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I do think the problem is there is no differentiation between organic animal husbandry which has proven benefits (the pastures capture carbon dioxide etc) and t

I do think the problem is there is no differentiation between organic animal husbandry which has proven benefits (the pastures capture carbon dioxide etc) and the intensive factory farms. I have been reasonably selective of my meat sources over the past decade buying from a local butcher who sources from local organic farms and i am a happy customer and not ashamed.

bafumio 5y ago
How does that make the co2 and methan go away? Every cow produces it. And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people?
- throwaway69123 5y ago
  He offsets the carbon by mixing in some veal
  - bafumio 5y ago
    I think I heard of it but never been able to buy it
- CaptArmchair 5y ago
  > Every cow produces it. Every individual cow does produce CO2 and Methane. But that's not causing rapid climate change. The root cause is perceiving cows - or meat in general - as a commodity. Factory farming, raising and keeping tens of thousands of animals, has little to do with the historically intricate relationship between individual humans and cattle. It's about producing as much of a resource as possible in order to compete on an open market. In such a model, CO2 and Methane are costs to the farm that need to be externalized as cheaply as possible. Not to mention externalized costs further down the chain to the customer such as the waste of unsold produce, single use plastic packaging, transport and so on. > And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people? Not OP. I buy meat from a local butcher or farm. No. I don't have that conflict for several reasons. First, I rather buy quality meat once a week which I consume sparingly, then cheap, processed meat daily or even multiple times a day. So, that evens the costs out for me. Second, I choose to pay a higher price. Why? Because that's closer to the true cost of keeping and raising healthy cattle on a small, sustainable scale. What I get is a quality product. Third, I make self-cooked meals on a daily basis. I'm a stickler for good, tasty food. Choosing to approach meat more carefully prompted me to adapt my diet and replace the dishes I used to make. This is a positive experience since there's an absolute wealth of dishes out there that don't require meat. The meat I do buy and prepare only get minimally wasted (e.g. freezing portions, making stock,...) Fourth, I don't support a model where the abundant availability of meat globally is taken for granted, even though the environmental and social costs are clearly there. My effort is entirely insignificant on a global scale, but at least it makes me sleep just ever so slightly better at night. That's more then enough for me.
  - bafumio 5y ago
    I try to do the same with meat. I can easily afford it and do it seldom. 60-100$ price for bio beef is not a problem. My internal issue has more to do with the conflict of me being able to afford the best meat on the market but a lot more can't. Can I tell poor people to stop buying cheap meat while still consuming it myself?
    - CaptArmchair 5y ago
      > Can I tell poor people to stop buying cheap meat while still consuming it myself? Aren't the more interesting questions: why are so many individiuals poor? can't afford to buy produce at an "ethically reasonable" price point?
      - TheCapeGreek 5y ago
        Making your product available to the widest amount of people possible can also drive the mass-production practices talked about in this thread. So it's not just people being poor, it's that poor people are a huge market!
        airhead969 5y ago
        The US govt subsidizes many grains and provides socialism to farmers to make soda and burgers cheap, at the cost of healthcare and the climate. Often, fast food is only what poor people can afford.
        CaptArmchair 5y ago
        True enough. I wouldn't call it "socialism" though. The reality is that individual / independent farming isn't economically viable since farmers have to compete with these large factory farms. Most farmers running factory farms at the behest of large private corporations who define what the farmer can and can't do because they invest in these farms. Factory farms aren't diverse farms: they produce only one specific commodity e.g. meat, dairy, grain, soy beans,... The price the farmer can get is entirely defined by those large commercial interests. Just think about the notion that farmers, by contract, need to buy seeds from these corporations. Seeds which are protected by intellectual property law. As a result, the practice of seed saving - which is thousands of years old - has become a liability as there's a risk of patent infringement. As a result, farmers aren't just forced to buy seeds, they have to buy those seeds every year, and they can't really choose between suppliers by contract. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_saving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_saving Such practices render farmers into anything but employees in name. It would be "socialist" if the farmer retained their freedom and their vote in how the farm is run. Legally speaking, they still do have that freedom and that agency as a legally independent business. But in practice, the exploitative nature of the economic relationship between farmers, the markets and these corporations has turned that pretty much into a meaningless concepts. In that regard, the subsidization of agriculture doesn't benefit the farmers. It benefits those corporations through these entirely skewed market dynamics.
- elp 5y ago
  Is there something specific about cows that produces more methane than other animals? Assuming we stopped cow farming completely and the fields were turned into wild live reserves of bison or something would emissions magically go down? Or do they no longer count as anthropogenic so we can magically ignore them?
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    If cows are fed an unnatural diet instead of grass they fart a lot. So wild animals don't have the same issue.
    - elp 5y ago
      Do you have a source for that? From my brief looking it seems like its the other way around (https://beef.unl.edu/reduce-methane-production-cattle https://beef.unl.edu/reduce-methane-production-cattle)
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    A huge portion of beef calories come from mechanically harvested feed (pasture crops and soy and corn). The emissions related to those calories would go away.
    - Ancapistani 5y ago
      Beef production accounts for 9% of US corn production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_States#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_... If we have a magic wand and that disappeared entirely tomorrow, that would simply be allocated to other areas. There’s a reason sodas in the US are sweetened with HFCS and our gasoline is cut with ethanol produced from corn - because of lobbying efforts to subsidize corn production, which has driven down costs, which in turn made it profitable to use corn in ways where it wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Europe uses ethanol derived from sugar beets, which is significantly more efficient in terms of CO2. It’s significantly more complex than “if we reduce beef consumption, we’ll reduce corn consumption”.
- tasssko 5y ago
  The issue here is there is no balance in the discussion. we push people to be vegan and they become radical environmentalists but the vegan lifestyle for the average person is filled with processed foods with no discussion of the environmental impact of food processing. Busy people have no time for some of the food preparation required to be vegan. There is no balance of conversation at all. Regarding the comment about me paying higher prices, I can't agree. I spend an aggregate of about £1.50 / head on meat per day which is much less than if I decided to buy any processed soy or processed plant protein.
  - bafumio 5y ago
    You do? Do you get the cheapest meat available? Where do you live?
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Cattle on ranchland can easily be CO2 negative. Soil is a great carbon sink. So as long as the quality of the soil is increasing, we're removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Cattle and Buffalo are great for the soil, unlike other grass consumers like sheep. Methane is a more difficult problem. It's mostly soluble with specific supplements and other mechanisms, but it's an expensive process that ranchers won't pay for unless there are proper incentives.
akvadrako 5y ago
Indeed. I have seen a study that suggested free range cows in Australian grasslands were even less CO2 intensive per calorie than grains and also made use of land which wasn't farmable. However such a thing can't really scale because of the large area required.
- voisin 5y ago
  Link to study?
  - tasssko 5y ago
    Here is one source[1] this science is not new. The no dig farming movement takes this further because they don’t till the land the soil retains more co2. [1]https://www.soilassociation.org/media/4954/policy_soil_carbon_full_review.pdf https://www.soilassociation.org/media/4954/policy_soil_carbo...
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  > Grasslands cover around 3.5 billion heactares globally, representing 26-40 percent of Earth's total terrestrial area. I assume wiki meant these are natural grasslands in which case sounds pretty scalable.
airhead969 5y ago
You can't provide billions of organic, free-range, hipster beef burgers to the entire world and expect there to not be associated massive anthropogenic costs to GHGEs and air/water/soil pollution. The point is meat ag for the whole world is inherently not scalable, not sustainable, and a losing luxury like ivory that needs to go away ASAP.
fortran77 5y ago
The majority of the Western world eats too much food! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obesity-packs-serious-climate-consequences/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obes... We need to start taxing the Obese and Overweight to encourage them to put their forks down, and to pay for their externalities. With 67% of Americans obese or overweight, this would help more than switching to a "better" beef. https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obesity-rates-may-contribute-to-climate-change https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obe...
oliwarner 5y ago
I make similar choices for animal welfare reasons for all our meat, but better husbandry and land management doesn't stop the cow pumping out methane. The problem is we still refuse to make sacrifices to show an impending climate disaster. We know where we need to be, we know that gestures like organic beef don't get us there. I hope our grandkids forgive us.

bafumio 5y ago

How does that make the co2 and methan go away? Every cow produces it. And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people?

throwaway69123 5y ago
He offsets the carbon by mixing in some veal
- bafumio 5y ago
  I think I heard of it but never been able to buy it
CaptArmchair 5y ago
> Every cow produces it. Every individual cow does produce CO2 and Methane. But that's not causing rapid climate change. The root cause is perceiving cows - or meat in general - as a commodity. Factory farming, raising and keeping tens of thousands of animals, has little to do with the historically intricate relationship between individual humans and cattle. It's about producing as much of a resource as possible in order to compete on an open market. In such a model, CO2 and Methane are costs to the farm that need to be externalized as cheaply as possible. Not to mention externalized costs further down the chain to the customer such as the waste of unsold produce, single use plastic packaging, transport and so on. > And do you have a conflict that you are able to pay higher prices for meat than a lot of other people? Not OP. I buy meat from a local butcher or farm. No. I don't have that conflict for several reasons. First, I rather buy quality meat once a week which I consume sparingly, then cheap, processed meat daily or even multiple times a day. So, that evens the costs out for me. Second, I choose to pay a higher price. Why? Because that's closer to the true cost of keeping and raising healthy cattle on a small, sustainable scale. What I get is a quality product. Third, I make self-cooked meals on a daily basis. I'm a stickler for good, tasty food. Choosing to approach meat more carefully prompted me to adapt my diet and replace the dishes I used to make. This is a positive experience since there's an absolute wealth of dishes out there that don't require meat. The meat I do buy and prepare only get minimally wasted (e.g. freezing portions, making stock,...) Fourth, I don't support a model where the abundant availability of meat globally is taken for granted, even though the environmental and social costs are clearly there. My effort is entirely insignificant on a global scale, but at least it makes me sleep just ever so slightly better at night. That's more then enough for me.
- bafumio 5y ago
  I try to do the same with meat. I can easily afford it and do it seldom. 60-100$ price for bio beef is not a problem. My internal issue has more to do with the conflict of me being able to afford the best meat on the market but a lot more can't. Can I tell poor people to stop buying cheap meat while still consuming it myself?
  - CaptArmchair 5y ago
    > Can I tell poor people to stop buying cheap meat while still consuming it myself? Aren't the more interesting questions: why are so many individiuals poor? can't afford to buy produce at an "ethically reasonable" price point?
    - TheCapeGreek 5y ago
      Making your product available to the widest amount of people possible can also drive the mass-production practices talked about in this thread. So it's not just people being poor, it's that poor people are a huge market!
      - airhead969 5y ago
        The US govt subsidizes many grains and provides socialism to farmers to make soda and burgers cheap, at the cost of healthcare and the climate. Often, fast food is only what poor people can afford.
        CaptArmchair 5y ago
        True enough. I wouldn't call it "socialism" though. The reality is that individual / independent farming isn't economically viable since farmers have to compete with these large factory farms. Most farmers running factory farms at the behest of large private corporations who define what the farmer can and can't do because they invest in these farms. Factory farms aren't diverse farms: they produce only one specific commodity e.g. meat, dairy, grain, soy beans,... The price the farmer can get is entirely defined by those large commercial interests. Just think about the notion that farmers, by contract, need to buy seeds from these corporations. Seeds which are protected by intellectual property law. As a result, the practice of seed saving - which is thousands of years old - has become a liability as there's a risk of patent infringement. As a result, farmers aren't just forced to buy seeds, they have to buy those seeds every year, and they can't really choose between suppliers by contract. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_saving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_saving Such practices render farmers into anything but employees in name. It would be "socialist" if the farmer retained their freedom and their vote in how the farm is run. Legally speaking, they still do have that freedom and that agency as a legally independent business. But in practice, the exploitative nature of the economic relationship between farmers, the markets and these corporations has turned that pretty much into a meaningless concepts. In that regard, the subsidization of agriculture doesn't benefit the farmers. It benefits those corporations through these entirely skewed market dynamics.
elp 5y ago
Is there something specific about cows that produces more methane than other animals? Assuming we stopped cow farming completely and the fields were turned into wild live reserves of bison or something would emissions magically go down? Or do they no longer count as anthropogenic so we can magically ignore them?
- akvadrako 5y ago
  If cows are fed an unnatural diet instead of grass they fart a lot. So wild animals don't have the same issue.
  - elp 5y ago
    Do you have a source for that? From my brief looking it seems like its the other way around (https://beef.unl.edu/reduce-methane-production-cattle https://beef.unl.edu/reduce-methane-production-cattle)
- maxerickson 5y ago
  A huge portion of beef calories come from mechanically harvested feed (pasture crops and soy and corn). The emissions related to those calories would go away.
  - Ancapistani 5y ago
    Beef production accounts for 9% of US corn production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_States#Production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_production_in_the_United_... If we have a magic wand and that disappeared entirely tomorrow, that would simply be allocated to other areas. There’s a reason sodas in the US are sweetened with HFCS and our gasoline is cut with ethanol produced from corn - because of lobbying efforts to subsidize corn production, which has driven down costs, which in turn made it profitable to use corn in ways where it wouldn’t otherwise make sense. Europe uses ethanol derived from sugar beets, which is significantly more efficient in terms of CO2. It’s significantly more complex than “if we reduce beef consumption, we’ll reduce corn consumption”.
tasssko 5y ago
The issue here is there is no balance in the discussion. we push people to be vegan and they become radical environmentalists but the vegan lifestyle for the average person is filled with processed foods with no discussion of the environmental impact of food processing. Busy people have no time for some of the food preparation required to be vegan. There is no balance of conversation at all. Regarding the comment about me paying higher prices, I can't agree. I spend an aggregate of about £1.50 / head on meat per day which is much less than if I decided to buy any processed soy or processed plant protein.
- bafumio 5y ago
  You do? Do you get the cheapest meat available? Where do you live?
bryanlarsen 5y ago
Cattle on ranchland can easily be CO2 negative. Soil is a great carbon sink. So as long as the quality of the soil is increasing, we're removing CO2 from the atmosphere. Cattle and Buffalo are great for the soil, unlike other grass consumers like sheep. Methane is a more difficult problem. It's mostly soluble with specific supplements and other mechanisms, but it's an expensive process that ranchers won't pay for unless there are proper incentives.

akvadrako 5y ago

Indeed. I have seen a study that suggested free range cows in Australian grasslands were even less CO2 intensive per calorie than grains and also made use of land which wasn't farmable. However such a thing can't really scale because of the large area required.

voisin 5y ago
Link to study?
- tasssko 5y ago
  Here is one source[1] this science is not new. The no dig farming movement takes this further because they don’t till the land the soil retains more co2. [1]https://www.soilassociation.org/media/4954/policy_soil_carbon_full_review.pdf https://www.soilassociation.org/media/4954/policy_soil_carbo...
dzhiurgis 5y ago
> Grasslands cover around 3.5 billion heactares globally, representing 26-40 percent of Earth's total terrestrial area. I assume wiki meant these are natural grasslands in which case sounds pretty scalable.

airhead969 5y ago

You can't provide billions of organic, free-range, hipster beef burgers to the entire world and expect there to not be associated massive anthropogenic costs to GHGEs and air/water/soil pollution. The point is meat ag for the whole world is inherently not scalable, not sustainable, and a losing luxury like ivory that needs to go away ASAP.

fortran77 5y ago

The majority of the Western world eats too much food! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obesity-packs-serious-climate-consequences/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obes... We need to start taxing the Obese and Overweight to encourage them to put their forks down, and to pay for their externalities. With 67% of Americans obese or overweight, this would help more than switching to a "better" beef. https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obesity-rates-may-contribute-to-climate-change https://www.webmd.com/diet/obesity/news/20191220/growing-obe...

oliwarner 5y ago

I make similar choices for animal welfare reasons for all our meat, but better husbandry and land management doesn't stop the cow pumping out methane. The problem is we still refuse to make sacrifices to show an impending climate disaster. We know where we need to be, we know that gestures like organic beef don't get us there. I hope our grandkids forgive us.