Our PM's Harvard speech

[harm_less]

The closing sentence of the linked article covers off your suggestions aptly: "The proposal was also put to Climate Minister James Shaw, who told 1News heÔÇÖs grown ÔÇ£very frustrated at the simplistic nature of the debate"."

The grass you mention is fertilised with large amounts of soluble fertilisers which require huge hydrocarbon input in their manufacture. The cows' diet is supplemented with PKE and other imported feeds that are transported often thousands of kms and are derived from environmentally destructive sources.

The pasture is grazed heavily by dense herds of livestock who exhale methane as part of their digestion. Grass could be considered a carbon sink but nowhere to the same extent as forests considering the biomass differential between the two. Also the fact that the grass is grazed is equivalent to forest harvest, which also then releases the sequestered carbon effectively negating any gain.

So what land area do the wilderbeasts roam? The 'stocking rate' won't come anywhere near that of our industrial farming systems so the effluent they excrete is easily absorbed by their environment, in lieu of any artificial fertilisers. That's a 'closed loop' system as opposed to our high input and high discharge farming systems.

Your right about the fertilizer use, thats far more of an issue.
I know farmers who have ran very successful dairy farms without the need of these synthetic fertilizers. It can be done. As far as "farts" from cows, I doubt it makes much difference what they are eating, unless they are eating much higher quantities of grass than in the wild.
But why does dairy only get the flack from this? All beef farming is the same. I do see they are going after sheep now however.
I see dung beetles have been introduced into NZ, something we never had here while african counterparts do.
But it is really messed up when I see studies done with genetic engineered bacteria given to stock to change their emissions in their digestive tract. Thats messing with nature.


Also some interesting information - NZ does not count much of the south islands native forest as our carbon sink. Why i dont know.

The methane is exhaled by ruminants far more so than as part of their excretion. The big difference between savanna grazing wildebeests, and pasture grazed beef cattle for that matter is the intensity of those herds. The situation with CAFO systems for beef animals would be the only cow farming system that comes close to that of dairy operations in terms of animal density, and fortunately that sort of farming is very rare in NZ.

Imported feed for dairy herds doesn't so much change the animals' emissions but the transportation of many of those feedstocks over great distances contribute to CO2 discharged from the trucks and ships used to do so.

Genetic engineering of livestock and their gut biome together with modifying dietary inputs such as the addition of seaweeds is really just a band-aid fix for a very sick farming model.