Posted on 04/05/2011 10:42:33 AM PDT by mandaladon
Flatulent cows are not a laughing matter. (Pause.) OK, they are a laughing matter. And flatulent sheep and goats are almost as funny — though not to the chickens and pigs in the pen next door. But pull-my-hoof livestock are a problem too.
The emissions produced by nature's woodwind section contain a nasty mix of many gasses, among them methane. Though carbon dioxide is the first gas that comes to mind when we think of greenhouse emissions, pound for pound, methane is more than 20 times more powerful in terms of its global warming potential. Methane doesn't linger in the atmosphere quite as long as CO2, and it's not produced industrially in anywhere near the same quantity, but it does its damage all the same — and livestock toots out a surprisingly large share of it.
According to one Danish study, the average cow produces enough methane per year to do the same greenhouse damage as four tons of CO2. The average car, by contrast, produces just 2.7 tons. Multiply that by the planet's 1.5 billion cattle and buffalo and 1.8 billion smaller ruminants and you have the methane equivalent of two billion tons of CO2 per year. According to the U.K. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), livestock account for about 4.5% of all of the country's annual greenhouse gas emissions. Globally the figure is thought to be higher — about six percent.
(Excerpt) Read more at ecocentric.blogs.time.com ...
HUH! Stopping feeding cows corn will prevent farts??
Just WHERE did you come up with THAT bit of b.s.
As a farm kid I milked the family cow and can assure that pastured cows do indeed fart.
Speaking of putting gasses into the environment..
When these folks can prevent all the horrendous gasses that volcanoes belch into the atmosphere by the ton. THEN, and only then, can they attempt to regulate anything else.
I shouldn’t have not. But it will lessen it by 13-18%.
Being a farmboy, I don’t recall a whole lot of excessive flatulence from the cows, and we did feed them corn, but I guess, whatever.
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