of cows per hectare. So if the total population of cows would go down to 0-1% of todays farmed amount, that would reduce the GHG emission impact down to a negligible amount.
You are inventing a problem that doesn’t exist to justify the continuation of factory farming.
Surrounded by vast supporting fields which have none. Please, try to get a whole-picture view of anything before you post, don’t accost me with over-reductive narrow-focus BS, this is almost “The US has more people per capita” type of comical. Also, don’t just knee-jerk dismiss a link to a paper in Nature, of all journals.
So if the total population of cows would go down to 0-1% of todays farmed amount, that would reduce the GHG emission impact down to a negligible amount.
No. And if you read the paper, you’d understand why.
You are inventing a problem that doesn’t exist to justify the continuation of factory farming.
I’m opposed to factory farming. For other reasons. Biodiversity, for one.
I read the paper you linked. Are you seriously suggesting that if we stopped animal agriculture, wild animals would flood the countryside to the same extent as in the Kenya study? I don’t think that is broached by the study at all.
A single study will not tell you everything about everything. No, ruminants will not just magically appear in the landscape, we’re living in a causal universe, after all.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all ruminants indeed all grazers (also deer, giraffes, whatever) are extinct. Plants will flourish, not being eaten by them, then individual plants, or parts of them (falling leaves etc) will die as part of their normal life/reproduction cycle – and get eaten by fungi, bacteria, etc. Which will burp CO2 and probably other greenhouse gases.
The condition for nature to produce CO2 are simple: The presence of carbon in a form that can be oxidised, such as sugar and starches of which plants produce plenty, the presence of oxygen, and a critter, any critter, that can do it. Even if it’s just a single species, it’s going to eat the whole thing and release all the carbon back into the atmosphere. Consuming available energy to reproduce itself is literally what life is all about.
If there’s energy around that can be used, nature will use it. Have a look at the most biodiverse and productive ecosystem in the world, the Amazon rain forest: It has very poor soil because as soon as something dies, its remains are recycled by something else. Destroying the Amazon rain forest releases CO2, again planting stuff there re-captures it, but reconstituted forest doesn’t continue to sequester carbon indefinitely: Only until it has accumulated the amount of carbon that it needs to sustain itself, after that it’s going to be carbon-neutral.
You may be asking “but then how did all that oil and coal end up in the soil”: Highly specific circumstances: Plants were producing stuff that critters couldn’t eat. But we’re currently not in that situation and in fact critters seem to be ludicrously efficient at evolving to break up new compounds. PET was first synthesised 1941, in 2016 scientists found critters which can eat it – producing CO2 in the process, of course. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to all that herbivore-free land you envision. If we want to sequester carbon, care has to be taken that nature won’t dig it up again.
sigh
citation. Things differ a bit depending on exactly what kind of environment you’re looking at but that’s still the rough ballpark. Yes, non-pasture farming looks different – but the area used to grow soy now would still sequester carbon, and it’d still be released back into the atmosphere by animals that eat it. Forests etc. aren’t bottomless CO2 sinks.
I don’t think you have a proper picture of what a natural ruminant population looks like. To give you a proper sense, Imagine a galloping Bison herd stretching, in a not exactly thin line, from horizon to horizon.
There’s green stuff to be eaten. As long as that’s there, the population of animals eating green stuff increases. Simple as that. It’s part of the natural CO2 cycle, to go ahead and say “let’s ‘fix’ the natural CO2 cycle so we don’t have to fix the man-made one” is ecologically naive.
A close to natural “population density” of cows is in the magnitudes of 1 cows per hectare of green land. Factory farms have hundreds of cows per hectare. So if the total population of cows would go down to 0-1% of todays farmed amount, that would reduce the GHG emission impact down to a negligible amount.
You are inventing a problem that doesn’t exist to justify the continuation of factory farming.
Surrounded by vast supporting fields which have none. Please, try to get a whole-picture view of anything before you post, don’t accost me with over-reductive narrow-focus BS, this is almost “The US has more people per capita” type of comical. Also, don’t just knee-jerk dismiss a link to a paper in Nature, of all journals.
No. And if you read the paper, you’d understand why.
I’m opposed to factory farming. For other reasons. Biodiversity, for one.
I read the paper you linked. Are you seriously suggesting that if we stopped animal agriculture, wild animals would flood the countryside to the same extent as in the Kenya study? I don’t think that is broached by the study at all.
A single study will not tell you everything about everything. No, ruminants will not just magically appear in the landscape, we’re living in a causal universe, after all.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all ruminants indeed all grazers (also deer, giraffes, whatever) are extinct. Plants will flourish, not being eaten by them, then individual plants, or parts of them (falling leaves etc) will die as part of their normal life/reproduction cycle – and get eaten by fungi, bacteria, etc. Which will burp CO2 and probably other greenhouse gases.
The condition for nature to produce CO2 are simple: The presence of carbon in a form that can be oxidised, such as sugar and starches of which plants produce plenty, the presence of oxygen, and a critter, any critter, that can do it. Even if it’s just a single species, it’s going to eat the whole thing and release all the carbon back into the atmosphere. Consuming available energy to reproduce itself is literally what life is all about.
If there’s energy around that can be used, nature will use it. Have a look at the most biodiverse and productive ecosystem in the world, the Amazon rain forest: It has very poor soil because as soon as something dies, its remains are recycled by something else. Destroying the Amazon rain forest releases CO2, again planting stuff there re-captures it, but reconstituted forest doesn’t continue to sequester carbon indefinitely: Only until it has accumulated the amount of carbon that it needs to sustain itself, after that it’s going to be carbon-neutral.
You may be asking “but then how did all that oil and coal end up in the soil”: Highly specific circumstances: Plants were producing stuff that critters couldn’t eat. But we’re currently not in that situation and in fact critters seem to be ludicrously efficient at evolving to break up new compounds. PET was first synthesised 1941, in 2016 scientists found critters which can eat it – producing CO2 in the process, of course. That’s exactly what’s going to happen to all that herbivore-free land you envision. If we want to sequester carbon, care has to be taken that nature won’t dig it up again.