Cow dung for brains
I know I can hardly talk about sustainability. I am writing this from seat 33A on SQ377 to Singapore. That said at least I understand that this kind of lifestyle has no future. Unlike these dickhead Texan’s as reported in The Economist (6/1/2007):
It’s best to hold you nose when you visit the Bar G Feedyard near Hereford (the “beef Capital of the Worldâ€?) in the Texas Panhandle. Some 125,000 cattle are black dots huddled in pens as far as the eye can see. The manure – some 300m kg annually – piles up and gets carted away for fertiliser.
Soon there will be a new use for the cow dung. Ten miles away, Panda Ethanol … is building one of America’s largest ethanol plants, capable of producing 380m litres as year. Manure will be trucked down the road, ad Panda’s expense. There, with the said of sand and head, the manure will be gasified. The synthetic natural gas will then be burned, creating steam that will head up corn – 1m tonnes a year and help turn it into ethanol.
I don’t need to tell anyone how bad for the environment feed lot beef is. Cows are grazing animals, they are meant to eat grass and other plants, not human food such as soy beans and other grains. However, cow dung can be used as a relatively natural fertiliser, which doesn’t totally destroy the soil. Burning the dung, rather than return it to the land means that more carbon that was sequestered in the ground is sent up into the atmosphere.
If that is not stupid enough, using the heat generated to help ferment corn into ethanol has got to be the most ridiculous idea in the history off green-wash. Corn is only cheap enough to turn into ethanol due to relatively cheap fossil fuel based inputs (remember they will be using fertiliser made from natural gas now that they are burning up all the cow dung) and subsidies from the government. Broad scale corn farming rapes the soil of anything beneficial so it effectively becomes a rocky sponge for adding chemicals. Despite the corn capturing at least some energy from the sun, the process of creating ethanol is so energy intensive, at best corn ethanol gives out as much energy as it takes to produce. At worst, it actually loses energy.
To sum up, broad scale agriculture continues to destroy soil fertility. The feedlotting of beef continues because now it’s an important part of the “green energyâ€? industry. We squander our remaining fossil fuel reserves on a energy system that is more polluting than the one we are trying to replace. If people could just stop worrying about how they are going to drive their cars and starting thinking about how they are going to eat (the world grain stock pile is almost down to World War II levels), we might actually come up with some rational and sustainable solutions to the predicament we are in.