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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Meat production uses far more fresh water than crop production.
Land that could be used for food production is being used to raise animal feed. Many pounds of this feed is needed to grow one pound of meat. Ever wonder why we grow so much corn? Most of it is feed corn for animals.
You do NOT need to eat meat.
Really? Actually, you do. We are made as omnivores, and as such, we cannot produce all 20 of the vital amino acids needed for survival. We get the remainder that we cannot produce from outside sources. Now, it is true that up until the 20th century, anyone attempting a vegan diet would slowly die of serious health issues without vitamin B12, which is now in fortified tofu.
However, despite such a solution, it turns out that there is growing evidence to support that absorption via natural sources is far more effective than supplements.
I have been vegan and vegetarian both in my life, and I can assure you that I once swallowed this tired line. We really aren't hard-wired to survive on legumes and grains alone. We do need meat, if not a smaller amount than a lot of self-professed omnivores proclaim is necessary. We should, however, be eating meat once or twice per week to stay healthy and keep our biological engines running.
Please don't go google this and turn to PETA or some other vegetarian organization to refute my claims. At the very least, have the sense to read something by people who know what they're talking about and find a damn scientific journal. That's where I get my information. Thanks!
and taken other steps to reduce your household energy needs, the next step to take is either opting out of car culture or adopting a mostly vegan diet. Either step is going to really alter your lifestyle. For a lot of people, changing what they eat is just going to be easier. Parking the car (or SUV) and relying on public transportation might reduce your global warming impact more than a diet change, but not many people are in a position to choose that (thanks to short-sighted city planning that relies on car culture).
My body can't tolerate all the plant estrogens that come along with plant proteins.
mmmmmmm...steak...
In a society where obesity is so rampant that being overweight is the norm; in a culture that calls for the neck of a football player for treating his dogs the way your meat producer treats other similiar mammals, and in a nation with the largest carbon footprint in the world, there is but one solution. Go vegan.
BTW - I have seem feed to conversion ratios double what this author purports. (In other words, it takes a shocking 15 pounds of feed to receive a single pound of beef from cattle , 4 pounds of feed to acquire a pound of chicken flesh, etc . . .)
Anadromous freshwater, and estuarine fisheries all over the US have been decimated, depleted, or driven to extinction by the following factors:
1)factory farming for meat, especially poultry and hogs, which produce tremendous amounts of pollution from manure that runs off into streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and estuaries, eventually comprising a large portion of the nutrient suffocation responsible for "dead zones" like the one presently found in the Gulf Of Mexico.
2) the long-term neglect of the public works in the USA that has led to under-funded, outdated, and over-capacity municipal sewage treatment facilities becoming the #1 point-site polluters in the country today (Hawaii's Wakkiki Beach was closed to swimming due to sewage pollution for more than week last year- did you know that?) The most recent American Society of Civil Engineers reports have given this country a D- in water treatment for several years in succession. How much longer until it flunks?
http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=103
3) massive irrigation projects, particularly on the West Coast, often for water-hungry crops like alfalfa for animal feed, or even non-food crops like cotton (along with the looming "ethanol" con game), that starve the riverine ecosystems of water and deplete the aquifers and the springs.
Plentiful fish runs in clean rivers are like free protein- all that's required is to maintain sufficient habitat, and to harvest the fish when they run upriver, in quantities sufficient to allow healthy and sustainable spawning populations of salmon, steelhead trout, shad, striped bass, perch, herring...and estuaries full of crabs, clams, oysters, and shellfish.
But the money power now lies with the factory farms, and massive petrochemical agribusiness irrigated plantations, and cotton, and sugar cane- along with bought and paid-for politicians who mortgage the future in the name of "lower taxes" while the country falls apart...what next, a cholera epidemic?
There's a 1600-lb animal missing from your calculations.
Here are my calculations, with references, courtesy of google and an hour of my time. Thanks also to the USDA and PBS.
Size of national herd, all cows and calves: 106 million.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-07-20-2007.txt
Number on feed (multiplying their GHG impact): 11 million.
(in short, they are only on feed near The End.)
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/cofd0907.txt
Number of bison they ecologically replaced, bison that ALSO produced GHGs:
60 million.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay8.html
OK, so because of the 11 million on feed, the 106 million cows have the GHG impact of a good 120 million grass-fed, so they have double the "natural" level produced by the bison?
But wait! Or, rather, weight:
Bull bison (37% of herd): 1800-2500 lb.
Cow bison (45%): 900-1200 lb.
Calves (18%) :35 lb up to numbers above
sources:
Herd composition:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-541X(198907)53%3A3%3C593%3ACOBPEW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R
Weight:
http://www.gunpowderbison.com/Kids%20Corner
So the TONNAGE of natural ruminants on the North American plains can be calculated from the above numbers (giving calves half the average of cow and bull) to be an "average bison" weight of 1559 lb. Times 60M, is 46.8 megatons.
The US herd is lighter because it's mostly younger than a natural one; we slaughter cows at 2 years, bison live 20, so a higher proportion of the total is calves.
My first reference also notes that just 33M of that national herd is over 500 lbs. Conservatively giving them all the full adult weight (from wikipedia, "cattle") halfway between 1300 and 1900 lb, and the average of the other 74M that are under 500lb, conservatively, at 400 lb...we get a total tonnage of beef at 41.2 megtons.
Bottom line: there are fewer tons of beef now than there were of bison in the 19th century. Beef eater's disturbance of the natural methane balance is zero, indeed it may be NEGATIVE.
Maybe not; 41.2MT is only 12% less than 46.8MT and my whole-hour of research may have missed a few things. Also, the amplification of GHG output by the 10% of the herd that's on feed is a factor. I'm willing to call it even, although my weight numbers were quite conservative.
So, there's no GHG impact at ALL, compared to the original, natural state. At least not in North America -- but what was the former methane production everywhere that are now cattle ranches? Most ranching is done where there was an equivalent animal before. And even swamps and rainforests have quite a bit of decomposition that produces methane; smell one some time.
Until you do that part of the calc - the previous GHG load from the former "natural" environment, you don't have a calculation, you have HALF a calculation.
Liz Galst, please do 100% of your homework next article, I'll only do the other half for free this once.
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219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
