By “livestock”, I mainly mean cattle, since they are the biggest livestock greenhouse gas emitters and their care entails much appropriation of land from mother nature, directly (grazing ) and indirectly (feed crops). This headline tells part of the story: Harvard Study Finds Shift to Grass-Fed Beef Would Require 30% More Cattle and Increase Beef’s Methane Emissions 43%. Or if you prefer: The Search for Sustainable Beef: Grazing threatens wildlife and takes an enormous toll on habitats, and won’t fix the climate crisis animal agriculture creates. Yeah, I know. The grass-fed cow movement. Tastes better (so they say, though I haven’t seen any blind tests on this point). Better quality of life for our bovine friends. Beneficial manure to replenish the soil. Unfortunately, weighing the good and the bad, the bad wins. The amount of land devoted to grazing must be reduced.
So what needs to be done is to grow more feed (e.g., corn, barley, oats) on less land, while doing as little damage as possible to the environment. Also known as sustainable intensification of agriculture. And to find ways to be kinder to cows in their constrained circumstances. I’ve already written a lot on sustainable intensification of agriculture, for instance:
First Step in Helping Farmers Help the Environment: Listen, Don’t Tell, Part I
First Step in Helping Farmers Help the Environment: Listen, Don’t Tell, Part II
First Step in Helping Farmers Help the Environment: Listen, Don’t Tell, Part III
Sustainable Intensive Farming: The Only Way to Go
As for being kinder to cows, the Code of Cattle Care provides guidance, as does Humane Farm Animal Care, a non-profit certification organization. I’m sure even more could be done but we need ideas that don’t involve expansion of agricultural land for grazing.
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Note: As for reducing livestock-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, I dealt with this before in Mitigation Measures for a Less Warm Planet, Part IIId: Reduce Methane Emissions from Anthropogenic Sources. The crux of the matter: the GHG in question is mostly methane and you get a lot more cow protein with much less methane in North America and Europe than in the rest of the world. As it turns out, Latin America, South Asia, and parts of Sub Saharan Africa account for over two-thirds of cow-related methane emissions. The sinful meat eaters in the Northern Hemisphere are not driving these emissions. It's the low-productive cows of the less developed world, the ones that give little protein for all that gas. Help them! Improve feed quality, disease control, and grassland management. Select the best breeds for local conditions. Tweak their gut microbiota so that they're less gaseous. The developed world already knows how to do this - we just need to spread this wealth of knowledge and technology to the rest of the world and help them pay for coming up to speed. Think about it: if, say, improved cows gave humans eight times the protein per unit of methane, global consumption of cow protein could double and livestock-related methane emissions would still go way down.