Monday Breakfast

by Natasha Chart

categories: Climate, Livestock, Recommended Reading

Published August 10, 2009 @ 07:40AM PT

Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...

- There's a new documentary on Percy Schmeiser's battle with Monsanto, as noted by Charles Lemos, following the 2008 settlement where Monsanto agreed to pay cleanup costs for contaminating his fields.

- Jill Richardson was here in Philadelphia on her book tour last Thursday, the night I figured out something was really wrong with my foot, then she went to Lancaster, PA for the CSA goodness and then it was on to New York, NY.

- The Northeast's late blight hit Paula Crossfield's rooftop tomato garden, and she took the opportunity to talk about the unique financial problem the disease has posed for small farmers growing specialty crops.

- Sens. Boxer and Baucus are squaring off over who'll get to write the Senate version of the House climate bill, and agricultural, coal and oil interests are expected to have even more say over the results. Keith Good at the FarmPolicy blog leaves little hope in his DC squabble roundup that, in spite of the fact that the military is firmly convinced of the threat climate change poses to national security, that our legislators will actually shape up and give us the change we need.

- So, about meat and climate change ...

... But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess flatulence is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years ago when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America not to mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain lions, etc. Did the methane from their digestion and the nitrous oxide from their manure cause temperatures to rise then? Or could there be other contributing factors today resulting from industrial agriculture, factors that change natural processes, which are not being taken into account? It has long been known that when grasslands are chemically fertilized their productivity is increased but their plant diversity is diminished.

A recent study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1, pp. 45 - 49) documents how that the diminished diversity from sowing only two or three grasses and legumes in modern pastures results in diminished availability of numerous secondary nutritional compounds, for example tannins from the minor pasture forbs, which are known to greatly reduce methane emissions. Could not the artificial fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure? Might not the increased phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have modified digestibility? I am sure that future research will document other contributing factors of industrial agricultural practices on animal emissions. The fact is clear. It is not the livestock; it is the way they are raised. ...