Bringing healing and regenerative principles to life - in leadership, organisations and culture. Founder of Regenerative Confluence reflective practice community.
This is such a great short video explaining the journey taken by an imagined 10 carbon atoms from grass, and how they travel the biogenic carbon cycle after they are ingested by the cow. Some of the carbon will be burped out as methane, which over ten years or so reduces back into water and CO2 and is reabsorbed by the grasses. Within this system, and assuming stable cattle numbers, no additional carbon is 'created'. It completely puts to bed this idea that cows and other ruminants are filling our atmosphere with methane. Giving them drugs to 'tackle' the problem is completely unnecessary when you actually understand this cycle. Unlike other sources of methane, from landfill, swamps and waterlogged land, and of course the gas and oil sector, cattle methane doesn't have a net impact. And data indicates that the number of all wild and domestic ruminants in the US currently is comparable to when enormous herds of bison roamed the plains - so the volume of ruminants is similar to pre-industrial levels. The panic over methane from cattle is yet another miscalculation and misunderstanding of how nature works. Remember when the UN reported that cattle rearing led to more greenhouse gas emissions than all cars, trucks, planes, trains and boats in the entire world combined... which was then popularised via the film Cowspiracy. It turns out that the researchers had compared a 'cradle to grave' model of ALL inputs over the lifecycle of rearing a cow, including feed, machinery, transportation, processing, cooking etc, against just the tailpipe emissions for transport. Even though the researchers retracted their statement, it was already embedded in public awareness. Then there was the data about a quarter pound of beef requiring 660 gallons of water to produce. Again, the 'researchers' had discounted so-called 'green water', i.e. rain water falling on fields, hydrating the soil and grasses as an external input. Any water the cows take in is then peed out back onto the fields. Exogenous inputs are minimised. And of course, many people engaged in rearing livestock care about their impact. I couldn't help but be struck at last years Oxford Real Farming Conference that there were so many people farming beef and dairy who also made time to do their carbon accounting, measure biodiversity etc. It seems as though another stereotype is that farmers don't care. This may apply to some of the big ag companies, and of course they need to be accountable, but allowing small and medium size farmers to be punished is not the answer. We need to inform ourselves and support them in the different ways we can if we want to preserve nutritious, locally raised or grown food, plant or animal based. And its time that the climate activists drop the narrative about beef and dairy being the enemy - it doesn't stack up. #climate #methane #emmissions #greenhousegases #biogeniccarboncycle #regenerativeagriculture #regenerativefarming
