How Do Cows Contribute To Global Warming – Livestock accounts for more than 40% of methane emissions, mostly from beef and dairy cattle. Photo: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty

About one-third of human-caused methane emissions come from livestock, mostly beef and dairy cattle, produced during the digestion process that ruminants (hoofed animals including cows, sheep, and goats) allow plants to absorb.

How Do Cows Contribute To Global Warming

Cows and other farm animals produce about 14% of human-caused climate emissions, and methane from their burps and manure is considered the biggest focus and best chance for controlling global warming.

Cutting Greenhouse Gases From Food Production Is Urgent, Scientists Say

Although methane breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The reduction in emissions has been heralded as an immediate opportunity to slow global warming ahead of the Cop26 UN climate talks in Glasgow.

“Cutting methane is the single biggest opportunity to slow warming between now and 2040,” Durwood Salke, a lead analyst at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in August.

Methane reduction options include alternative feeds for cattle, reducing feed loss and waste, and cutting meat and dairy production.

The UN wants to move away from large meat and dairy industries, especially in high-income countries. However, production continues to rise.

Burp By Burp, Fighting Emissions From Cows

The US and EU made a joint pledge last month to cut methane emissions by about a third over the next decade, with no specific commitments for the farming sector.

“No country has a real target to reduce livestock-related emissions or meat consumption,” says Christine Chemnitz, head of agricultural policy at the environmental NGO Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

New Zealand is the only country to legislate to cut greenhouse gases from livestock, but with farming emissions still rising, the government has been advised it will need to cut cattle numbers to meet targets.

The UK’s legal obligation to be net zero by 2050 has no specific targets for the farming sector. The government’s net zero plan only goes as far as “75% of England’s farmers will engage in low-carbon practices by 2030”.

How Much Do Cow Burps Cost Us?

The Scottish Government’s climate plans set a target to reduce emissions from farming to 9% below 2018 levels by 2032, but do not include livestock specificities.

In Europe, Denmark has passed a legally binding target to reduce climate emissions from the agricultural sector by at least 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels, but again nothing specific for livestock.

In the US, the state of California has a goal of reducing emissions from the livestock sector by 40% below 2013 levels by 2030, but is on track to meet that goal.

“The legally binding targets we see from countries are not sector specific. They tend to set emissions targets that are flexible about how to achieve them,” says Ben Henderson, agricultural policy analyst at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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Brazil and Argentina, two of the world’s largest producers of beef products and animal feed crops, have reportedly argued strongly against UN recommendations that reducing meat consumption is essential to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

While countries may be wary of committing to action, Chemnitz says the EU’s goal of reducing emissions by at least 55% by 2030 is one commitment that “definitely cannot be met without reducing livestock and meat consumption”.

Cows are milked on an intensive farm in Drucat, France. Europe has no climate-specific targets for livestock farming. Photo: Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty

Northern Ireland, which has seen an increase in meat production over the past decade, may need to cut its cattle and sheep numbers by 86% to meet its net zero target. The Irish government has been advised that a 51% reduction in climate emissions by 2030 cannot be achieved with its ever-expanding dairy industry.

Good Reasons You Should Care About Cow Farts & Cow Burps

“Like climate a decade or two ago, the science to address agriculture and diet is strong, but the political will and cost to change the system to get less [environmentally] harmful things and better things like fruits and vegetables, and people’s health. And what’s lacking is helping markets adjust to improve the planet,” says Professor Tim Benton, director of research at Chatham House.

Although there are no climate-specific targets for livestock farming in Europe, there are environmental policies that can limit the meat and dairy sectors. For example, the Netherlands was recently forced to propose radical plans to reduce the number of livestock by about a third to help reduce ammonia pollution.

Sign up for the Farming Animals monthly update to get the largest roundup of farming and food stories from around the world and keep up with our investigations. You can send us your stories and thoughts Animal Farming @ Methane is produced as part of the digestive process of cows and cow burps are full of it. That’s what makes cattle a major contributor to methane emissions in the United States.

Climate scientists say greenhouse gas emissions must be dramatically reduced to prevent catastrophic global warming. At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, over 100 countries, including the United States, agreed to reduce methane emissions by 30% by 2030.

Livestock Don’t Contribute 14.5% Of…

Cows are a large part of the standard diet in the United States, and Americans have eaten an average of 56 pounds of beef per year over the past 100 years, according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Methane emissions from livestock, including cattle, are the largest source of agricultural emissions worldwide, according to a global methane assessment published in 2021. Researchers say cows are the leading animal emitters because of the unique way they produce methane — through burping and defecating.

Step back for a minute because we’re about to get into some math to verify the data analyzed from the EPA to find out exactly how much methane cows emit in the US.

In the United States, greenhouse gas emissions are monitored by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 2019, the United States emitted 6.6 billion metric tons of the greenhouse gas, and data shows that 10.1% of those emissions were methane. It is the second most prevalent greenhouse gas behind carbon dioxide (CO2), and is 80 times more global-warming than methane CO2 over a 20-year period, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) says on its website.

Methane is produced as part of a normal digestive process in animals, but since cows and other animals such as sheep, goats and buffalo have four chambers instead of four, they produce more methane as a byproduct of their digestion. In this process, known as enteric fermentation, cows either exhale or exhale methane. In addition to their burps, the EPA says that treating, storing and transporting cattle manure can emit methane, nitrous oxide, and other pollutants during the manure management process.

Why Methane From Cattle Warms The Climate Differently Than Co2 From Fossil Fuels

All U.S. Livestock accounts for 37% of methane emissions, with cattle responsible for the majority, producing 86.2% of that methane. About two-thirds of cattle emissions come from burps, with the remaining one-third from manure management.

When we calculate methane from cow burps and cow manure, cows account for 31.5% of all methane emissions in the United States, making them the number one source of methane emissions in the country. Other sources of methane emissions are natural gas production at 23.9%, landfills at 17.4% and wastewater at 2.8%, according to EPA data.

To reach climate change goals in the United States, animal and environmental researchers are looking for unique ways to reduce methane emissions from cattle.

In 2017, Robin White, an assistant professor of animal production systems in Virginia Tech’s Department of Animal and Poultry Science, co-authored a study that looked at the impact of removing livestock from U.S. agriculture.

The Climate Friendly Cows Bred To Belch Less Methane

According to data from the study, greenhouse gas emissions, including methane, dropped by about 2.6% only when all livestock was removed.

“The basic expectation is that if we remove them, you basically automatically recoup that greenhouse gas emission cost, and what we’re finding is that the simulation that we’ve done doesn’t really support that,” White said.

“You could argue that you could retire that land — you could take it out of production entirely,” White said. “But the point is, agricultural land is in agriculture because it makes someone’s living.”

Since eliminating all cattle from the US food chain is unrealistic, researchers are getting to the heart of the issue instead.

Are Cow Farts Destroying The Planet? — Sacred Cow

Ermias Kebreab, associate dean for global engagement in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis, studies agriculture’s impact on greenhouse gas emissions. By changing what cows eat, Kebreab and other researchers at UC Davis have found that emissions can be dramatically reduced, and the most promising research comes from an unlikely source: the sea.

“We use different food additives. Seaweed, for example, we are working on here. We’ve seen up to an 80% reduction in animal emissions,” Khebreb told VERIFY.

In this photo taken on June 8, 2018, video, dairy cows eat a diet mixed with seaweed at a dairy farm at the University of California, Davis.

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