New research being done on farms in Vermont in the USA indicates that the artificial diet fed to cattle since the second world war is responsible for a large part of the methane emitted by agriculture. The experiment introduced plants like alfalfa and flax seed into the cattle’s diet mimicing the natural grasses that cows ate earlier last century and replacing corn and soya bean feed. Milk production remained steady while methane emissions dropped by 18 per cent. The first of 15 farmers to try the experiment, Guy Choiniere, said that the cows are healthier, their coats are shinier and their breath is sweeter. Methane is a greenhouse gas, twenty times as effective as carbon dioxide at trapping the sun’s heat. Feedlot cattle produce well over 100kilograms of methane each year as well as consuming 700litres of water for every litre of milk they produce.
Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture
The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.
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Diet helps to reduce methane from cattle
The program was initiated by Stonyfield Farm, the yogurt manufacturer, at the Vermont farms that supply it with organic milk. Mr. Choiniere, a third-generation dairy herder who went organic in 2003, said he had sensed that the outcome would be good even before he got the results.
“They are healthier,” he said of his cows. “Their coats are shinier, and the breath is sweet.”
Sweetening cow breath is a matter of some urgency, climate scientists say. Cows have digestive bacteria in their stomachs that cause them to belch methane, the second-most-significant heat-trapping emission associated with global warming after carbon dioxide. Although it is far less common in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, it has 20 times the heat-trapping ability.
Frank Mitloehner, a University of California, Davis, professor who places cows in air-tight tent enclosures and measures what he calls their “eruptions,” says the average cow expels — through burps mostly, but some flatulence — 200 to 400 pounds of methane a year.
More broadly, with worldwide production of milk and beef expected to double in the next 30 years, the United Nations has called livestock one of the most serious near-term threats to the global climate. In a 2006 report that looked at the environmental impact of cows worldwide, including forest-clearing activity to create pasture land, it estimated that cows might be more dangerous to Earth’s atmosphere than trucks and cars combined.
In the United States, where average milk production per cow has more than quadrupled since the 1950s, fewer cows are needed per gallon of milk, so the total emissions of heat-trapping gas for the American dairy industry are relatively low per gallon compared with those in less industrialized countries.
Dairy Management Inc., the promotion and research arm of the American dairy industry, says it accounts for just 2 percent of the country’s emissions of heat-trapping gases, most of it from the cows’ methane.
Still, Erin Fitzgerald, director of social and environmental consulting for Dairy Management, says the industry wants to avert the possibility that customers will equate dairies with, say, coal plants. It has started a “cow of the future” program, looking for ways to reduce total industry emissions by 25 percent by the end of the next decade.
William R. Wailes, the head of the department of animal science at Colorado State University who is working on the cow of the future, says scientists are looking at everything from genetics — cows that naturally belch less — to adjusting the bacteria in the cow’s stomach.
For the short run, Professor Wailes said, changes in feed have been the most promising.
Stonyfield Farm, which started as a money-raising arm for a nonprofit organic dairy school and still has a progressive bent, has been working on the problem longer than most.
Nancy Hirshberg, Stonyfield’s vice president for natural resources, commissioned a full assessment of her company’s impact on climate change in 1999 that extended to emissions by some of its suppliers.
“I was shocked when I got the report,” Ms. Hirshberg said, “because it said our No. 1 impact is milk production. Not burning fossil fuels for transportation or packaging, but milk production. We were floored.”
From that moment on, Ms. Hirshberg began looking for a way to have the cows emit less methane.
A potential solution was offered by Groupe Danone, the French makers of Dannon yogurt and Evian bottled water, which bought a majority stake in Stonyfield Farm in 2003. Scientists working with Groupe Danone had been studying why their cows were healthier and produced more milk in the spring. The answer, the scientists determined, was that spring grasses are high in Omega-3 fatty acids, which may help the cow’s digestive tract operate smoothly.
Corn and soy, the feed that, thanks to postwar government aid, became dominant in the dairy industry, has a completely different type of fatty acid structure.
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It’s raining birds on Western Australia
The birds were found on Friday at a rubbish tip and near a quarry site in the Perth suburb of Henderson.
Ken Raine, environmental hazards manager of the DEC Pollution Response Unit, said that birds were seen frothing at the mouth and staggering around at the site before scores of dead birds were discovered within a kilometre radius of the landfill site.
“Autopsies carried out on the birds found Fenthion in high concentration,” the DEC told The Times. “It was in a landfill site and the birds were found close to the site, but we don’t yet know where the pesticide came from.”
Fenthion is an organophosporous insecticide used in horticulture to control pests such as fruit fly and aphids and pest birds such as weaver birds. It is also sold for domestic use to control fleas on dogs and in domestic fruit fly sprays.
The DEC was unable to say what quantity of the pesticide would have been present to kill birds in such large numbers.
Birds began dropping out of the sky in the beachside Perth suburb of Woodman Point over several days last July, sparking a big investigation into local industries. Post-mortem examinations on dozens of carcasses failed to establish a cause of death, but Fenthion poisoning was ruled out at the time, according to the DEC.
In December 2007, 5000 birds including yellow-throated miners, honey eaters and wattle birds were killed by lead carbonate blowing through Esperance as it was being exported through the town’s port.
An investigation into the birds’ deaths found that local children and adults had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood. A local company, Magellan Metals, escaped prosecution over the way it handled the transportation of lead through the town, but fears remained over the potential threat to humans.