A Government Accountability Office report explains that one facility can produce up to 1.6 million tons of manure each year, which causes 1.5 times more pollution to water and air than a city like Philadelphia.
The study concludes that even under the best grass-fed, grazing conditions, cows could still contract the fatal disease. “Our findings that there is a genetic component to BSE are significant because they tell you we can have this disease everywhere in the world, even in so-called BSE-free countries,” said Juergen A. Richt, the professor at Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine who conducted the study.
Brazil’s new environment minister, Carlos Minc is committed to serious punative action when it comes to the estimated 60,000 cows that are raised on illegally deforested land in the region of Amazonia.
In fact, cattle pasture now covers 7.8% of the Amazon region, with an ever growing presence as worldwide demand for beef skyrockets. Illegal cattle grazing helped Brazil become the world’s largest beef exporter in 2004, but after several years of declining deforestation rates in the Amazon, degradation of the rain forest is again on the rise. The pressure to produce more and more has led many ranchers to ignore regulation.
It is rare to find a politician who is willing to stand up to an industry that is responsible for a significant portion of the GDP, but Minister Minc made good on his promises to crack down on illegal ranching last week when his office confiscated 3,100 cows from one rancher who used a nature reserve in the state of Para as pasture land, cutting away forest that got in the way of his cattle. Not only is Minc committed to punishing those who clearcut the Amazon, he sees a use for the contraband livestock.
Aw, c’mon, pull my finger!
You’ve probably had that one pulled (pardon the pun) on you at least once in your life, and the old guy got a good laugh out of your response. It’s ok, old guys do strange things, I know.
Well, this isn’t about old guys, but sheep, cattle, deer and goats, the premier emitters of methane gas in the world. In this case, nature is “pulling the finger.”
The Swedes are an inventive lot, but this article in The Local really takes the cake, or milk, if you will.
They milk 1000 cows at Wapnö castle outside Halmstad, Sweden, and during the process of cooling the milk from 37 to 3 degrees C, they have devised a way to capture that heat and use it to warm up the castle and workshop buildings.
The Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences has just received $590,000 to support research into how diet affects a cow’s methane emissions. Livestock are blamed for 28 percent of the world’s human-caused emissions of methane, a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Photo courtesy of Man vyi at Wikimedia Commons
When I was a kid on the farm, tiptoeing through a barnyard was a way of life. It was something like playing hopscotch with cow pies. When spring came, it was time to clean out the barn, transfer the winter’s supply of manure, one pitchfork at a time, into a “honey wagon” and take it to the fields to be used as fertilizer. It amazed me how much there was, and until
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