Category: Livestock

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Illustrating cow dung

One of the joys of social networking is the serendipitous juxtapositions that it regularly throws up. Case in point. This morning a piece from ILRI turned up in my Facebook newsfeed:

Climate change may be combated by changing the diet of livestock, whose farting and manure, along with the feed crops produced, contribute to 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.

Nothing strange about that. ILRI blog posts get automatically sucked up into Facebook via NetworkedBlogs. But how weird is it that just below that item there was one of a photo by the wonderful Claude Renault featuring cow dung? You can also see it on Claude’s Flickr site, along with a number of others on the same topic. Any of which would have been a much more interesting accompaniment to ILRI’s otherwise perfectly fine piece than the rather boring picture of a cow they actually used. I’m not sure even Claude Renault could have managed to produce a compelling illustration of cows farting, mind, though people have tried.

LATER: Not that social networking doesn’t have its problems. Facebook didn’t allow me to post this note as a comment to either of the posts mentioned above, claiming that some of the content was found offensive by some users.

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Nibbles: Cancun, Maya in Haiti, Indian Food, Pavlovsk, Currywurst, Banana biofuel, Book, Radio, Beer, East African cattle breed, Climate change and altitude, Amazon, Lycopersicon, Pollinator plants, Phenology, Economics

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Nibbles: Heirloom Auction, Flatulence, Trade, Swaziland, Turkey genome, Sorghum

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Eating meat — the right meat — is OK

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don’t compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it’s a significant net gain.

That’s the core of George Monbiot’s change of mind, and one we’ve always supported.

By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It’s time we got stuck in.

Amen to that, George.