https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/red-meat-local-farmer-ottawa-1.5244343
[Ley farming is a bit more complicated than simple crop rotation, but it
worked in much of Europe for thousands of years without depleting the
soil. By contrast, conventional Big Ag practice in North America has
been referred to as 'mining the soil', and the chemical warfare used to
try to replace the nitrogen and phosphorus has led to algae blooms while
not resupplying the trace elements which are critical to soil health.
links, video and images in online article]
Fight climate change by eating meat, Ottawa farmers say
An age-old method for raising cattle can actually help reduce greenhouse
gases, farmers argue
Laura Osman , Jennifer Chevalier · CBC News · Posted: Aug 15, 2019
Farmers say people can still take a bite out of climate change while
eating red meat, pushing back against global headlines calling for major
changes to the world's farming and eating habits.
A UN report released last week left people hungry to know more about
what they should eat if they want to help curb the climate crisis.
Although it stopped short of explicitly advocating switching to a vegan
or vegetarian diet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
recommended reducing meat consumption.
"It hurts my soul to hear that we're viewing red meat as detrimental to
climate change," said Ottawa farmer Amber Payne. "I look at it as a
solution to fix many global problems."
Payne is one of a number of small-scale "regenerative farmers" who
believe that raising grass-fed cattle can actually help reduce
greenhouse gas emissions.
"We use animals here as tools on the land to capture the carbon and
store it in the ground," Payne said.
Carbon capture, as it's called, involves keeping plant life healthy so
it can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and into the soil,
trapping it underground.
Her cows graze on grass in a large field by the side of a road in
Greely, in the south end of Ottawa.
Every morning and evening she moves them along to a new spot to let the
grazed ground regenerate, promoting the growth of plants. She said that
helps fight climate change.
Age-old method
It may be a convenient argument for a beef farmer to make, but there is
merit to it, according to Ryan Katz-Rosene, a University of Ottawa
professor who is the president of the Environmental Studies Association
of Canada. He also lives on a farm that produces sheep for meat and wool.
He said there are a number of ways grass can sequester carbon. He
compares his and Payne's farms to the prairies before modern times, when
grazing buffalo helped maintain the natural ecosystem and create
carbon-rich topsoil.
"In a pasture or in a grassland, those grasses are pulling carbon
dioxide out of atmosphere," Katz-Rosene said. But he conceded the
million-dollar question is whether more carbon is being captured in that
grass than is being emitted by methane-producing cows.
'Not a magical solution'
The person who might be able to answer that question is one of Canada's
top experts in the field of agriculture and the environment.
Dr. Raymond Desjardins is a senior research scientist at Agriculture
Canada. He was recently appointed a member of the Order of Canada for
developing techniques to quantify greenhouse gas emissions.
He said the amount of carbon currently being sequestered in most
grasslands is relatively small — but the amount of carbon in the soil
beneath that grassland is huge.
According to Desjardins, the question that needs to be asked is: What
would that land be used for if cattle weren't grazing on it? If
perennial grasslands where cattle now feed were turned into annual crops
like canola or wheat, he said, significant amounts of that carbon would
be released into the atmosphere.
"You can lose a lot of carbon if you shift from perennial crops to
annual crops. So having cattle eating grass is good, but it's not a
magical solution for solving the climate change problem."
He said consumers don't need to stop eating meat, but they do need to be
aware of the emissions associated with the food they eat.
"Eating grass-fed beef might be better [than grain-fed beef] for the
environment. However, there are a lot of things to consider."
For instance, grain-fed cattle in traditional feedlots are more
efficiently raised — meaning they grow faster — leading to less methane
being produced per unit of feed they consume. Grass-fed cows take longer
to grow, hence more methane is produced before they are slaughtered.
Know who grows your food, farmers say
Katz-Rosene agrees that so-called regenerative farms aren't a
silver-bullet solution. It takes a lot of land to raise beef on a
pasture — one of the biggest concerns of the UN group that released the
report, he said.
"It's a serious limiting factor."
But, he said, there's no guarantee your plant-based protein is being
grown in an environmentally sustainable way.
"They could be in Kansas or something, and producing some massive mono
crop of soy using glyphosate [chemical herbicide] and synthetic
fertilizers and enormous amounts of diesel," he said. "Is that
ecologically beneficial?"
Payne, who said she's dedicated her life to nutrition and sustainable
farming, said the first step for most people is to simply become more
conscious of where their food is coming from, no matter what they're
consuming.
"What are their practices? What are they putting on their soil?" she
said. "Get to know the people that grow your food."
--
Darryl McMahon
Freelance Project Manager (sustainable systems)
=====================================
To subscribe, unsubscribe, turn vacation mode on or off,
or carry out other user-actions for this list, visit
https://www.freelists.org/list/keiths-list
Note: new climate change website is now in pre-launch
Visit https://www.10n10.ca/e/index.shtml
