As More Eat Meat, a Bid to Cut Emissions

[groovedaddy]

STERKSEL, the Netherlands — The cows and pigs dotting these flat green plains in the southern Netherlands create a bucolic landscape. But looked at through the lens of greenhouse gas accounting, they are living smokestacks, spewing methane emissions into the air.

That is why a group of farmers-turned-environmentalists here at a smelly but impeccably clean research farm have a new take on making a silk purse from a sow’s ear: They cook manure from their 3,000 pigs to capture the methane trapped within it, and then use the gas to make electricity for the local power grid.

Rising in the fields of the environmentally conscious Netherlands, the Sterksel project is a rare example of fledgling efforts to mitigate the heavy emissions from livestock. But much more needs to be done, scientists say, as more and more people are eating more meat around the world.

What to do about farm emissions is one of the main issues being discussed this week and next, as the environment ministers from 187 nations gather in Poznan, Poland, for talks on a new treaty to combat global warming. In releasing its latest figure on emissions last month, United Nations climate officials cited agriculture and transportation as the two sectors that remained most “problematic.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/science/earth/04meat.html?th&emc=th

[kestrel91316]

1. In all fairness, pigs don't "spew" any more methane than humans or dogs.

They are omnivores. Cattle and other ruminants, however, are HUGE producers of methane as a by-product of their particular digestive processes. They not only fart it, they belch it.

[MineralMan]

2. Indeed that is true...

In high school, I worked at a dairy. Most of the time I delivered milk, but on Saturday I helped with the milking. Cows produce prodigious quantities of gas, I can assure you. It's truly amazing.

[Dogmudgeon]

3. I thought this was true only if ruminants are fed grain (starches)

So that ruminants fed on grass don't produce more than a trace of methane.

Modern animal husbandry, designed to produce fatter, more tender meat, makes cattle that are miserably sick all their lives, by turning them into methane bioreactors.

And, in doing so, the nutritional composition of the meat is radically changed, and is much higher in omega-6 fats that even 20 years age.

Is any/all of this correct, or not?

--p!

[kestrel91316]

4. Nope. Methane is a normal by-product of ruminant digestion of plant material.

Specifically grasses and hay. If anything, grains muck things up. Not sure if a grain-fed cow produces more or less, but grass-fed produces plenty.