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Real meat is green - it eats grass

By Viv Forbes - posted Wednesday, 18 August 2021


The Green Wreckers who destroyed Australia's cheap reliable electricity are now targeting our cattle industry.

They use fake science and false advertising to threaten our right to produce and consume real meat.

This stupidity relies on a totally false argument that grazing animals cause global warming by releasing carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere.

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However, grazing animals have already reached "Net Zero". They add NET ZERO carbon to the environment – they just help to recycle the same carbon products faster, endlessly.

Grasses and crops extract CO2 from the atmosphere and add minerals, water and nutrients from the soil. They then use solar energy to create plant sugars and release oxygen. All grasses are either eaten by grazing animals and termites, or burnt in grass-fires lit by humans or lightning. Then comes the rain, the grasses re-grow, and the cycle starts again.

Cattle harvest these crops and grasses, creating meat, milk, fats and bones. (That's real carbon farming.)

Some of the carbon products that cattle eat get exhausted from both ends as CO2 and methane but not one atom of new carbon is introduced to the atmosphere by grasses, crops or cattle. They are just cogs in the endless carbon cycle that supports all life on Earth.

Moreover, contrary to the usual alarms, the atmospheric warming impact of methane from cattle is negligible since the few radiation absorption lines of methane are swamped by the absorption bands of the much more abundant water vapour. The same heat cannot be trapped twice. As physicist Dr Tom Sheahen points out:

"Worrying about methane emissions is the greatest waste of time in the entire lexicon of global warming fanaticism. . . . CH4's effect is so tiny as to be completely irrelevant."

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Cattle even aid carbon sequestration as their meat gets incorporated into long-lived human bodies. As the decades and centuries pass, prodigious amounts of carbon are transferred from the atmosphere to grasses, to beef steak and hamburgers, to milk and cream, and thus to human bodies and bones. Eventually, millions of human bodies are buried (together with the considerable carbon fixed in their wooden coffins). Unlike the carbon temporarily captured in soils, much of this carbon in human cemeteries is permanently removed from the atmosphere.

Not only are Greens ignorant of the full carbon cycle of life, they also can't count properly – they just measure whatever suits their red-green agenda. "Sequestration" or trying to bury carbon forever is anti-life and serves no useful purpose. All farmed soils will become severely deficient unless they are fertilised with carbon-bearing organic nutrients (like composted biomass or cattle manure) and mined or manufactured fertilisers containing lime, magnesite, phosphate, nitrogen and trace elements.

Cattle have always served human needs by converting inedible grasses into edible proteins and fats. Their hides make leather, and their bones and waste are recycled to make fertiliser.

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About the Author

Viv Forbes is a geologist and farmer who lives on a farm on the Bremer River.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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