The food security provided by cows and other domesticated ruminants cannot be replaced. The world’s hungriest people need the essential amino acids, fat, and other nutrients provided by cattle, and cattle serve as the most valuable economic asset for many of the world’s poorest.
We in the developed world have turned cows into nature’s great recyclers. We feed our cows all the leftovers after making beer and whiskey.
Citrus pulp, almond hulls, the meal left after extracting oil from soybeans and canola, bakery waste, the seeds left over after making your cotton clothing — all these are fed to cows, rather than rotting in a landfill. It is not unusual for well over a third of a cow’s diet to come from various byproducts, and over 80 percent of their diet is stuff humans don’t consume.
Alas, recycling and nourishing the world are not enough to save cows from the climate wars, with Denmark leading the way with taxes on cow burps scheduled to begin in 2030.
We haven’t reached the point of a national tax on cows in the US, but law schools are now demanding that new U.S. dietary guidelines “account for the climate impacts of diet,” and we’re all aware of the “Meatless Monday” campaigns intended to impose the vegan cult on school children.
In an amusing twist of fate, plant-based diets increase our “gas” production, including greenhouse gases like methane. Cattle digest plants in their foregut and thus burp their methane; we digest fiber in our hindgut, so it escapes from the other end. Avoid schools on Monday if you can.
What is particularly bizarre about the war on cows in the name of carbon neutrality is that they do not add new carbon to the system. They are simply consuming carbon from plant material to make beef and milk; their rumens produce methane along the way, which gets burped (and farted — but mostly burped) back into the atmosphere.
That methane is degraded to CO2 in a decade, which is subsequently reabsorbed by growing plants to start the cycle over.
Even more absurd with the war on cows is that all we’ve really done in the U.S. is replace bison with more efficient beef and dairy animals. Wild ruminants like bison and deer burp, too. We’re not producing much more “enteric methane” from ruminants now than was emanating from the millions of bison on the great plains centuries ago.
Genetic selection, improved nutrition, and higher crop yields — largely from higher atmospheric CO2, no less — have resulted in enormous gains in the sustainable production of milk and meat.
One would hope that the dairy and beef promotion organizations that farmers are forced to fund would try to correct the record and bring some sanity to the war on cows. That hope would be misplaced. They are fully on board with carbon “net zero” efforts and creating lots of paperwork for farmers to document just how much terrible greenhouse gas they are emitting.
The war on methane might make cattle worse for the environment in the end, with researchers and genetics companies developing cows with lower emissions. That did not work so well when tried with sheep. The sheep indeed belched less methane, which the researchers made sure to highlight.
Not so terrific was the fact that those sheep also digested their feed less effectively, resulting in greater manure output (which the authors failed to highlight).
True food security demands that food production be geographically dispersed to compensate for things like regional droughts, with widely dispersed ownership to prevent market manipulation or control over food access.
Cattle production allows local ownership and the ability to convert local resources into nutrient-dense human foods, unlike few other agricultural products. So why are so many pushing for cow taxes and anti-cattle policies?
I’m not convinced it is because of methane.
If methane levels keep rising at their current pace for the next half-century, world temperatures are predicted to increase by as little as 0.05° C.
Perhaps the war on cows comes down to our betters not having the control they subconsciously crave when little folk are able to feed themselves.
To me, 0.05° C seems like a pretty small price to pay for the world to enjoy more ice cream. Did I mention that it turns out ice cream is good for you, even if nutritional scientists don’t want to admit it?
Dr. Chad Dechow is an associate professor of dairy cattle genetics at Penn State University. Chad is a native of New York State and grew up on a small dairy farm that milked Holsteins and a handful of brown Swiss. His father continues to raise dairy heifers and beef cattle. He and his wife Elizabeth have been blessed with 4 boys and 1 girl.
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