Defending the Cow
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talkpoliticsMany years ago, I heard a tidbit passed as fact that sounded about as full of, well, bullshit as anything I'd heard in my life. Just google "cows as methane sources" and see the citations of this phenomenon pop up. Don't get me wrong; I'm not anti-science, and the scientists who have done these studies need to know that I mean them no harm. Their data is valuable, but only if it is applied in ways that don't get hijacked by philosophical forces on a crusade against the cow itself.
First, the problem. Researching global warming has been happening, believe it or not, since the early 1800s. Joseph Fourier suggested that the earth should be quite a bit colder than it was, and suggested science could determine the energy retained after the sun set by measuring heat on various places all over the earth and factoring in the heat retention properties of various parts of the earth itself. This sparked a curious rush of measurements, with scientists the Western world over heating rocks, water, soil, whatever, poking thermometers into them, and seeing how long it took for them to cool.
John Tyndall did this with atmosphere, and in 1859 announced the startling discovery that the main components of our atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, were all but transparent to infrared radiation. Water vapor and the remaining trace atmospheric gasses absorbed, held, and released just about all the heat energy in our atmosphere. That made those remaining trace gasses the target of further research.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius "was the first scientist to attempt to calculate how changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect." By 1908, "he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population." Which brings us close enough to 1910. I'll let Joe Salatin set the scene:
Cows, horses, pigs, sheep and goats have been a disgusting part of our human landscape for millennia. At the same time, few worried that these ubiquitous creatures could be a source for CO2 and other greenhouse gases as important as the dead plants and critters whose corpses long ago transmorgrified into the liquid, solid and gaseous fuels we burning to evermore industrialize our lives.
With me so far?
What changed for animal husbandry since 1910 has very little to do with the animal and just about everything to do with the desire people have to incrementally better their lives. As you can tell from the above Salatin selection, moving, storing and living with shit would be about the first damned chore targeted for technological, er, elimination.
The cow has traditionally been a necessary restorer of agricultural land. Fields used for our dominant crops lose vital nutrients to those crops. Allowed to rest, the fields revert to grasses. A farmer then allows his small herd to graze. This restores the nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium (NPK) balance to the soil and allows significant grass root systems to add organic energy to the dirt and encourage a below-ground ecosystem comprised of all manner of critters, bringing the soil once again toward fertility. When tilled, the plow rips through that grassy ecosystem, killing it and freeing its stored nutrient base for the future grain crop. The farmer loses grain and legume production with this slower process, but needs fewer foreign inputs to renew the soil, which is good in the days when foreign inputs needed to be moved to the farm by horse- or oxen-pulled carts.
Slowly, tractors and trucks replaced the draft animals, meaning fewer and fewer animals were required to pull plows and carts. (NB: Loss of draft animals and the manure they naturally produce was one of the prime reasons the Amish decided to eschew mechanized transportation in the early century.) More importantly, as this increased mobility changed the farm, farmers got a non-manure-based replacement for soil fertility:
And as the wars spurred research, fossil fuels more and more created NPK for both explosives and fertilizers. The manure that plagued much of human history had a potential replacement.
Though the average farmer has not needed the fertilizer and mobility cows provide, that doesn't mean the average consumer has lost his or her appetite for milk or meat. The process for obtaining the commodities simply changed.
More and larger tractors and cheaper and more abundant chemical fertilizers have allowed us to grow far, far more grain than we historically could. Back to 1910: According to an old Wired magazine article (sadly, not easily searched anymore), the cost of a small bag of flour, containing enough calories to sustain a single person for a day, cost four days labor to purchase. At the time the article was written, that cost had dropped to 69 cents, a fraction of an hour's labor today. We can credit cheap fossil fuels for that change, powering the tractors and producing the fertilizers that allow farmers to farm without ever touching manure.
This overabundance of grains has allowed cattle growers to simply bring dinner to the cow, rather than allow the cow to go and get natural grasses. Thus, the laborious task of escorting cattle to traditional grazing grounds has been shifted to keeping the cattle contained. Salatin notes that poured concrete flooring allowed farmers to scrape shit with far less effort than the above-described straw absorbtion and shoveling method; adding small tractors with scrapers further simplified the task.
It is into this mechanized process—not the natural grass-eating cattle-rearing familiar before all that cheap go-juice was available—that the climate change scientists start probing the cows. And it is this process that greatly exacerbates methane release, not the poor cows.
First of all, the cows are not the only atmospheric carbon source to worry about. Remember above when I mentioned the plowing cycle cutting through the grasslands, and how the dying grass ecosystem releases nutrients? When things die, more than nutrients are released; dying things also release methane. And quite a lot has died in our world's soil since the plow started its killing spree.
I read recently the accusation that aquifer depletion has lowered some parts of the globe as much as 20 or 30 feet. This is inaccurate. Aquifers are essentially subterranean gravel pits with water filling the interstitial space. Drain the water and the gravel continues to to support the shape of the aquifer. Aquifer subsidence is minimal, if it happens at all.
What has been lost especially in the US heartland is not a supporting column of water, but organic material. Many of the former grassy ecosystems in the midwest bore as much organic material below the soil as they showed above, and some of these natural grasses grew twelve feet tall when left ungrazed. The plows all but killed this ecosystem, releasing the nutrients; the crops grew from the nutrients; and the crops were then carted away to be eaten. Since we have interrupted the nasty and icky manure cycle, choosing instead to flush our solid wastes away, our natural fertilizer has been denied the land.
Infertile soil further loses more particulate to erosion, sending our topsoil down river just like our barely treated shit. Jarrod Diamond noted this in his book Collapse. In some mid-western towns, the only patch of land that hasn't been brought in and out of plowing has been the church, already planted with a nearby graveyard. Some of these churches sit on a hills 15-20 feet taller than the surrounding plain. The very, very flat surrounding plain.
Over hundreds of years, we have transformed this soil ecosystem into greenhouse gas.
Again, I'll not harsh the buzz of working scientists by wagging a finger in their direction. They are merely measuring gaseous emissions from the most obvious sources first. Other scientists will no doubt start to measure things like plowed field gaseous releases and start to get a handle on this problem.
I'll instead blame the very short-term memory and limited cognitive faculties of humans. Blaming AGW on cow farts is easy. If one merely abandon the cattle industry by eschewing its products, one can drive those convenient fossil-fueled autos without guilt. Writers already enamored of the vegan lifestyle can crank out crank observations largely devoid of merit, like Diet for a Small Planet, pinning more and more of the guilt on bovine digestion.
It's cognitive dissonance embodied. And it's completely wrong. Here's why:
We are, as Salatin notes, degrading the soil—and releasing still-unmeasured AGW gases in the process—in an effort to avoid manual labor and increase profits. Besides, this cheap energy is running low. Don't believe me? Look at the financial condition of much of the world, and wonder why gas still runs over $3/gallon. Hint: scarce commodities command higher prices. Bottom line; we will be returning toward 1910 agriculture whether we like it or not. Hopefully we can do so with some of the modern tools in a more sustainable and less labor-intensive fashion.
There's a lot more to hate about modern animal husbandry, but I'll rant later.
First, the problem. Researching global warming has been happening, believe it or not, since the early 1800s. Joseph Fourier suggested that the earth should be quite a bit colder than it was, and suggested science could determine the energy retained after the sun set by measuring heat on various places all over the earth and factoring in the heat retention properties of various parts of the earth itself. This sparked a curious rush of measurements, with scientists the Western world over heating rocks, water, soil, whatever, poking thermometers into them, and seeing how long it took for them to cool.
John Tyndall did this with atmosphere, and in 1859 announced the startling discovery that the main components of our atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, were all but transparent to infrared radiation. Water vapor and the remaining trace atmospheric gasses absorbed, held, and released just about all the heat energy in our atmosphere. That made those remaining trace gasses the target of further research.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius "was the first scientist to attempt to calculate how changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect." By 1908, "he suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age, and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population." Which brings us close enough to 1910. I'll let Joe Salatin set the scene:
Imagine you're living in about 1910. America is in that disturbing cultural shift between the agrarian and industrial economy. . . .
This nasty cusp of urbanization without electricity, indoor plumbing, and automobiles is literally suffocating cities in horse manure. It's everywhere. You can't walk down a sidewalk without getting it on your shoes. When you cross the street, piles of it greet every step. Pedestrians bring it into retail stores and fashion galleries on their shoes. Wiping, washing, kicking — everything revolves around getting that manure off your feet.
Daily mule trains hauling straw, oats, and hay into town to feed the insatiable appetites of the liveries can't haul the manure out fast enough. Open sewers running along streets get clogged with manure. Farms nearby, within mule distance of the city, can't supply enough hay to feed the crush of horses amassed in the city. Finding a hotel room is easier than finding a stall for the night. And everywhere piles of manure rot, drawing flies and creating a stench.
People are tired of manure. On the farm, half the workload is shoveling manure. Low, dark, damp stables in bank barns must be bedded with straw each evening to soak up the manure. Routinely, these stalls must be cleaned out, using crude forks powered by strong backs. The bedding, packed down by the horses, contains a tight pack of straw and manure. The straw binds the pack together. Shoveling requires ripping those threads apart, stooping over the pile, breathing in the musty aroma of manure.
In the city, in the country, manure dominates life. The outhouse, the chamber pot. Human manure. Animal manure. It's everywhere and it all has to be moved by hand, with crude forks and shovels. Mechanical manure spreaders have not yet been invented. . . . Manure, manure, manure. It's everywhere. It draws flies. Big, black flies.
Flies land on your pies. Flies get in the pitcher of cream you have sitting on the kitchen counter because you have no refrigerator. Iceboxes are beginning to be used, but they are still a luxury item. You curse the manure that brings the flies that land in the cream. You wipe your brow, sigh, and wonder when this manure tsunami will ever end.
(Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advise for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World, Center Street, 2011, pp. 123-124.)
Cows, horses, pigs, sheep and goats have been a disgusting part of our human landscape for millennia. At the same time, few worried that these ubiquitous creatures could be a source for CO2 and other greenhouse gases as important as the dead plants and critters whose corpses long ago transmorgrified into the liquid, solid and gaseous fuels we burning to evermore industrialize our lives.
With me so far?
What changed for animal husbandry since 1910 has very little to do with the animal and just about everything to do with the desire people have to incrementally better their lives. As you can tell from the above Salatin selection, moving, storing and living with shit would be about the first damned chore targeted for technological, er, elimination.
The cow has traditionally been a necessary restorer of agricultural land. Fields used for our dominant crops lose vital nutrients to those crops. Allowed to rest, the fields revert to grasses. A farmer then allows his small herd to graze. This restores the nitrogen/phosphorous/potassium (NPK) balance to the soil and allows significant grass root systems to add organic energy to the dirt and encourage a below-ground ecosystem comprised of all manner of critters, bringing the soil once again toward fertility. When tilled, the plow rips through that grassy ecosystem, killing it and freeing its stored nutrient base for the future grain crop. The farmer loses grain and legume production with this slower process, but needs fewer foreign inputs to renew the soil, which is good in the days when foreign inputs needed to be moved to the farm by horse- or oxen-pulled carts.
Slowly, tractors and trucks replaced the draft animals, meaning fewer and fewer animals were required to pull plows and carts. (NB: Loss of draft animals and the manure they naturally produce was one of the prime reasons the Amish decided to eschew mechanized transportation in the early century.) More importantly, as this increased mobility changed the farm, farmers got a non-manure-based replacement for soil fertility:
Into this disturbing period of cultural change [the 1930s] came two violently disturbing events: World War I and World War II. Both of them needed explosives. Lots of explosives. As fortune would have it, explosives are made out of NPK. As a result, the war effort drove incredibly fast advances in the chemistry, manufacture, acquisition, and distribution of NPK. Soil scientists and bomb scientists worked side by side. The industry to efficiently utilize, manufacture, and distribute NPK grew at warp speed, financed largely by the war effort.
Fortunately for this manufacturing, petroleum was cheap and plentiful. Manures, plant residues, bacteria, ashes, and rocks had historically supplied NPK.
(Salatin, ibid, p. 126.)
And as the wars spurred research, fossil fuels more and more created NPK for both explosives and fertilizers. The manure that plagued much of human history had a potential replacement.
Though the average farmer has not needed the fertilizer and mobility cows provide, that doesn't mean the average consumer has lost his or her appetite for milk or meat. The process for obtaining the commodities simply changed.
More and larger tractors and cheaper and more abundant chemical fertilizers have allowed us to grow far, far more grain than we historically could. Back to 1910: According to an old Wired magazine article (sadly, not easily searched anymore), the cost of a small bag of flour, containing enough calories to sustain a single person for a day, cost four days labor to purchase. At the time the article was written, that cost had dropped to 69 cents, a fraction of an hour's labor today. We can credit cheap fossil fuels for that change, powering the tractors and producing the fertilizers that allow farmers to farm without ever touching manure.
This overabundance of grains has allowed cattle growers to simply bring dinner to the cow, rather than allow the cow to go and get natural grasses. Thus, the laborious task of escorting cattle to traditional grazing grounds has been shifted to keeping the cattle contained. Salatin notes that poured concrete flooring allowed farmers to scrape shit with far less effort than the above-described straw absorbtion and shoveling method; adding small tractors with scrapers further simplified the task.
It is into this mechanized process—not the natural grass-eating cattle-rearing familiar before all that cheap go-juice was available—that the climate change scientists start probing the cows. And it is this process that greatly exacerbates methane release, not the poor cows.
First of all, the cows are not the only atmospheric carbon source to worry about. Remember above when I mentioned the plowing cycle cutting through the grasslands, and how the dying grass ecosystem releases nutrients? When things die, more than nutrients are released; dying things also release methane. And quite a lot has died in our world's soil since the plow started its killing spree.
I read recently the accusation that aquifer depletion has lowered some parts of the globe as much as 20 or 30 feet. This is inaccurate. Aquifers are essentially subterranean gravel pits with water filling the interstitial space. Drain the water and the gravel continues to to support the shape of the aquifer. Aquifer subsidence is minimal, if it happens at all.
What has been lost especially in the US heartland is not a supporting column of water, but organic material. Many of the former grassy ecosystems in the midwest bore as much organic material below the soil as they showed above, and some of these natural grasses grew twelve feet tall when left ungrazed. The plows all but killed this ecosystem, releasing the nutrients; the crops grew from the nutrients; and the crops were then carted away to be eaten. Since we have interrupted the nasty and icky manure cycle, choosing instead to flush our solid wastes away, our natural fertilizer has been denied the land.
Infertile soil further loses more particulate to erosion, sending our topsoil down river just like our barely treated shit. Jarrod Diamond noted this in his book Collapse. In some mid-western towns, the only patch of land that hasn't been brought in and out of plowing has been the church, already planted with a nearby graveyard. Some of these churches sit on a hills 15-20 feet taller than the surrounding plain. The very, very flat surrounding plain.
Over hundreds of years, we have transformed this soil ecosystem into greenhouse gas.
Again, I'll not harsh the buzz of working scientists by wagging a finger in their direction. They are merely measuring gaseous emissions from the most obvious sources first. Other scientists will no doubt start to measure things like plowed field gaseous releases and start to get a handle on this problem.
I'll instead blame the very short-term memory and limited cognitive faculties of humans. Blaming AGW on cow farts is easy. If one merely abandon the cattle industry by eschewing its products, one can drive those convenient fossil-fueled autos without guilt. Writers already enamored of the vegan lifestyle can crank out crank observations largely devoid of merit, like Diet for a Small Planet, pinning more and more of the guilt on bovine digestion.
It's cognitive dissonance embodied. And it's completely wrong. Here's why:
An herbivore is a grass pruner. Without the herbivore, the forage would grow to senescence, fall over, and oxidize CO2 into the atmosphere. The herbivorous pruning restarts the juvenile growth phase of the biomass engine — kind of like pushing a horticultural restart button. Without the herbivore, the photosynthetic activity — viewed like a solar collector — shuts down into dormancy. Throughout history and worldwide, the herbivore reawakens biomass, stimulating it to greater solar activity. . . .
Because some people use the cow abusively by denying this normal role is not reason to demonize the cow any more than it would be proper to eliminate automobiles because someone drives one recklessly. Not a single long-term tillage system on earth exists without an herbivorous component. You can't just substitute tofu (made from tillage — soybeans) for the herbivore. It doesn't work ecologically. Period. No matter how much you like tofu.
This is perhaps one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about farming ecology. In a desire to get rid of the cow, they want to substitute plants that require tillage. No long-term example exists in which tillage is sustainable. It always requires injection of biomass from outside the system or a soil-development pasture cycle. To think that plants which require tillage can build soil like perennial pasture indicates environmental absurdity.
Tillage, or stirring the soil, burns out organic matter due to the hyperoxygenation it creates. While this offers a tremendous amount of energy to a growing crop like squash, corn, or wheat, it comes at a price in soil degradation, and especially nitrogen retention.
(Salatin, ibid, pp. 20-21, emphasis mine.)
We are, as Salatin notes, degrading the soil—and releasing still-unmeasured AGW gases in the process—in an effort to avoid manual labor and increase profits. Besides, this cheap energy is running low. Don't believe me? Look at the financial condition of much of the world, and wonder why gas still runs over $3/gallon. Hint: scarce commodities command higher prices. Bottom line; we will be returning toward 1910 agriculture whether we like it or not. Hopefully we can do so with some of the modern tools in a more sustainable and less labor-intensive fashion.
There's a lot more to hate about modern animal husbandry, but I'll rant later.
