Given what we know about the limits of soil seqeustration this is basically a PR exercise by the meat industry to keep the methane flowing into the atmosphere.
Given what we know about the limits of soil seqeustration this is basically a PR exercise by the meat industry to keep the methane flowing into the atmosphere.
Yeah, ruminants take huge amounts of grains and legumes to produce small amounts of food. The US basically grows food for cattle and cars, with a tiny chunk going to people.
even better – ruminants are not meant to survive on grains and legumes, it fucks over their digestive system so we have to throw in massive doses of antibiotics to counter the damage …
Any source on the feed being the factor necessitating the antibiotics? Afaik, there just are way too many and they tend to stand in their own shit all day and that makes the antibiotics necessary.
(Somewhat related: I was a bit horrified recently when my dad told me about growing up on a farm and how badly their cattle took suddenly switching from their winter feed [siloed grass] to their summer feed [fresh grass]. When they would become overly gassy after the switch, his granddad would routinely pierce their rumen to let the gas out, along with a bit of blood. This procedure turned out to be completely unnecessary when they started mixing the feed for a few weeks in spring.)
This counts for very little, but I once transported a dairy farmer (Paramedic) between hospitals and had about an hour or so to pick his brain about the industry. As I recall, Corn has too much sugar in it, and if you give your cows too much corn, your feed will be too ‘hot’ and it fucks the cows up somehow. There’s a LOT of work that goes into balancing the nutrient intake for dairy cows. Also, the antibiotics are used for promoting growth in meat cattle, because something about the antibiotics makes the cows grow bigger faster.