Eating meat and carbon answered

Some people favour grass fed cattle, and some favour grain fed.  The flavours outcomes of the meat are quite distinct, with the latter considered more tender after cooking due to the increased fat distributed throughout the flesh.

Of course the meat production chain has different issues attached to it as well.  Cattle feed lots are the main source of meat production in the USA, and increasingly elsewhere.  However if you have ever watched Food Inc you will know that feed lots appear to be grossly inappropriate for the welfare of the animals.  And, also become potential for ghettos of e-coli multiplication.

Intuitively it would seem that feed lots would also be producing greater methane and other gases, or carbon equivalents.  Think of all the production of grains, then the transporting of that feed to the lot, and then the carbon generated by all that compared to a bunch of cows on a paddock eating grass.  

But this study says that feed lots actually produces “lower GHG emissions than grass fed production”  claiming “the additional effort in producing and transporting feeds is effectively offset by the increased efficiency of meat production in feedlots.”  

This seems nigh on impossible.  Then, speaking with a cattleman last evening I was told of a product called Rumensin.  It is a supplementary feed that increases energy for each mouthful of feed in cattle, by changing the microbal population in the rumen of cattle.  This then increases the efficiency of meat production.

That is, this enables cattle to get larger on the same amount of feed.  Great for cattle ranchers, because for the same feed resource, they earn more [assuming that the price per kilo remains constant].  And this Rumensin can be fed to grazing or lot fed cattle, and also dairy cattle [so as to produce greater milk quantity for the same amount of feed].

Interestingly, it also claims that the product “reduces the production of waste gasses, carbon dioxide and methane”.  Hmmm!!

Unfortunately, if accidently ingested by horses it appears that it is fatal.

There is also a sheep version which was tested by the Australia Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority. They have strict limits on ingestion of this product by sheep that produce milk (nil) and 7 days limits pre-slaughter for export meats.  It appears that 1 day limits apply for the local market, but the paper does show limited acceptance by most continents of any tainting whatsoever.

And another piece of research says that “eating red meat three times a week results in between 164kg* to 258kg**of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions a year - vastly different to figures quoted that claim up to 1.5 tonnes.”

So I guess the take on this is that eating the meat from cattle has a much lower production of carbon equivalents than previously thought.  So eat up, the effect on the climate is lower than we thought.  But I will be ordering the grass fed organic version.