Last month, I wrote about the world’s largest leather exporter leaving the Amazon. This week there is even bigger news. The world’s largest meat exporter is leaving.

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The efficiency of current animal farming practices is an “illusion”, according to a report released last Summer by the Pew Charitable Trusts (May 30, 2008).

This “illusion” is made possible by “cheap grain, cheap water and prison-like confinement systems.” Underpinning this status is the drive for the lowest possible labor costs–meaning automated feeding, watering, and waste disposal is the norm–which undermines and impoverishes traditional, family and small farm operations (farms which are typically bought out by corporate farming conglomerates, who then receive  the lion’s share of subsidies; about half a trillion since 2001).

What some call “industrial” farming and others –like the Union of Concerned Scientists–more descriptively refer to as  “confined” farming, results in massive over-crowding of livestock where unsafe/unhealthy conditions prevail for both the  animals, and the workers. These conditions make the spread of disease easier, and lead to over use of antibiotics (which are also often used to keep young calves sickly, and their meat more tender). *

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Timberland has announced a new policy agreement with Greenpeace to ensure that leather used in new boots and shoes won’t contribute to deforestation in the Amazon.

The policy will issue a moratorium on purchasing any cattle raised in newly deforested areas within the Amazon Rainforest, and it will force all of its suppliers to do the same.

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Irish scientists have discovered that adding just a small amount of fish oil to the diet of cattle can vastly reduce the amount of methane produced by, ahem…cow farts.

Climate scientists have long known that, pound for pound, methane is 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping the suns rays, making it a highly potent greenhouse gas. An incredible 900 billion tonnes of the noxious fumes are produced each year by methanogen bacteria that live in the digestive systems of ruminants such as cattle, sheep and goats.

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Courtesy of  Scientific American and Environmental Health News, another reason to despise plastic. According to an article by Matthew Cimitile, researchers believe that airborne pollution from plastics manufacturing may change the DNA of cattle.

It all started when ranchers living 4 miles downwind from the Formosa Plastics facilities in Point Comfort, Texas noticed that their steers were losing weight, their cows were miscarrying and having stillborn calves and some of the calves were being born with abnormalities like missing limbs:

Tests have revealed that herds as far as six miles downwind of the factories have more DNA disturbances than other herds not downwind, according to scientists at Texas A & M University. The changes in chromosome structure and other genetic damage can increase the animal’s risk of cancer and reproductive damage

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The Nature Conservancy announced this week that they have purchased ranchland in Shasta, California and hope to return Big Springs Creek to its former glory as a major salmon run.

The organization noticed the creek’s consistent, glacier-fed flowing water supply should make it the perfect spawning area for the embattled Pacific salmon, but it wasn’t being properly cared for. Years later, they’ve purchased 4,136 acres of surrounding land and plan to fence off the creek to protect it.

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A Swedish town announced last month that it will use cremated bodies to provide heat, and now the British town of Reepham has decided to heat many of its buildings by burning oil made from melted cow and pig carcasses. Are dead bodies— human or otherwise— the next big thing in heating?

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The Red-billed Oxpecker is a member of the starling and myna family Sturndidae. It is native to the Savannah of sub-Saharan Africa, from the Central African Republic east to Sudan and south to northern and eastern South Africa.

It is basically an insect eater, but gets its name from its habit of feeding on ticks and other insects living on the hides of large animals. While it is claimed that it can eat up to 100 engorged ticks a day this is often secondary as its favourite food is blood which it sources by opening tick bites with its beak. It is even claimed it will stop wounds from healing to ensure an ongoing supply of blood.

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After years of debate and planning, the St. Paul, MN city council has voted unanimously to move forward with a unique plan to produce biogas from manure and ethanol waste in rural farms and pump it miles to power an enormous paper recycling plant.

The energy-efficiency of recycling paper is not the best, so this plan is a welcome alternative-fuel twist to the standard process.

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A Government Accountability Office report, however, has come out against the proposed EPA change. The 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. In Congress, a House oversight committee convened today to try to convince the EPA away from the change.

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Previously believed to be a food-borne disease, researchers have discovered that some cows are genetically predisposed to contract bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The report shows that up to 48,000 cattle in the United States alone could carry the gene.

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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

Cow manure has been discovered as an energy source: it has power and it’s being used to make electricity and ethanol. Take for example the E3 BioFuels Genesis plant in Mead, Nebraska. The $80 million facility began operation this summer, turning out some 25 million gallons of ethanol a year (a rather small amount, compared to other ethanol plants around the country). What makes this facility unique is it’s patented closed-loop system, the first of its kind in America, and quite possibly in the world.

The plant is old news, really, but here’s how it works. A nearby beef cattle feedlot provides 150,000 pounds of manure every day, which is processed through an anaerobic digester, and that produces methane. The methane is used to fire the plant’s boilers, replacing expensive natural gas, resulting in a large reduction in operating expenses. Company officials say the Genesis plant produces 46 units of energy for every unit of fossil fuel energy required, a 46:1 efficiency ratio. Conventional ethanol plants are rated at a ratio of 3:1.

A byproduct of ethanol production, wet distiller’s grain, is fed to the cattle in the feedlot and the process begins all over again. Now this is a very brief explanation of what’s happening at the Genesis plant. Their website explains it very well..

So why am I writing about this? Well, there’s more to cow manure, as you probably know. Millions of tons are produced every day by the estimated 1.5 billion cattle populating our planet. Let’s put this into some sort of perspective. The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay estimates the average dairy cow drops 148 pounds of manure each day. Do the math: that’s a lot of BS! And you thought it was all in Washington!

Dairy Farms

Haubenschild FarmSeveral dairy farms in America use the output of their cattle in much the same way as the Nebraska plant, with one exception. The Haubenschild Dairy Farm in Princeton, Minnesota, is a shining example. Instead of using the methane to create heat for boilers, it’s used to run generators that provide electric power for the operation, and supply electricity to surrounding homes as well. Anaerobic digester systems are expensive though, ranging from $200,000 to $1,000,000 depending on the size of the herd, so farmers with smaller herds have been reluctant to make that kind of investment. The USDA has free software for download that will determine digester size and cost based on the size of a farm’s herd. I found it fun, and very informative.

Hopefully, as the science of digesters improves, the process will become less costly, and more farmers and commercial operations will be able to take advantage of poop power. I was surprised to learn from The AgSTAR Program website that several pig farms are using digesters, and there’s even a duck farm in Wisconsin using a digester.

Belching

Here’s the capper: while manure provides greenhouse gasses, a cow’s breath introduces far more methane and other gasses into the air. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the six million tons of methane burped by cattle in the US each year is equivalent to 36 million tons of carbon dioxide. If you add the output of sheep, goats and other ruminants, they all account for more than 18% of the greenhouse gasses that cause global warming, and that, according to the IPCC, is more than cars, planes and all other forms of transportation.

So, is the world’s cattle population contributing to global warming? It would seem so with all the belching and pooping, and the IPCC makes a strong case.

While we’re beginning to discover applications for animal manure, what about the burping? I doubt gas masks would work well on cows, and there’s no way we’ll be decreasing herd sizes anytime soon. Diet seems the best way to reduce production of greenhouse gasses produced by livestock, along with more efficient and productive methods of dealing with manure.

I’m so proud of myself; I didn’t once say “shit."