One-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe

 

No ****, kind of like some Chinese experiment years ago where they redistributed Yaks or something and a few years later the few that knew what to do with Yaks owned them all.

 

They can suck on the C02 transport costs of the efficient corporate farm.

When the old man who had my father living in a barn died in the 70's my father and I went to the funeral at the farm in Pine Mountain Georgia, and he told me not to say anything against FDR, the picture was still over the mantle. Some land I used to plow, lost from being disinherited (which brought my father to tears when he thought it would happen, since he never inherited anything), was in the last episode of Walking Dead. Give me an acre, I'll put your picture over the mantle.

 

Your posts about the sins of vegetarians is incorrect, all the way down to the spelling of "vegetarians". Actually, if one eats feed-lot raised beef, the agricultural land needed to support that diet is 16x that of a vegetarian. Worst of all, is that it is a very soil-depleting, and heavy input form of agriculture.

 

The greatest depletion of land is caused by tillage and mob grazed livestock actually builds topsoil. Nature never tills.

 

A lot of meat has very low impact on the environment. For example sheep farming here in Norway is pretty much the most environment friendly food you can eat, since the sheep are almost exclusively getting their food from areas where crops can't be grown.

Cows do have a more negative impact than sheep, but they too can get their food from areas not suited for growing crops.

It really depends on what kind of meat you eat, and how that meat was produced, more than automatically thinking carnivores are more damaging to the environment than vegans.

 

Thanks for the nitpicking. I will endeavor to also return said favor.... And since we're nit picking here, I posted 1 post so far in response to you, not plural, so you have an agreement issue. Care to continue? I would ask, about the appropriateness of using the word "actually" as a sentence starter. More, now you've conflated your initial assertion of 6X to 16X without citation. More, you've left out the usage in terms of total agricultural production. Why leave vegetarians off the list of abuses? Have you seen what the use of almond milk means to the water tables in California? As if that doesn't have an impact? Your analysis just seems so, well, lacking.

 

Almond milk. Almonds. Don't meat eaters ever eat almonds. Last I checked, dairy milk was vegetarian. Whose analysis is lacking?

 

Yes, I would agree - when it comes to well-managed grazing animals.

 

Yup, the core of it all is "well managed".

The sad thing is how a lot of the counter productive regulations to farming here, and I suspect in most of the world is pushed by a lot of people who generally don't understand farming or animals at all.

For example, we have to keep cows out on pasture for at least 8 weeks a year, or we're breaking the law. But this is not practical every year. If there's an extremely rainy season, letting them out, will lead to a lot of broken legs, and pretty bad animal welfare. Same for letting cows out when it's too hot outside. It lead to nice pictures and all, it looks pretty when cows are out on a field during summer, but it's more to satisfy the urbanites than the cows themselves.

The cows generally love the first days outside, then they'll get tired of it quite quick.

Not saying they should be kept inside all year around though, just saying what animal rights activists want, is rarely the same thing the animals want. Regulations to farming is a good thing, but farmers tend to be ignored, when they are the ones with the knowledge and experience.

 

I think the point is you have to get protein somewhere and nuts is a go to source for vegetarians and nuts use a lot of water. There's literally no free lunch.

 

Truly. It's such BS for the smug to spout off about how low impact their lives are given the facts that obviously they are not. I get a hoot out of the defensiveness of the posts. Fun stuff...

 

Then you are not the subject if the OP which is geared toward those in the AGW cult that say their vegetarian ways get them off the hook for the C02 contribution of farming.

 

Makes sense to me. I'm enlightened and transformed!!!

 

This thread has veered off-topic. The original post was about agriculture's contribution to greenhouse gases. According to the FAO, the two largest agricultural contributors to greenhouse gases are:

The largest source of GHG emissions within agriculture is enteric fermentation - when methane is produced by livestock during digestion and released via belches - this accounted in 2011 for 39 percent of the sector's total GHG outputs. Emissions from enteric fermentation increased 11 percent between 2001 and 2011.

Emissions generated during the application of synthetic fertilizers accounted for 13 percent of agricultural emissions (725 Mt CO2 eq.) in 2011, and are the fastest growing emissions source in agriculture, having increased some 37 percent since 2001.

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/216137/icode/

 

The idea was to be entertained, but to each their own.

 

The threads pointing out the fact that being a vegetarian may slightly reduce your contribution to C02 output from farming but is in no way a get out of jail free card and in some ways getting protein from other sources than meat is even worse such as in water used to grow almonds. I'm probably off a bit but I think I read a gallon per almond.

 

I don't see the word "vegetarian" in the title of this thread. I think my post was more to the point of the title.

 

Do you see the word in the first paragraph of the OP?

"So your a vegetarian and think you are saving the planet and not contributing to "global warming"? Think again."

 

If you want to limit discussions of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions to vegetarianism, you should have put the word in the title. Either way, growing for vegetarians is a small subset of agriculture, so the thread is fairly ridiculous, just as I said in my very first post. Therefore, I'll bow out of further discussion.

 

I don't even know what that means. "Growing for vegetarians"? Food is grown and we all eat it. You are the one this thread was based on when you claimed that your vegetarian ways insulated you from contributing to AGW. I have shown that you are most definitely not off the hook and in some ways do more damage than good. Your a real contributor to pollution and depletion of the water table as in a gallon per almond which is a nut vegetarians use to get protein and the massive amounts of fossil fuels it takes to grow and transport grain and petroleum based fertilizer and pesticides and herbicides in wheat. In other words you live in a fantasy world.

 

You logic is not like our mere earth logic. People with common sense understand that scale matters. Only those living in a fantasy world pretend that scale has no bearing on morality.

A person who works to have a lower carbon footprint is acting in a more moral manner than you are. Deal with it. The fact that the person's carbon footprint isn't zero doesn't change that fact.

 

Your work to have a lower carbon footprint often does more harm than good when it comes to real environmental problems, that's what you just can't grasp and that's one of my main gripes with the AGW mass hysteria.

 

Such as?

The almond tree thing isn't such a case, since nobody buys almonds while saying "This is lowering my carbon footprint!'".