Are cows to blame for global warming?

BEEF farmers have launched a stinging attack on a climate change expert who will tonight urge consumers to abandon meat diets in favour of vegetarianism.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is calling on individuals to cut their carbon footprints by transforming their diets at a lecture hosted by Compassion in World Farming lecture in London.

He will claim that current global animal production is responsible for 18% of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions - and the figure is set to double by 2050.

Dr Pachauri said that although people are cutting car and air journeys, insulating their homes and recycling, they are yet to fully realise the impact of livestock production on climate change.

He said an average household could more effectively cut their emissions by halving their meat consumption rather than halving their car usage.

He said: “While the world is looking for sharp reductions in greenhouse gases responsible for climate change, growing global meat production is going to severely compromise future efforts.

“A small reduction can make a difference. For example, a study from the University of Chicago showed that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by 20%, it would be as if they switched from a standard Sedan to the ultra-efficient Prius.”

Compassion in World Farming argues that measures to reduce livestock emissions should be treated with caution, such as changing cows’ diets so that they produce less methane.

 It’s concerned that the animals’ health and welfare could suffer.

 “For example, a diet with higher proportion of cereals to reduce their methane output is likely to cause high levels of lameness, as the more acidic diet adversely affects the cattle’s feet,” said CIWF ambassador Joyce D’Silva.

 The UK’s National Beef Association (NBA) reacted to the speech with “disappointment, and a weary lack of surprise”.

 NBA chairman Christopher Thomas-Everard said the 18% figure had long since been discredited since it was first “invented” in 2006 in a FOA report “Livestock’s Long Shadow”.

 A third of the 18% was attributed in that report to the clearance of Amazonian rainforest, originally for cattle ranching and now, more commonly, for the growing of crops like soya. It was based on the peak 2004 figure of 26,000 sq km of rainforest burned.

 In contrast, the UK’s temperate grass grows freshly each spring, said Mr Thomas-Everard.

 All the country’s beef cows graze grass in the summer and are either fed hay, silage or straw in winter, or in many cases remain grazing throughout winter too.

 “Concerned consumers should know that grass-fed UK beef has a lower carbon footprint than any alternative,” said Mr Thomas-Everard.

 “An obvious feature of the UK’s topography is that 61% of ground cover is either grassland or moorland, only 22% is arable.

 “Humans cannot eat grass but ruminant livestock convert it into a food the British have been eating for thousands of years.”

 According to the NBA the vegetarian alternatives of lentils, pulses and cereals all require tractor fuel for their production and it takes 10 units of fossil fuel energy to produce every unit of this type of food. 

  “Even if it were possible to plough our grasslands and moorlands and grow vegan food, the carbon release would be far greater than centuries of the exhalations of cattle and sheep,” said Mr Thomas-Everard.

 The NBA pointed out that methane is produced by bacteria consuming vegetation - whether inside the bovine rumens or outside. 

 Where there are no ruminants, all uneaten grass will decay and in wet conditions bacteria decomposing vegetation will give off methane.

 “The only landscape that does not produce methane is a desert,” said Mr Thomas-Everard.

  According to the NBA, global warming theorists should be more concerned by other potential sources of carbon release.

 These include methane hydrates on the sea bed, bacterial decay of warming tundra, volcanoes, warming of atmospheric water vapour, the burning of dwindling reserves of oil, coal and natural gas and the destruction of forests. 

 On the latter point, it points to a research anomaly produced by a team led by Frank Keppler from the Max-Planck Institute in Germany.

 The NBA says its researchers discovered that plants produce up to one-third of the second most important greenhouse gas - methane. 

 If true, it suggests that global deforestation will lead to declining levels of atmospheric methane.

 Climate change sceptic Alwyn Davies, of Brynford, Holywell, said farmers were right to condemn Mr Pachauri’s claims, especially that 18% of “warming” was due to farm animal emissions.

 He said: “How very odd that when 60m buffalo roamed the US in the 1800s, we were in the grip  of the Little Ice Age.

 “Will Mr Pachauri suggest the culling of millions of ruminants in Africa, also producing  methane?”

  Environmentalist often cite the claim that cattle require 8kg of grain for every 1kg of beef grown.

 The NBA says this is misleading: poultry and pigs require grain but ruminants - other than bull dairy calves  - are usually not fed grain.

 Instead beef cows usually graze for most of the year, and are fed over the winter on grass silage, waste feeds such as straw, stock-feed potatoes, waste vegetables, brewers grains, by-product molasses, breakfast cereals, bread and cakes past their sell-by-date, and sugar beet pulp.

 Mr Davies said the issue highlighted the scaremongering which besets the climate change debate.

 He added: “Environmentalists supported bio-fuels and food crops are now poured into fuel tanks, leading to a world shortage.

 “The NFU should ignore the nonsense that is man-made warming and concentrate on its core function: helping their members provide the food the world so desperately needs.”

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