this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Not do be pedantic but wouldn't this imply you HAVE to grow feed for livestock? There's lots of regions where you don't feed your livestock but let them graze. It's part of the reason why 100% of those with Irish decent are able to digest lactose as it was crucial for survival for thousands of years.
I think overwhelmingly you have the correct position here however.
Grass-fed doesn't really scale and entails a number of other environmental issues from higher methane to higher deforestation. Even for Ireland in particular, it's got quite a number of issues
Increased methane emissions
Grass-fed production requires longer growing times leading to more lifetime methane emissions overall. It also requires more cattle overall due to lower slaughter weight
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401/pdf
Not enough land to meet demand even if 100% of grassland was used
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
Problems in countries that have tried to scale it up
New Zealand has tried to scale up it's grass-fed production and often touts it. To do so, they end up using heavy amounts of fertilizer in their production so much so that some regions need a 12-fold reduction in their dairy industry size just to have their water meet safety thresholds
https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806
Keep in mind that this is the case with New Zealand still using plenty of feed because their definition of grass-fed still allows for plenty of supplemental grain. A fully grass-fed system would fair even worse in that regard
(emphasis mine)
https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadReportByFileName?fileName=New%20Zealand%20Grain%20and%20Feed%20Market%20Situation_Wellington_New%20Zealand_NZ2023-0003.pdf
Problems with grass-fed production in Ireland
In the UK and Ireland, the land that grass-fed cows are on is primarily actually not natural grass-land - its natural state is temperate rainforest
https://theconversation.com/livestock-grazing-is-preventing-the-return-of-rainforests-to-the-uk-and-ireland-198014
I feel like you want to argue about this but I really don't. I agree with you, I just have some criticisms for how you cherry pick feed crops and now cows to support your argument. Sheep could easily be eating just grass and have their wool used to insulate housing that could theoretically decrease the burning of sequestered carbon for heating/cooling. But that's not what is going on, it's not a popular use, and it's not really fair to you to cherry pick data like that.
The source looking at Ireland does talk about how sheep grazing in the UK and Ireland are primarily on temperate forestland. But more broadly, other ruminants like sheep are going to have similarly high methane emissions to cattle. Ruminants, unlike other farm animals, have most of their emission from eccentric fermentation (and or land use change/deforestation) which is going to occur at similar rates when they are eating grass as well. So should I have separated that out a bit, potentially yes, but my earlier comments were already getting quite long
From one study:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751731122000416#s0050
In terms of land usage, the land usage is actually even higher for lamb and mutton production per kg and per kg protein compared to the already high usage for beef production [1] [2]. This entails wool production having high usage since sheep in wool production are typically killed for meat as well once their wool production decrease (similar to dairy).
When we compare wool emissions to other textiles, we find that wool has some of the highest emissions per kg of any textile [3]. We could just as easily be using cotton (lower emissions to produce per kg) which has similar insulation R values and lower emissions
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-kg-poore
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-protein-poore
[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ndustrial-carbon-footprint-of-textile-fabrics-in-this-study-kgCO-2-e-kg_tbl1_303634993 along with other studies all showing the same trends of other regions with wool as a great outlier in terms of emissions. The emissions don't seem to vary much from what I have read even when looking at regions with mostly all pasture-based production
Sorry, my apologies I didn't read more into it.
Ah no worries, I have a tendency to just dump a lot into comments so it might be easy to miss some of the details. My infodumping tendencies have their cons sometimes :)