you're right, this is greenwashing. I sell into the market sometimes and the hides are basically wasted unless you try hard to line up buyers. plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere. It's true that factory-raised beef is bad for the environment though, as they eat grains that are fertilized from oil via Haber–Bosch. It's also true that tanning uses lots of nasty stuff, but there is vegetable tanning which works well and sourced from nuts and stuff.
> you're right, this is greenwashing ... plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere
Sounds like you might be doing a bit of greenwashing yourself. The carbon came from the atmosphere, but the cows make methane, which is much worse. Also they spoil the land and water. And also you're not counting the carbon used to actually raise them, like the gas in the equipment and the transport.
Now calculate the use of the agricultural machinery to get the same number of calories from plants.
I have no idea how cows "spoil land and water". Have you seen a cow?
No one ever said plant based food is carbon neutral. But it uses way less carbon than cows. And yes, I've seen a cow. Many. They spoil the land by trampling it and the water by having their excrement run off into it.
The land with cattle on are the most productive, as they get quite a compliment of natural fertilizer from the cattle. I would say cattle do not spoil the land, but improve it. This can't help but be the case, given the way grass responds to being eaten.
Additionally, once the grazers improve grass life, the water-table improves. The worst lakes in our area are surrounded by fertilized annual crops. Their water is polluted with nitrogen fertilizers and are very poor quality, with blue-green algae blooms, and as a result are not swimmable. My friend lost a dog to such a lake.
The land with active grazers in contrast, is very good at preventing this problem. The best lake for 200km around me is surrounded by grass-fed cattle operations, and there is absolutely no problem with algae blooms.
I think a central problem of our time is that educated elites are detached from reality, not seeing things like what I mention above, and so are acting upon their false perceptions, causing great harms as a result. The Apple announcement today about leather acts to confirm my suspicions about this.
Thats not how that works, just like the water cycle there is a carbon cycle.
You can’t produce “more” greenhouse gases in a closed system, the system will ebb and flow; until you dig up megatons of carbon that has been stored for a few hundred millennia and insert it into that system.
(same story with polar ice caps and the water cycle)
The water cycle is actually the perfect analogy. The form of the water is almost as important as the amount. When you take all the water out of the ground and put it on the surface, and then a bunch evaporates, sure, we have the same amount of water. But we're still in big trouble because we don't have usable fresh water.
If you take a bunch of carbon in the grass and convert it to methane gas, sure you have the same amount, but it's a lot worse for the planet.
My current (and if I understood correctly: the current scientific) understanding of the carbon cycle does not indicate that methane is significantly more harmful than other forms of carbon release, mostly due to the fact that it does not have a significant lifetime in the atmosphere.
The issue remains, squarely, on adding to the carbon cycle. The harmful values of methane output is directly correlated with the oil based feed which GP mentions.
The water cycle is a great example because it is filtering the water as it goes, rapidly producing fresh water that rains on the land. Methane, likewise, is a short-lived byproduct of excess animal activity, and in a steady state sustainable mode, we have equality. The problem is the finger of oil on the scale, not the grass-raised beef, just like how excess bovines produce excess methane.
Don't forget about the pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer that is sprayed over crops that gets washed into the water. The Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico dead zone is an example. Where i live, cow pasture land mostly is untouched.
Also, cows have feet and digestive systems so it takes more equipment and diesel for harvesting and processing grains.
They don't kill cows to make leather. The cows are raised for meat and milk. Actually, NOT using leather is worse for the environment because now you have leather which has no use and you're creating pleather or whatever replacement.
> plus, if your beef is grass fed for its whole life like ours, it's carbon neutral, as all the carbon that goes into the animal came from the atmosphere
This totally ignores the land use issue. Cattle absolutely decimate natural areas. e.g. significant areas of the midwest/great plain that were prairie with deep roots to store carbon are now pasture. Pasture grass has comparatively shallow roots and limited ability to store carbon.
Hasn't the midwest host large herds of grazing buffalo for millenia? I think the last I read about this stuff, most cattle farmers want their grass to still be the old school deep-rooted stuff, if other grasses take over it is a symptom of overgrazing.
- Grazers improve the capacity of grass to carbon capture
- Some land is ONLY able to grow grass. The alternative is desertification, and so livestock is the only option to produce food. edit: unless you bring in fossil fertilizers.
I think what you are doing is definitely better than some of the specific agriculture feedstocks for cows that increase the enteric emissions of cows to make them grow quickly. That said it isn't carbon neutral - the digestive systems of cows produce methane from food. Methane is between 24- 29 times more impactful then carbon for global warming.
Cows still have a signifiant impact on especially as a function of how large the industry has become.
And to your point - wasting hides is also not great. Would be great if we were less wasteful in general.
I suspect that because of conservation of energy, methane is a highly reactive over the short term, but ultimately an insignificant element in the big picture IF you ignore the massive oil inputs humans are adding to the system. That is to say, methane on its own is not a reason to discourage digging up oil to make grain, which is used to feed cattle.
