AIBU to think most people don’t realise reducing meat will not save the planet and may in fact cause more climate issues.

[TreeLoverr]

I’m a farmer, but before you dismiss this as bias, I don’t have any livestock so do not sell meat.

We own a purely arable based farm and pretty much exclusively grow grain and cereals.

My family had beef cattle on the farm , but they’re sold the heard years before I was born due to lack of profits.

The reason why I say this is due to a few reasons. The soils on our farm are suffering. Especially due to lack of organic content. The soil must be replaced with actual organic matter (like in a garden, it erodes over time and you have to put compost on)

When most farms operated by rotating grazing animals this happens naturally. The grass putting roots down also stops soil erosion, and the dung from the animals too. There are other things that we are just beginning to understand like the important impact of hooves trampling and the delicate micro biome that the cows eating and pooping replenishes.

Just putting dung onto the fields is not enough. Firstly the nutritional balance gets off kilter very quickly (in a way that doesn’t really happen with livestock rotation) and secondly it is difficult to get hold of when you don’t have your own animals.

The alternative to this is fertiliser. Fertilisers are made using fossil fuels. This is far worse for the environment than animals on grassland.

Many farmland is not suitable for cropping. Too hilly/steep, rocky etc. but it is suitable for raising animals, turning otherwise wasted land into human food.

When we have a bad harvest, it often means the crops are not suitable for human consumption. This is then sold for animal feed, turning this into food further down the line as we can then eat the animals. This crop would otherwise have to be destroyed or just left in the field.

But what about greenhouse gases you might be wondering? Animals are PART of the natural cycle. They are not the same as greenhouse gasses released during fossil fuels being burned. Greenhouse gasses are trapped in the soil and plants that they eat, they release and the plants absorb again. plants literally live off carbon dioxide and methane.

How we farm can absolutely negatively affect climate change, but grass fed British beef and lamb is actually important to our ecology and an important food source in order to maximise our environment without destroying it.

Well as I said not a farmer but I have watched Jeremy clarksons farm and from that I would say they grow the crop hoping to get a good crop. For various reasons (soil health being a big one) it fails regularly and that crop becomes animal feed.

I am just going to leave this here…
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/24/uk-30-40-years-away-eradication-soil-fertility-warns-michael-gove

I am not going to out myself directly but I may or may not have been studying in said location at the time when this was looked at extensively. It is real. The soils are fucked.

The climate is fucked yes. Can we reverse that I don’t think we can actually. So the soils better in bloody good shape to deal with the turbulence that’s coming.

In 20 years you will hear all about it. When it really becomes a problem. Until then just ignore everything and continue on thinking the world is a simple place and vehemently shout ‘idiot’ at people trying to raise awareness.

It all interacts. Soil quality dictates plant quality, which affects the air quality.

"OP you are completely right, but people don't like nuance."

🤣

How would the majority of people going plant based help the soil recover?

how would it help when crops fail and you cannot give ruined crops to livestock.

how would it help in areas where the ground is too steep or rocky?

how does it help to have endless fields of mono crops

how does it help the micro biome of the soil.

The main issue with your post was the link in with the carbon cycle and methane usage. You have raised some good points on soil fertility, which I completely agree with. But I'm not convinced livestock farming is the complete answer to soil fertility/ecology problems.

Going back to the carbon dioxide/methane issue. Whoever anyone tries to minimise carbon emissions, stating plants will take them up, it makes me think of Richard Tice and his ridiculous suggestion that carbon dioxide is plant food, so pumping more out is fine, as the plants will do more photosynthesis. This is not scientific at all. In fact, many plants in temperate regions will slow down photosynthesis as temperatures rise (as they are doing), as they start doing something called photorespiration instead. This will dramatically affect their growth and crop yields. If this happens, then I'm not sure at all that grass-fed cows will be an efficient way of producing food. And yes, methane is broken down eventually into carbon dioxide after 10 years, but it's up there doing the damage in the atmosphere for those 10 years in the interim. Surely better to not have it released at all, especially as it is a much more potent greenhouse gas?

Thank you, I appreciate it.

My thoughts:
their biggest point is methane from farts and dung, what do you think is worse for the environment, natural methane released from animals, who then eat grass, which absorbs the gasses from the air and are largely in a CYCLE, or gasses released from fertiliser (which is made using fossil fuels, you must use some fertiliser, in order to feed large populations, but we should be reducing as much as possible)

In the uk we do not partake in deforestation to create farmland, we did in the past, but the uk was also home to vast grasslands, which we expanded. Rewilding areas is definitely a good thing, but we must balance with food production.

These are their main arguments as far as I can see. What is Zoe's stake in the game? they want to sell their plant based food? I have no meat for sale.

Never thought I would live to see the day when a farmer uses the word ‘poop’.

I have kids, what can I say 😂🤷‍♀️

I think the answer is in doing a bit of everything, and depending on the location try and figure out what the sustainable balance is.

There is no point worrying about emissions if the soil is dead. You are worrying about emissions because you are worrying about warming. When there is no plant cover warming would increase exponentially. An instant 5-10 degrees c increase in ground temp.

If you want to read more then the below are both good introductions and overviews of the topic…

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10105869/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.15816

That made me laugh too!

I’m not vegan but I’m sure the world wouldn’t go plant based overnight. It would take several generations to embed into society. In that time science and farming would have adapted & advanced so the issues we have with soil today will be resolved over time with technology that probably hasn’t even been developed yet. You’ve only got to look back over the last 150 years of industry medicine and science to see that.

Hi! I'm a vegan not in denial 👋 so you can cross that off your list

So you never eat animals or dairy outside of your home? You are vegan outside of the one time a week you eat your happily slaughtered animal?

No offence but when you say things like ‘slaughter animals’ it’s very loaded to show your view. It’s fine to have that view. But this discussion is about holistic approach to food production to our environmental issues. We need people focused on facts and not feelings, and the vegan emotional side of this is pretty incompatible with the environmental side.

One example of this is a strategy to reduce co2 vs output is to slaughter earlier, and breed earlier. So you get the benefits with less emission. Obviously for you you’re not going to like that if vegan as that’s more individual lives for the same output. But that is one of many factors which are being trialled.

The atmosphere doesn’t care where emissions come from- whether that’s cars, cows, factories or natural processes. What matters is the volume, the timing, and the heating potential of different greenhouse gases. As pp have pointed out, methane is much worse for global warming because it has a much higher heating factor than carbon dioxide. So, even though methane only sticks around in the environment for 10 years or so, and then breaks down in to CO2 and water, you still have huge heating peaks because of the amount of CH4 going into the atmosphere, and the heating potential that it has now is basically much greater than the heating potential of CO2 now. Does that make sense?

when the atmosphere gets heated is really important in climate change— I’m sure you’ve heard of planetary boundaries and tipping points —- basically, that there are certain biological, physical, and chemical systems that can only withstand certain levels of heating before they are interrupted, whether permanently or temporarily. AMOC is an example of such a system. If you are doing a huge amount of heating now you are more likely to cross over these planetary boundaries because the rate of heating is so high. When those planetary boundaries get crossed, it’s really hard to say if there’s any going back, or what the new environmental conditions might be like and whether we and our ecosystems are equipped to survive them.

so basically, methane emitted from livestock is worse for the environment right now and in the next decade, than CO2 from fertiliser use. And, don’t forget that methane breaks down into CO2 so that stays in the atmosphere for 100 years or more - double whammy.

I promise you I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been a climate scientist for 10 years and work on the science of this on a daily basis.

I am not saying the atmosphere cares which origin the gasses are from, fossil fuels are releasing locked away gasses, and animals eating plants are taking part in the cycle.
So using fossil fuels is adding only, whereas animals are part of the cycle.

This is simply incorrect.

yes animals eat plants, but that doesn’t mean that the amount of GHG they draw out of the atmosphere is equivalent to the amount of GHG they put into it.

if the system was balanced, none of this would matter and people wouldn’t be making a stink about livestock farming, but the issue is that the system is not balanced and the amount of GHG emitted is far far greater than the amount of GHG either consumed by livestock or stored in grasslands. It’s that simple. The equation doesn’t add up.

Here is an article that explains this more:

www.desmog.com/2024/02/01/climate-change-livestock-methane-carbon-sequestration-claims/

The article:

"That’s not to say that any use of cattle in agriculture is inherently problematic. Research has convincingly demonstrated that integrating ruminants into pastures and croplands really can help to sequester more CO2 in some circumstances. “Study after study after study after study has shown that one of very few agricultural systems that sequester carbon are pasturelands,”"

"According to the Nature analysis, even the most ideal conditions can only support about one cow per hectare of land, about the average density of grazing animals in Europe."

US farming practices are damaging, there is no doubt there.

We have to feed people and we have to protect the soils, what is your solution to the soil depletion and the damage that mono cropping does?

I am saying we need to implement livestock farming in a way that ensures the quality and longevity of our soil. Not that we embrace practices that further exploit the land and make things worse.

Correct.

And ‘happily slaughtered’ is obviously designed to make me feel guilty, but it doesn’t.

I am a big wildlife lover, and follow lots of wildlife cams. Life and death in the animal kingdom is brutal. Fish being torn apart alive by sharp osprey beaks. Baby bunnies being cornered in their burrows and dragged out and eaten by stoats. Deer that break a leg and die of starvation and dehydration.
Nature is red in tooth and claw and sadly animals don’t die quietly in their beds. Well-cared-for farm animals who are slaughtered in a small but high-standard local abattoir have a better life and death than most.

It is large-scale industrial farming that doesn't afford animals any quality of life that I take issue with. So I do not buy animal produce unless I know where it has come from.

Animals are slaughtered though, they go to slaughter houses or abattoirs as they’re sometimes called.

I love eating red meat! Eat it, almost daily, with butter. Delicious and healthy. BMI 22 and BP 108/60. No sarcopenia, healthy muscles, including heart. No carb gut.

Yes but you have also failed to absorb all of the other information that article is sharing, which directly disproves the point you’re trying to make about cattle’s emissions somehow being offset by how they are raised and them eating grass.

So, I’m sorry, your point on that remains factually incorrect and I’m wondering whether you’re being deliberately obtuse.

its unhelpful to conflate the issue of soil health with global climate change, which you’ve consistently done here.

my point is— both things can be true— soil might be better relative to other forms of agriculture in the nature positive model you describe; AND livestock can be net negative for global climate change.

That’s nice dear. 🤣