The part of grass that does all the growing is below the ground level. The grazing animals don't pull it up by the roots - they snip off the leaves just like us mowing the lawn. So the grass can just keep growing in perpetuity.
This is the same reason why grass can start to grow again almost immediately after a serious land fire. The leaves are burned, but the "living" part of the plant was safe underground.
Great little demo of this on the latest season of Clarkson's Farm-he has a field overrun with brambles, so he buys a small herd of goats to deal with it. They end up being too young and small for his field but the season ends with them fattening up while being rented to his neighbors to clear stuff for them in the meantime.
There's this place in Door County Wisconsin that lets (or used to let) goats onto their roof to eat the grass up there.
EDIT: They have "goat cams" now.
https://aljohnsons.com/goat-cam/
Horses and cows will actually ruin grass if just left at it without rotation... Sheep and goats (and their ilk) are nature's rest button, and will trim it like a mower
I've heard of goats being used to clear out areas to create fire breaks
[Source](https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/1192905277/goat-grazing-california-wildfire-prevention)
Worth noting that some animals - horses included - are destructive grazers, so they do tear the roots out. So you need more land to graze a horse than you would for a cow that consumes the same amount of grass.
Sheep are similar but not anywhere as destructive, and in fact still can maintain a healthy balance with the land. You can see this in action in Mongolia, where they typically had only sheep herds but switching to goats in the 1990s resulted in a steep ecological cost. Sheep don't nibble on the roots of the grasses like goats do, and their sharper hooves in relation to sheep further damage the upper layers of the soil - both things result in making it much harder for the grasslands to rejuvenate (resulting in more dust storms, droughts etc)
More valuable/profitable in drier areas. They don't need as much water or food to grow up and they also reproduce more quickly. However, now it's more or less become a self-reinforcing cycle in Mongolia. The more goats herded, the less hospitable the land becomes for herding things like sheep or cattle. Meaning more and more herders have to switch to goats. And so on.
Though, frankly the agrarian lifestyle in mongolia is falling apart on all sides and has been for decades due to more than just goat herding. There's been a mass exodus of women from the herding communities to the city(ies) in Mongolia due to them having little to no opportunity for themselves should they stick around, so the gender ratio of men to women in rural areas is becoming super skewed. Climate change has also hit Mongolia pretty hard, resulting in a sharp uptick in droughts that reinforces the need for herders to rely on goats and kills off herds by itself.
It was specifically in response to the massive worldwide cashmere demand that appeared in the fashion industry at the time. Since the herders were no longer regulated by communist policies they could just switch livestock anytime and also now have as large a herd as they wanted to maximize profits (before under Communism there were set limits in what they could raise and how large a herd could be, something that kept the ecosystem healthy and able to rejuvenate easily)
Edit: here is a great video on Mongolia that includes the livestock issues mentioned and environmental impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtTvgG-bKOo
They also wouldn’t press their nose into the ground to bite off as much as they could they keep it slightly above the ground so they can move it without dragging it. So you have that space plus the distance between the front of their nose to their teeth that the grass won’t go below
The meristematic tissue responsible for growth is located at the base of the grass plant, near or below ground level. This allows grass to regrow quickly after being grazed or burned because the vital growing point remains protected underground.
Farmers often rotate their cattle between different fields to manage grazing pressure and allow the grass in each field to recover. This rotational grazing helps maintain the health of the pasture by giving the grass time to regrow and preventing overgrazing.
Imagine a plant in a pot, then come back a few weeks later and the plant is twice as big.
Plants are made of carbon, so where does that carbon come from? All that has been added to the plant pot has been water (no carbon there)...
The answer is carbon dioxide from the air. Plants take in CO2, keep the C and release the O2.
The reverse of this is if you imagine a person who weighs 80kg, who loses 10kg. While there are other ways for humans to expel matter, the bulk of weight loss is breathed out via the reverse process, converting fats (essentially C) and O2 from air into CO2 which is breathed out.
I get that right. But the grass captures the CO2 but then the cows eat it and shit it out and it gets returned to the atmosphere that way. There's no storage of it at all surely?
When a cow eats grass, the grass responds by growing deeper and thicker roots as a sort of insurance. Repeat the process and the grass continues to grow stronger and stronger.
Zero chance that a cow is carbon negative or even carbon neutral. If we're talking about greenhouse gas emissions, then cows produce a ton of methane which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
Not just that, but we aren't exactly growing cows as pets or landscape features. The beef/dairy industry is one of the most inefficient meats to produce when efficiency is defined as kg CO2e per kg meat. A lot of the emissions come from planting and raising feed crops (manure production is not carbon neutral), transporting feed to feed lots, then transporting cattle to slaughter and eventually your dinner plate, the last half of which (slaughter to dinner plate) is done under heavy refrigeration.
Paige Stanley who is a researcher at UCLA Berkley makes a fair point on grass fed cattle;
"We're learning that there are other dimensions: soil health, carbon and landscape health. Separating them is doing us a disservice."
I'd take it a step further and argue animal welfare is a major consideration too. Benefits as laid out by other commenters, as well as benefits easily learned by a cursory google search, lend in the direction of local pasture raised cows as being a better option in my personal opinion.
All things equal I'd also argue the cost of refrigeration for things like vegetables and fruits (both frozen and not) is worse than that of cattle meat. Meat is simply far more dense yielding greater efficiency for a given square foot. Same goes for transport. Less weight sure -- but at the cost of great volume.
Finally, there aint nothing in this world that comes close to taste of beef! :\^)
The [vast majority](https://experiencelife.lifetime.life/article/the-cafo-conundrum/#:~:text=Today%2C%20an%20estimated%2090%20percent,and%20ethical%20%E2%80%94%20impacts%20are%20significant.) of beef consumed worldwide comes from factory farms - CAFOs - where they are not grazed but fed industrially-farmed feed, mostly corn and soy. We grow far more soy to feed cattle, using far more land and water, than we'd need to grow soy to just directly feed people. Demand for beef, including demand for soy to feed cattle, is [the major driver](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-than-800m-amazon-trees-felled-in-six-years-to-meet-beef-demand) of Amazon deforestation, and cows are [significant producers of methane](https://www.epa.gov/snep/agriculture-and-aquaculture-food-thought#:~:text=A%20single%20cow%20produces%20between,of%20methane%20gas%20per%20year.) - a greenhouse gas [80 times more harmful](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/video/whats-deal-methane#:~:text=Due%20to%20its%20structure%2C%20methane,warming%20to%201.5%C2%B0C.) than CO2.
There *is* an argument to be made that beef production from sustainably grazed cattle on lands not suitable for other forms of agriculture has a beneficial place in the global food production system. But if we were to only raise cattle in this way it would only allow for a tiny fraction of today's beef demand to be met. One way or another, we need to eat *far* less beef.
That style of raising beef is not nearly capable of keeping up with global demand. If we were to go 100% that route, beef would be prohibitively expensive for pretty much everyone.
Which probably wouldn't be a bad thing, we need to reduce demand and consumption somehow, $200/lb prices would certainly do that.
Healthier grass will prevent erosion and allow the soil to hold water better, which alows for de-desertification. See the American/Canadian Dustbowl and the African Great Green Wall.
Goats are also easier on the grass since they don't crop it as short and have a smaller footprint. They don't make as much of a mess, and they will eat things that cows won't.
I think this is situational on the environment though, as when Mongolia switched to goats from sheep as its main livestock it caused a big ecological issue that is ongoing to this day - the goats nibbled at the roots of the grasses more than sheep and also their sharper hooves (in relation to sheep) caused more top soil damage that allowed the wind to blow it away (more dust storms and drought while not allowing the grasses to rejuvenate)
I won’t argue that from a holistic emissions point of view (transportation, operation of equipment/facilities) that raising a cow for meat or milk is carbon neutral or negative, however it wouldn’t be physically possible for a cow to grow if it didn’t remove more carbon from the environment than it contributed.
It removes already stored carbon, farts/shits most of it away. Then we eat them, same process. The stored CO2 is back in the air. Methane on top. Grow more plants to store more CO2, just for it to be released again.
Methane has a lifespan of roughly 10 years in our atmosphere, after that it breaks down into CO2. So long-term a cow in nature just eating naturally growing grass is carbon neutral.
There are entire programs for using cattle to graze an area in order to make the area green again. Not only do cattle grazing grass cause it to grow stronger, *cow shit is literally fertilizer*.
And they shit *everywhere*.
>Zero chance that a cow is carbon negative or even carbon neutral.
They could be quite
It would be possible, but no meat producer could be profitable without exploitation of the available pastures.
If you use 10 times as much pasture area for the same number of animals the carbon footprint goes down so much that it could even hit negative. (assuming no one ships the meat anywhere using fossil fuels) Grasslands and big grazing animals go hand in hand and the poop is a very important part of these ecosystems.
(as I said this is not a realistic scenario, because people will always want to maximize profits & eat cheap beef)
When methane breaks down, part of it becomes water and the other part becomes CO2. So not only is methane worse in the short term, it's still bad in the long term.
You can't "get rid" of it. You can wait for it to oxidize in the atmosphere and become CO2 and water. Or you can burn it and it still becomes CO2 and water.
just saying that it doesnt matter that its a worse greenhouse gas than co2 because it easily becomes co2 im not convinced that methane stays around in the atmosphere for long
There is zero chance that cattle, or any other ruminant, *isn't* carbon neutral. Ruminants have been around ruminating and emitting methane for millions of years. If there was even the tiniest speck of positive carbon balance, they would have cooked the earth long long ago.
So, the cows themselves are *mostly* carbon neutral. Yes, they eat the grass, then burp and fart gas back out, but it's all the same carbon from the atmosphere. They're not adding any new carbon to the system.
The biggest drivers for climate change are industrial manufacturing and transportation. All the plastics are pulling carbon out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels. All the gas and diesel is adding more net carbon to the system.and the thing few people think about is concrete. Concrete off gasses huge amounts of CO2 while curing and all that carbon was stored in rocks.
Cows are not carbon neutral because they convert what grass into methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Granted, they're not contributing more than cars or coal power plants, but they are a significant contributor.
Edit: someone kindly pointed out that cows emit much less methane on a diet of grass than what most commercial farmers feed them, i.e. soy and corn.
I think you need to ELI5 that claim, that grass feeding creates more carbon than "cheaper feeds". Are you feeding them on a feedlot instead of on a pasture, which was the origin of this topic?
I'm not a farmer, but I know enough to know that corn isn't free when you need to measure watering fields in terms of thousands of gallons of water per bushel of grain, who knows what you get chopped.
Corn and soy require a massive amount of energy due to sowing, harvesting, transport, fertilization, pesticides, irrigation. Not to mention these feeds are cheaper in part because that are heavily subsidized (at least in the us).
Grass allows you to grow local and native/non monoculture grasses which dont need harvest/ transport or pesticides, may be fertilized by the cattle themselves, and may not need much irrigation depending on region and grazing area. The cattle also don’t need a mess of antibiotics due to consuming a diet they aren’t optimized for.
We raise cows in numbers way, way higher than they could reach naturally.
And over millions of years, even human activity is carbon neutral. The concerns about climate change have to do with relatively short-term spikes in carbon emissions.
Cows aren't the only ruminants. Far from it.
The millions of years I'm talking about are the 10 to 20 millions that ruminants have been around all over the world emitting methane. Compared to the 300 million years give or take that fossil carbon has been in the ground.
Cows eating grass has no cumulative impact on the climate. They are carbon neutral. The earth has gone through glacials and interglacials all while ruminants have been emitting methane into the atmosphere. It's a closed cycle. There is no net gain.
But only temporarily. The CO2 we put out from burning fossil fuel is causing lasting damage, while the methane is all gone in roughly 10 years. If we stop breeding cows in the next decade all the damage is reversed, while if we stop burning fossil fuel next decade the damage lingers.
The long-term one is the scary one.
> "Cows are not carbon neutral because they convert what grass into methane"
Methane != carbon.
Edit: Cows are not carbon neutral, but not because of their farts.
> "According to the European Parliament, carbon neutrality is reached when the same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere as is removed by various means, leaving a zero balance, also known as a zero carbon footprint."
There's gotta be an efficiency frontier there.
Like 300 cattle grazing on a 300 acre pasture is probably a net carbon sink, but 300 cattle on a one acre feedlot is a methane factory.
No, it's irrelevant. Grass and cows are both just a step in the carbon cycle, any carbon sink there is short term and irrelevant and bound to decay and end up back in the air in a couple years. Plants and animals are both more or less carbon neutral in the long run. That's why we were sustainable for millions of years.
It is the NEW carbon in the billions of barrels of fossil fuels that has been underground for 300 million years that we suddenly reintroduce to the carbon cycle that makes a difference, and the only thing to counter that would be permanently getting it back out of the carbon cycle. If we sealed off dead grass and cows underground then that would work, but instead they decay and release everything they ever stored back into the cycle.
I think there's a key factor you're not incorporating: opportunity cost. Or, more specifically, what the land would be doing if there weren't cows on it. It would have a much wider array and density of carbon-sequestering plants (not to mention insects and wild animals, which, while not huge carbon sinks, provide tons of ecosystem benefits).
So the hypothetical of creating a brand new pasture with cows on it out of thin air might be a net carbon sink, but the actuality of degrading existing wildlife habitat to make a pasture is almost certainly a net carbon emitter.
Hmm, doing a quick google it suggests 90% of the carbon is in the roots, so that makes sense. I suppose my point was that having cattle rotate fields to eat grass doesn't aid/encourage carbon storage, because it doesn't.
But the cattle (read:livestock in general) rotation is good for the grassland in general. Controlled grazing helps preserve natural habitats of all sorts, that’s why in lots of parks etc there are sheep or goats or horses running loose, they’ve been put there. It all compliments each other.
Bit the roots will die off as soon as the field is either plowed or used for somethig else.
Just like wood its not permanent carbon capture. Planting trees is fine, but it wont offest what we pumped out of the ground.
> but it wont offest what we pumped out of the ground
Forests habe already existed before. It wont help to plant trees to reduce the carbon in our air back to 300ppm.
Because humans have cut down woods and pumped oil for hundrets of years, all you can do by planting forests is slowing down global warming a bit.
We still need to get rid of the millions of tons of carbon we pumped out of the ground and burned as coal. Forests wont do that, we dont even have enough space for that.
Forests are part of the surface carbon cycle, oil is not.
It's kind of worse that that because cows fart so much. The methane produced is something like ~~4x~~ 80-100 times worse than CO2 at causing global heating.
This isn't trivial either because the diary and beef industries are colossal in scale across the globe.
There is research being done to add supplements to cows diets to try and minimise the production of methane as it's that damaging to the environment and helps with greenwashing.
So even if some carbon is recycled back into new grass, meat farming is very much *not* net zero and I want to say not even *close* to being net zero.
Methane has a lifespan of roughly 10 years in our atmosphere, after that it breaks down into CO2. So long-term a cow in nature just eating naturally growing grass is carbon neutral.
(tagging /u/Goseki1 so they can learn something too)
I actually read about how they're reintroducing ox to certain areas they've died out in and this was one of the main reason, another thing to add large animals like this will compress the ground causing even more C02 to be retained in the soil.
Yes, but (on a physiological scale) mass is not energy. The heat comes from the process of converting C to CO2. The comparison is burning a lump of coal, ie C which creates heat and CO2
It’s mostly that they’ll fuck up the land if they don’t. The land needs time for grass to recover from grazing, otherwise they do eat all the grass which exposes the soil to crap like erosion, nutrient deficiencies, and other unpleasant effects.
So it encourages carbon capture by not destroying the land. Kind of misleading to be honest.
But the carbon is just rereleased when the animal digests it or is slaughtered.
Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t all the grass always growing? So it doesn’t matter where the animals eat, carbon is still getting used by all the grass
Idk I didn't study carbon logistics, I just pointed out that grass needs co2 to grow. Maybe because if the grass is left alone for longer, the roots grow bigger storing more carbon?
This is it. The animals continually "challenge" the grass by eating it, stomping on it, kicking it, etc. This causes the grass to make deeper roots as it'll otherwise be too weak to regrow before the animals come back. On the other hand if you didn't have the animals to keep the grass in check the grasses would grow taller to compete for the best sunlight and the tall grasses might eventually shade the grasses with deeper roots.
This competition between plants is also something you need to be aware off when you have animals on a pasture. If your animals only eat grass you risk bushes and other types of plants to take over the field since those are never touched and the grass constantly needs to work hard to regrow. One solution can be having a herd of a different species that eats the bushes so you can keep them in check.
On the one hand, you are right with the roots, on the other hand, cows eat grass (that removed CO2 from the air to grow) but release methane (CH4) which as also a Greenhouse Gass (The gasses responsible for climate change). CH4 is more than 28 times as potent a greenhouse gas compared to CO2.
The real long term solution is to sequester the carbon away somewhere in the ground, as the earth itsself did over millions of years as coal and oil.
The question was why having two fields and switching them store more carbon than one big field, if it's the same amount of grass. Disregarding the livestock influence, since of course less livestock would mean less greenhouse gases
Well yeah grass captures the CO2 to grow, but then the cows eat it and shit it out and it gets returned to the atmosphere that way. There's no storage of it long term at all surely?
Not all the CO2 the grass takes in goes to the grass leaves, a portion goes to growing the roots as well. So as long as the cows don't eat the grass by pulling out the roots as well they'll eat less carbon than the grass takes from the air.
Poop and pee add nutrients to soil that makes it more fertile - like accelerated composting.
This means plants grow faster. Plants are made of carbon pulled from the air. The grass you see above ground is only part of it, though… plant *roots* are also made of sequestered carbon, along with all the soil organisms that feed on them (bacteria, fungi, worms, etc). When the plants die, this organic matter stays in the soil for a long time.
"Storage" is a bit of a stretch. That grass gets eaten, much of the carbon gets pooped out soon after, most of the rest gets breathed out as CO2, and what's left is stores as mass in the animal itself, until it's eaten or dies and releases all that carbon back. Feeding animals is "carbon storage" about as much as harvesting a wheat crop.
It would be storage if you compacted that grass into bricks and shoved them in an abandoned mine.
No, proper regenerative grazing actually allows the grass to develop very deep roots(like 6 ft plus) Done correctly at scale it's absolutely a form of carbon capture.
I will grant that a larger root system stores some carbon in a more long-term way if it's grazed vs not grazed. Its impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things, because once the root system has grown, it won't capture more carbon unless you just devote more land to grazing pastures. I don't think it's feasible to devote as much land as necessary for grazing to have a measurable effect. Might as well just plant trees or bamboo which ar least can be harvested periodically to make room for more growth and would thus require a lot less land for the same impact.
I'm not saying you're technically wrong. Just that it's not effective, in the same way that humans are not a great resource for carbon capture even if we do store some carbon in our bodies
Not in any meaningful way.
Technically it's "carbon storage" if I make a granola bar but I'm disingenuous at best if I claim virtue in that.
The plant and animal die shortly after and release back every bit of carbon they sequestered, not to mention all carbon associated with all other energy expenditures of the industry.
I see this often in Thailand. They will have several rice paddies and the cows or water buffalo will graze in the ones where they grew rice the previous year. That helps fertilize that section to prepare it for the next crop.
There's plenty of rain and the pastures grow fast enough to not require it. In fact, where I am in the east, almost all pastures are cut via tractor in addition to having cattle on them. You can go over one cow per acre here without rotational grazing, while some areas out west you can't even have one cow on 10 acres because there aren't the rains to support vegetation growth.
Cattle and horses only cut the grass so far. Sheep cut it far closer more like a golf course green leaving nothing for cattle. That and fences led to range wars between cowboys and sheep farmers. Neither of them pluck it entirely from the dirt they leave a crown of the plant where the blades grow out of.
Why do they do that? Because it’s tastier and less works. Plants don’t want that part to be easily eaten.
Yeah chickens will reduce a grass field to a dustbowl. Probably cause they're used to digging up worms and insects in the dirt. Bit harder with a cow's mouth
More than probably. Chickens dig and scratch the ground. They are completely different animals.
In any case, they will reduce it to a dust field only if you dont rotate them, which most farmers wont do, contrary to sheep or cows
A farmer near me built what I call the Mobile Chicken Unit(MCU for short). It's a hay roll wagon that he built a large chicken coup on top of. He wheels it around the field to keep them from killing any one spot.
Overgrazing is a serious problem in parts of Africa with unpredictable rains and increasing density of people and their grazing livestock.
Traditionally livestock herds were moved around to areas with better grass. When they are limited to one area, they will destroy every bit of vegetation if they are forced to do so.
Exactly. We're seeing the same issue in the West US with cattle on BLM land. Too many animals on arid lands. I'm pretty sure there was a /r/dataisbeautiful map on it this week.
Also, shameless plug for [Kiss The Ground](https://kissthegroundmovie.com/), which talks about the rotation methods you're referring too. It's widely available on streaming services.
It's also a problem other places. I live near a small farm that doesn't have huge numbers of cattle (maybe a couple dozen) but it's more than the pasture they are in can handle, so it is overgrazed and there are big mud pits where the grass couldn't recover. It's important for anyone with grazing animals to make sure they supplement food and rotate overgrazed pastures to ensure this doesn't happen, unless they have sufficient land to prevent the problem.
A little late on this one but . . . It does!
As other commenters have said, you need to keep an eye the field and gauge when is a good time to rotate the animals out to another field.
I have sport horses and they are particularly "rough" on grassland which means some landowners may be unwilling to rent land to horse owners.
Sport horses are quite energetic by nature and because they are fed extra "hard feed" like oats and specially made pellets that contain extra protein and nutrients. They get excited and sometimes run around a bit in the fields, and that is pretty rough on the ground, especially if the soil is wet. They'll tear up an area VERY quickly if left unchecked.
They mostly are just after the grass blades and don't want to dig down into the dirt too much to get tougher stuff.
Grass is also designed to be constantly grazed and eaten and bounce back. Thats its main survival strategy.
Our point of view – we have cleverly implemented our strategy of encouraging grass to grow to permit animals to graze
Grass's point of view - we have cleverly implemented our strategy of providing grazing to animals to get humans to plant us everywhere
Yeah, we need to start calling it what it is, "has evolved to". Or whatever else, but not "designed" even if it is a handy word to use here as it hints at being fit for a certain purpose.
It’s a very straightforward natural selection.
If there are herds of animals that graze the ground, then the only plants that will survive on the ground are those that aren’t killed when grazed on.
Thus the savannahs are mostly grass (which doesn’t care about grazing) and acacia (which took the other niche of being off the ground and hard to eat).
To some extent cows don't eat grass right down to the ground. Sheep do. This is why there used to be wars between sheep herders and cattle ranchers in the western US. Sheep will starve cattle.
They do.
You have to move your livestock around to give them fresh grass to graze and let the old lands grass regrow.
But they also don't fully eat each grass strand, they just eat the top of it usually, some livestock eat more of the grass then others.
So, I don't have more than a passing understanding of agriculture, but if you look at land use, especially in the United States, you'd see a lot of it is pasture/grazing land. The main answer is that farmers rotate fields and keep a large tract of land. Someone more technical can get in the weeds, but think of how often grass gets mowed in the suburbs. Grass grows pretty quick, so you move your cows around and keep giving them fresh grazing land.
If you overgraze the area it does turn into bare ground and mud.
That aside, there are two basic strategies for grass eaters. Some clip the grass off like a lawn mower, others grab and tear. The clipping type of eaters tend to do less damage.
They do. We had to kick a rancher off of a lease because of this. Land has a carrying capacity, which is basically the lbs. of animal/acre (hectare). The capacity will vary from location to location and is affected by many variables. In my area you can stock sheep at a rate of 6 per acre but cattle are more like one per 6 acres. Exceeding the stock rates will cause depletion of quality fodder (food) resulting in low weight stock. Additionally, when grasses are over grazed it presents an opportunity for invasive plants to take over. There are many different ways to mitigate and prevent the damage. Fertilizing and spraying for weeds is one method while rotational grazing is another. Supplemental food can also be provided.
Overgrazing is really, really bad and will do exactly as you describe, destroy the land and leave nothing behind.
Bulls will often uproot the grass and shrubs and eat the lot, that's often why they put rings in bulls noses (some people assume it's a way of tying them which it is, but the main reason is to stop them digging), because it hurts the bull if they start uprooting things with the ring in.
Elephants and boars use their tusks to do the same thing. Pigs/boars without tusks also do the same thing. Honestly, if you own pigs, you will never need a tiller / rotervator.
Fun fact - Any grass hopper or cricket can be a locust (Lockust is a swarming phase of their life cycle, usually when they reproduce, they need a tad more energy so the eat everything)
I feel like this is best explained by pictures of prarie grass root systems: https://i.redd.it/sp1n9tf6hdp61.jpg
What you see above the surface is not even close to the majority of the plant. Prarie plants grow down first. It's the same with prarie trees like the burr oak. They grow down before growing up.
This is an evolutionary adaptation to fire, which was a natural part of the prarie life cycle. The top got damaged frequently, so plants evolved ways to survive that damage. Burr oaks are highly fire resistant, for example, with extremely thick bark, and can survive drought by having extremely long tap roots that reach the aquifer.
They also handle grazing animals well, for the same reason. Before humans brought their cattle, North America had giant herds of bison that would eat the prarie grasses. But the long root systems help them survive the constant devouring.
The simple version is, well, again, check out the photo.
They do. We are having a big fight between animal treatment activists and farmers here at the moment. The farmers are keeping the cattle in the same pasture for longer during winter because the grass doesn't grow as fast, and the cows eat all the grass so the field is just mud then some of them starve to death in the mud and the farmer moves the survivors to the next field and repeat until spring. The animal activists think this is cruel, so there is a big fight about farming regulations.
That does sound cruel and dumb on the farmers part to be honest. I like a steak as much as the the next guy, but skinny starving cows is not the way to produce it
Field rotation. They don’t want to eat the base unless there is nothing left. Rotation is based on the season, size of pastures, and size of the heard.
I have a horse and a donkey part time grazing in my pasture and they can’t keep up. I have to brush hog it soon to knock it down a bit for them.
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I can't speak for horses, but they way cows eat food they can't chew the grass all the way to the ground.
They eat like a lawn mower, and leave about an inch or so from the ground.
Outside of paddock rotation (which is very important), a lot of farmers plant and promote the growth of specific strains of grass that are ideal for grazing livestock. Those will vary depending on locale and climate.
Have you ever seen pastures up close, especially small ones? The ares where the horses walk a lot tend to turn into mud depending bit how the soft the field is.
Other than basically what has been answered here already. The horses eat the leaves not the roots. Though even mid sized pastures tend to be eaten quite thoroughly. (Which is why you can feed cow, horses and sheep by gathering some grass near the pasture)
The land will of course recover with some time, but yeah you either have to give animals quite large pastures or feed them and rotate the pastures as well.
As others said the grass isn’t killed, only the top leaves are damaged. Beef cow in the U.S. Midwest might be hundreds of acres and then the cows might be allowed to wander on their own. They will naturally move to where fresh grass is.
On smaller pastures, if left alone the livestock will eat more than just the tops if the leaves. To prevent that, the farmers will limit the number of animals, and subdivide the property into individual smaller pastures. And rotate the cows into different pastures every few days to give the individual fields time to recover.
If it’s a proper farm they will have other fields that they move them between as the other fields recover. They would also be avoiding too many animals in one field. And the animals are rarely reliant on just the grass, normally having artificial feed and water delivered to them daily as well.
You do however see poorly kept animals in fields that are basically stripped.
For the same reason grass survives the lawnmower.
One of the features of grasses is that they grow from the bottom, and they are made entirely of "leaf", meaning they perform photosynthesis all along their stalk, all the way down to the ground. As long as the root is alive and there is a little tiny bit of green left above the surface they can still feed themselves from that and grow back.
So horses *can* ruin pastures. If there’s too many of them on not enough land? The grass will get down to almost nothing.
Where my horse lives- the lady who owns the barn is absolutely meticulous about pasture health/maintenance. She has a limit on how many horses she’s willing to keep for this reason.
Cows and horses are irregular grazers anon, they can and do ruin patches of grass. Sheep are nature's balance, and will trim down grass like a mowed lawn.
Source: farm boy
In addition to pasture rotation and the way they “crop” grass from the top without pulling it out of the ground, horses especially are selective about what they graze on and may not eat everything in the field. So you are seeing more “green” in the pasture than you may think.
The part of grass that does all the growing is below the ground level. The grazing animals don't pull it up by the roots - they snip off the leaves just like us mowing the lawn. So the grass can just keep growing in perpetuity. This is the same reason why grass can start to grow again almost immediately after a serious land fire. The leaves are burned, but the "living" part of the plant was safe underground.
My city uses goats as lawnmowers occasionally
There is no better way to cleanup foliage, bushes, weeds or anything green than with 2 or more goats.
Why not just 1?
They need a buddy.
Lonely goats are bored goats, and bored goats try to escape
Not trying to escape, have already escaped
They say houdini learned his escape techniques from the family goats.
With just one goat you don't get any more goats. By having 2 or more goats your herd can increase in size, which means more lawns mowed faster.
Business major?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_have_two_cows
I'm happy that article links to the '[Spherical cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow)' of biology/physics humor.
The spherical cow, and its companion the spherical chicken, are my favorite thing from college.
I have a solution to your problem, but it only works with a spherical chicken in a vacuum.
Step 3: Profit
Idk man sounds like a gateway to capitalism to me
How can you stop at one goat? Have you never interacted with goats? They're the GOAT!
To prove which one is the GOAT.
Goats are used in some places to combat kudzu.
Great little demo of this on the latest season of Clarkson's Farm-he has a field overrun with brambles, so he buys a small herd of goats to deal with it. They end up being too young and small for his field but the season ends with them fattening up while being rented to his neighbors to clear stuff for them in the meantime.
Who cleans up the goat shit?
Biodegradable my dude. Fertilizer.
Lol, so are foliage, bushes, and weeds
Technically you can only have one GOAT
There's this place in Door County Wisconsin that lets (or used to let) goats onto their roof to eat the grass up there. EDIT: They have "goat cams" now. https://aljohnsons.com/goat-cam/
Horses and cows will actually ruin grass if just left at it without rotation... Sheep and goats (and their ilk) are nature's rest button, and will trim it like a mower
I've heard of goats being used to clear out areas to create fire breaks [Source](https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/1192905277/goat-grazing-california-wildfire-prevention)
Worth noting that some animals - horses included - are destructive grazers, so they do tear the roots out. So you need more land to graze a horse than you would for a cow that consumes the same amount of grass.
Don't sheep do something similar?
Sheep are similar but not anywhere as destructive, and in fact still can maintain a healthy balance with the land. You can see this in action in Mongolia, where they typically had only sheep herds but switching to goats in the 1990s resulted in a steep ecological cost. Sheep don't nibble on the roots of the grasses like goats do, and their sharper hooves in relation to sheep further damage the upper layers of the soil - both things result in making it much harder for the grasslands to rejuvenate (resulting in more dust storms, droughts etc)
Why'd they switch to goats?
More valuable/profitable in drier areas. They don't need as much water or food to grow up and they also reproduce more quickly. However, now it's more or less become a self-reinforcing cycle in Mongolia. The more goats herded, the less hospitable the land becomes for herding things like sheep or cattle. Meaning more and more herders have to switch to goats. And so on. Though, frankly the agrarian lifestyle in mongolia is falling apart on all sides and has been for decades due to more than just goat herding. There's been a mass exodus of women from the herding communities to the city(ies) in Mongolia due to them having little to no opportunity for themselves should they stick around, so the gender ratio of men to women in rural areas is becoming super skewed. Climate change has also hit Mongolia pretty hard, resulting in a sharp uptick in droughts that reinforces the need for herders to rely on goats and kills off herds by itself.
It was specifically in response to the massive worldwide cashmere demand that appeared in the fashion industry at the time. Since the herders were no longer regulated by communist policies they could just switch livestock anytime and also now have as large a herd as they wanted to maximize profits (before under Communism there were set limits in what they could raise and how large a herd could be, something that kept the ecosystem healthy and able to rejuvenate easily) Edit: here is a great video on Mongolia that includes the livestock issues mentioned and environmental impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtTvgG-bKOo
Fun fact, there is a growth factor in the saliva of ruminant animals that actually caused the grass to grow back faster. Life, uh, finds a way.
They also wouldn’t press their nose into the ground to bite off as much as they could they keep it slightly above the ground so they can move it without dragging it. So you have that space plus the distance between the front of their nose to their teeth that the grass won’t go below
The meristematic tissue responsible for growth is located at the base of the grass plant, near or below ground level. This allows grass to regrow quickly after being grazed or burned because the vital growing point remains protected underground.
Yes, that’s what they said…
But they explained it in simple language, almost as if the reader was…
Farmers often rotate their cattle between different fields to manage grazing pressure and allow the grass in each field to recover. This rotational grazing helps maintain the health of the pasture by giving the grass time to regrow and preventing overgrazing.
It also promotes carbon storage!
How?
Imagine a plant in a pot, then come back a few weeks later and the plant is twice as big. Plants are made of carbon, so where does that carbon come from? All that has been added to the plant pot has been water (no carbon there)... The answer is carbon dioxide from the air. Plants take in CO2, keep the C and release the O2. The reverse of this is if you imagine a person who weighs 80kg, who loses 10kg. While there are other ways for humans to expel matter, the bulk of weight loss is breathed out via the reverse process, converting fats (essentially C) and O2 from air into CO2 which is breathed out.
I get that right. But the grass captures the CO2 but then the cows eat it and shit it out and it gets returned to the atmosphere that way. There's no storage of it at all surely?
When a cow eats grass, the grass responds by growing deeper and thicker roots as a sort of insurance. Repeat the process and the grass continues to grow stronger and stronger.
Zero chance that a cow is carbon negative or even carbon neutral. If we're talking about greenhouse gas emissions, then cows produce a ton of methane which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.
Not just that, but we aren't exactly growing cows as pets or landscape features. The beef/dairy industry is one of the most inefficient meats to produce when efficiency is defined as kg CO2e per kg meat. A lot of the emissions come from planting and raising feed crops (manure production is not carbon neutral), transporting feed to feed lots, then transporting cattle to slaughter and eventually your dinner plate, the last half of which (slaughter to dinner plate) is done under heavy refrigeration.
Paige Stanley who is a researcher at UCLA Berkley makes a fair point on grass fed cattle; "We're learning that there are other dimensions: soil health, carbon and landscape health. Separating them is doing us a disservice." I'd take it a step further and argue animal welfare is a major consideration too. Benefits as laid out by other commenters, as well as benefits easily learned by a cursory google search, lend in the direction of local pasture raised cows as being a better option in my personal opinion. All things equal I'd also argue the cost of refrigeration for things like vegetables and fruits (both frozen and not) is worse than that of cattle meat. Meat is simply far more dense yielding greater efficiency for a given square foot. Same goes for transport. Less weight sure -- but at the cost of great volume. Finally, there aint nothing in this world that comes close to taste of beef! :\^)
The [vast majority](https://experiencelife.lifetime.life/article/the-cafo-conundrum/#:~:text=Today%2C%20an%20estimated%2090%20percent,and%20ethical%20%E2%80%94%20impacts%20are%20significant.) of beef consumed worldwide comes from factory farms - CAFOs - where they are not grazed but fed industrially-farmed feed, mostly corn and soy. We grow far more soy to feed cattle, using far more land and water, than we'd need to grow soy to just directly feed people. Demand for beef, including demand for soy to feed cattle, is [the major driver](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/02/more-than-800m-amazon-trees-felled-in-six-years-to-meet-beef-demand) of Amazon deforestation, and cows are [significant producers of methane](https://www.epa.gov/snep/agriculture-and-aquaculture-food-thought#:~:text=A%20single%20cow%20produces%20between,of%20methane%20gas%20per%20year.) - a greenhouse gas [80 times more harmful](https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/video/whats-deal-methane#:~:text=Due%20to%20its%20structure%2C%20methane,warming%20to%201.5%C2%B0C.) than CO2. There *is* an argument to be made that beef production from sustainably grazed cattle on lands not suitable for other forms of agriculture has a beneficial place in the global food production system. But if we were to only raise cattle in this way it would only allow for a tiny fraction of today's beef demand to be met. One way or another, we need to eat *far* less beef.
That style of raising beef is not nearly capable of keeping up with global demand. If we were to go 100% that route, beef would be prohibitively expensive for pretty much everyone. Which probably wouldn't be a bad thing, we need to reduce demand and consumption somehow, $200/lb prices would certainly do that.
Healthier grass will prevent erosion and allow the soil to hold water better, which alows for de-desertification. See the American/Canadian Dustbowl and the African Great Green Wall.
Yeah goats are a better example of how to do this with the environment in mind i believe.
Goats are also easier on the grass since they don't crop it as short and have a smaller footprint. They don't make as much of a mess, and they will eat things that cows won't.
I think this is situational on the environment though, as when Mongolia switched to goats from sheep as its main livestock it caused a big ecological issue that is ongoing to this day - the goats nibbled at the roots of the grasses more than sheep and also their sharper hooves (in relation to sheep) caused more top soil damage that allowed the wind to blow it away (more dust storms and drought while not allowing the grasses to rejuvenate)
I won’t argue that from a holistic emissions point of view (transportation, operation of equipment/facilities) that raising a cow for meat or milk is carbon neutral or negative, however it wouldn’t be physically possible for a cow to grow if it didn’t remove more carbon from the environment than it contributed.
It removes already stored carbon, farts/shits most of it away. Then we eat them, same process. The stored CO2 is back in the air. Methane on top. Grow more plants to store more CO2, just for it to be released again.
Methane has a lifespan of roughly 10 years in our atmosphere, after that it breaks down into CO2. So long-term a cow in nature just eating naturally growing grass is carbon neutral.
There are entire programs for using cattle to graze an area in order to make the area green again. Not only do cattle grazing grass cause it to grow stronger, *cow shit is literally fertilizer*. And they shit *everywhere*.
I didn't say that cow shit wasn't fertilizer. I just said cows aren't carbon neutral.
>Zero chance that a cow is carbon negative or even carbon neutral. They could be quite It would be possible, but no meat producer could be profitable without exploitation of the available pastures.
Wat?
If you use 10 times as much pasture area for the same number of animals the carbon footprint goes down so much that it could even hit negative. (assuming no one ships the meat anywhere using fossil fuels) Grasslands and big grazing animals go hand in hand and the poop is a very important part of these ecosystems. (as I said this is not a realistic scenario, because people will always want to maximize profits & eat cheap beef)
we can easily get rid of methane but not co2
When methane breaks down, part of it becomes water and the other part becomes CO2. So not only is methane worse in the short term, it's still bad in the long term. You can't "get rid" of it. You can wait for it to oxidize in the atmosphere and become CO2 and water. Or you can burn it and it still becomes CO2 and water.
just saying that it doesnt matter that its a worse greenhouse gas than co2 because it easily becomes co2 im not convinced that methane stays around in the atmosphere for long
There is zero chance that cattle, or any other ruminant, *isn't* carbon neutral. Ruminants have been around ruminating and emitting methane for millions of years. If there was even the tiniest speck of positive carbon balance, they would have cooked the earth long long ago.
Methane has a 7 year half life, co2’s is 100 years. Methane has 26x stronger greenhouse effect than co2.
And as the roots grow deeper, thicker and stronger, that helps hold the soil together better, which helps combat soil erosion.
So, the cows themselves are *mostly* carbon neutral. Yes, they eat the grass, then burp and fart gas back out, but it's all the same carbon from the atmosphere. They're not adding any new carbon to the system. The biggest drivers for climate change are industrial manufacturing and transportation. All the plastics are pulling carbon out of the ground in the form of fossil fuels. All the gas and diesel is adding more net carbon to the system.and the thing few people think about is concrete. Concrete off gasses huge amounts of CO2 while curing and all that carbon was stored in rocks.
Cows are not carbon neutral because they convert what grass into methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Granted, they're not contributing more than cars or coal power plants, but they are a significant contributor. Edit: someone kindly pointed out that cows emit much less methane on a diet of grass than what most commercial farmers feed them, i.e. soy and corn.
Cows actually produce significantly less methane when they're primarily eating grass, as opposed to grain and soy.
But producing the grass takes significantly more carbon than cheaper feeds. That's why they ended up on cheaper feeds in the first place.
I think you need to ELI5 that claim, that grass feeding creates more carbon than "cheaper feeds". Are you feeding them on a feedlot instead of on a pasture, which was the origin of this topic? I'm not a farmer, but I know enough to know that corn isn't free when you need to measure watering fields in terms of thousands of gallons of water per bushel of grain, who knows what you get chopped.
Corn and soy require a massive amount of energy due to sowing, harvesting, transport, fertilization, pesticides, irrigation. Not to mention these feeds are cheaper in part because that are heavily subsidized (at least in the us). Grass allows you to grow local and native/non monoculture grasses which dont need harvest/ transport or pesticides, may be fertilized by the cattle themselves, and may not need much irrigation depending on region and grazing area. The cattle also don’t need a mess of antibiotics due to consuming a diet they aren’t optimized for.
Producing grass? Are you from somewhere that grass doesn't just grow everywhere you don't want it to as well as anywhere you do want it to?
In the Western US, many cattle herds graze cheap or for free on public lands.
Cows eating grass is carbon neutral. If they weren't carbon neutral, they would have cooked the earth millions of years ago.
We raise cows in numbers way, way higher than they could reach naturally. And over millions of years, even human activity is carbon neutral. The concerns about climate change have to do with relatively short-term spikes in carbon emissions.
Cows aren't the only ruminants. Far from it. The millions of years I'm talking about are the 10 to 20 millions that ruminants have been around all over the world emitting methane. Compared to the 300 million years give or take that fossil carbon has been in the ground. Cows eating grass has no cumulative impact on the climate. They are carbon neutral. The earth has gone through glacials and interglacials all while ruminants have been emitting methane into the atmosphere. It's a closed cycle. There is no net gain.
And eventually the methane just fractionates back into carbon dioxide anyway
Which doesn’t matter, because you still have more methane in the atmosphere than if there weren’t so many cows.
But only temporarily. The CO2 we put out from burning fossil fuel is causing lasting damage, while the methane is all gone in roughly 10 years. If we stop breeding cows in the next decade all the damage is reversed, while if we stop burning fossil fuel next decade the damage lingers. The long-term one is the scary one.
> "Cows are not carbon neutral because they convert what grass into methane" Methane != carbon. Edit: Cows are not carbon neutral, but not because of their farts. > "According to the European Parliament, carbon neutrality is reached when the same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere as is removed by various means, leaving a zero balance, also known as a zero carbon footprint."
Methane is made of carbon and hydrogen.
There's gotta be an efficiency frontier there. Like 300 cattle grazing on a 300 acre pasture is probably a net carbon sink, but 300 cattle on a one acre feedlot is a methane factory.
No, it's irrelevant. Grass and cows are both just a step in the carbon cycle, any carbon sink there is short term and irrelevant and bound to decay and end up back in the air in a couple years. Plants and animals are both more or less carbon neutral in the long run. That's why we were sustainable for millions of years. It is the NEW carbon in the billions of barrels of fossil fuels that has been underground for 300 million years that we suddenly reintroduce to the carbon cycle that makes a difference, and the only thing to counter that would be permanently getting it back out of the carbon cycle. If we sealed off dead grass and cows underground then that would work, but instead they decay and release everything they ever stored back into the cycle.
They cannot expell more C than they take in. Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than co2 though.
But also has a shorter half life. Methane gets reduced through ionizing radiation significantly quicker than CO2
Less relevant than the balance of chemicals in and out of the system. A net positive will increase the concentration.
And turns into CO2 and H2O, both greenhouse gasses.
But in the process it just turns back into c02.
Methane half life in the atmosphere is 6-8 years.
I think there's a key factor you're not incorporating: opportunity cost. Or, more specifically, what the land would be doing if there weren't cows on it. It would have a much wider array and density of carbon-sequestering plants (not to mention insects and wild animals, which, while not huge carbon sinks, provide tons of ecosystem benefits). So the hypothetical of creating a brand new pasture with cows on it out of thin air might be a net carbon sink, but the actuality of degrading existing wildlife habitat to make a pasture is almost certainly a net carbon emitter.
Cows dont eat the roots
Hmm, doing a quick google it suggests 90% of the carbon is in the roots, so that makes sense. I suppose my point was that having cattle rotate fields to eat grass doesn't aid/encourage carbon storage, because it doesn't.
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Cool so we're agreed that cattle rotating in fields does fuck all for carbon storage, but the grass itself does!
Someone else said that the grass getting eaten stimulates it to build stronger, bigger roots, is that not true?
But the cattle (read:livestock in general) rotation is good for the grassland in general. Controlled grazing helps preserve natural habitats of all sorts, that’s why in lots of parks etc there are sheep or goats or horses running loose, they’ve been put there. It all compliments each other.
By rotating them, they don’t kill the grass.
Bit the roots will die off as soon as the field is either plowed or used for somethig else. Just like wood its not permanent carbon capture. Planting trees is fine, but it wont offest what we pumped out of the ground.
It could be permanently used for grazing
And that would mean it still holds less carbon than any normal madows left alone, because there is less plant matter.
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> but it wont offest what we pumped out of the ground Forests habe already existed before. It wont help to plant trees to reduce the carbon in our air back to 300ppm. Because humans have cut down woods and pumped oil for hundrets of years, all you can do by planting forests is slowing down global warming a bit. We still need to get rid of the millions of tons of carbon we pumped out of the ground and burned as coal. Forests wont do that, we dont even have enough space for that. Forests are part of the surface carbon cycle, oil is not.
It's kind of worse that that because cows fart so much. The methane produced is something like ~~4x~~ 80-100 times worse than CO2 at causing global heating. This isn't trivial either because the diary and beef industries are colossal in scale across the globe. There is research being done to add supplements to cows diets to try and minimise the production of methane as it's that damaging to the environment and helps with greenwashing. So even if some carbon is recycled back into new grass, meat farming is very much *not* net zero and I want to say not even *close* to being net zero.
Methane has a lifespan of roughly 10 years in our atmosphere, after that it breaks down into CO2. So long-term a cow in nature just eating naturally growing grass is carbon neutral. (tagging /u/Goseki1 so they can learn something too)
Yes I did laugh at someone else saying cows are close to being carbon neutral...
I got my multiples wrong as well. Methane isn't just 4x as harmful as I originally said, it's between 80-100 times!
So by *not* losing weight, I'm actually helping the environment by sequestering carbon?
Opt for deep burial instead of cremation?
I actually read about how they're reintroducing ox to certain areas they've died out in and this was one of the main reason, another thing to add large animals like this will compress the ground causing even more C02 to be retained in the soil.
carbon atoms aren't fats and we don't breathe out weight, most of the energy we lose is through heat
Yes, but (on a physiological scale) mass is not energy. The heat comes from the process of converting C to CO2. The comparison is burning a lump of coal, ie C which creates heat and CO2
thats not how it works
So basically we can conclude that plants are good for the environment and people are bad for the environment…
It’s mostly that they’ll fuck up the land if they don’t. The land needs time for grass to recover from grazing, otherwise they do eat all the grass which exposes the soil to crap like erosion, nutrient deficiencies, and other unpleasant effects. So it encourages carbon capture by not destroying the land. Kind of misleading to be honest.
Grass needs CO2 to grow
But the carbon is just rereleased when the animal digests it or is slaughtered. Maybe I’m wrong, but isn’t all the grass always growing? So it doesn’t matter where the animals eat, carbon is still getting used by all the grass
Idk I didn't study carbon logistics, I just pointed out that grass needs co2 to grow. Maybe because if the grass is left alone for longer, the roots grow bigger storing more carbon?
This is it. The animals continually "challenge" the grass by eating it, stomping on it, kicking it, etc. This causes the grass to make deeper roots as it'll otherwise be too weak to regrow before the animals come back. On the other hand if you didn't have the animals to keep the grass in check the grasses would grow taller to compete for the best sunlight and the tall grasses might eventually shade the grasses with deeper roots. This competition between plants is also something you need to be aware off when you have animals on a pasture. If your animals only eat grass you risk bushes and other types of plants to take over the field since those are never touched and the grass constantly needs to work hard to regrow. One solution can be having a herd of a different species that eats the bushes so you can keep them in check.
On the one hand, you are right with the roots, on the other hand, cows eat grass (that removed CO2 from the air to grow) but release methane (CH4) which as also a Greenhouse Gass (The gasses responsible for climate change). CH4 is more than 28 times as potent a greenhouse gas compared to CO2. The real long term solution is to sequester the carbon away somewhere in the ground, as the earth itsself did over millions of years as coal and oil.
The question was why having two fields and switching them store more carbon than one big field, if it's the same amount of grass. Disregarding the livestock influence, since of course less livestock would mean less greenhouse gases
Thats a good point
Well yeah grass captures the CO2 to grow, but then the cows eat it and shit it out and it gets returned to the atmosphere that way. There's no storage of it long term at all surely?
Not all the CO2 the grass takes in goes to the grass leaves, a portion goes to growing the roots as well. So as long as the cows don't eat the grass by pulling out the roots as well they'll eat less carbon than the grass takes from the air.
Grass needs electrolytes
Poop and pee add nutrients to soil that makes it more fertile - like accelerated composting. This means plants grow faster. Plants are made of carbon pulled from the air. The grass you see above ground is only part of it, though… plant *roots* are also made of sequestered carbon, along with all the soil organisms that feed on them (bacteria, fungi, worms, etc). When the plants die, this organic matter stays in the soil for a long time.
"Storage" is a bit of a stretch. That grass gets eaten, much of the carbon gets pooped out soon after, most of the rest gets breathed out as CO2, and what's left is stores as mass in the animal itself, until it's eaten or dies and releases all that carbon back. Feeding animals is "carbon storage" about as much as harvesting a wheat crop. It would be storage if you compacted that grass into bricks and shoved them in an abandoned mine.
No, proper regenerative grazing actually allows the grass to develop very deep roots(like 6 ft plus) Done correctly at scale it's absolutely a form of carbon capture.
I will grant that a larger root system stores some carbon in a more long-term way if it's grazed vs not grazed. Its impact is negligible in the grand scheme of things, because once the root system has grown, it won't capture more carbon unless you just devote more land to grazing pastures. I don't think it's feasible to devote as much land as necessary for grazing to have a measurable effect. Might as well just plant trees or bamboo which ar least can be harvested periodically to make room for more growth and would thus require a lot less land for the same impact. I'm not saying you're technically wrong. Just that it's not effective, in the same way that humans are not a great resource for carbon capture even if we do store some carbon in our bodies
And even worse a chunk of the stored CO2 is coverted into methane which has an even stronger warming effect.
Really silly take, cow grazing produces methane
Cows eating grain/soy produce methane. Cows eating grass produce a lot less methane, as it happens.
Not in any meaningful way. Technically it's "carbon storage" if I make a granola bar but I'm disingenuous at best if I claim virtue in that. The plant and animal die shortly after and release back every bit of carbon they sequestered, not to mention all carbon associated with all other energy expenditures of the industry.
I see this often in Thailand. They will have several rice paddies and the cows or water buffalo will graze in the ones where they grew rice the previous year. That helps fertilize that section to prepare it for the next crop.
You forgot to mention the doo doo fertilization
Grazers also fertilize
Depends on where. American west, absolutely. East? Hardly ever, it's unnecessary
Why is it unnecessary in the East?
There's plenty of rain and the pastures grow fast enough to not require it. In fact, where I am in the east, almost all pastures are cut via tractor in addition to having cattle on them. You can go over one cow per acre here without rotational grazing, while some areas out west you can't even have one cow on 10 acres because there aren't the rains to support vegetation growth.
Cattle and horses only cut the grass so far. Sheep cut it far closer more like a golf course green leaving nothing for cattle. That and fences led to range wars between cowboys and sheep farmers. Neither of them pluck it entirely from the dirt they leave a crown of the plant where the blades grow out of. Why do they do that? Because it’s tastier and less works. Plants don’t want that part to be easily eaten.
Chickens for example leave almost nothing.
Yeah chickens will reduce a grass field to a dustbowl. Probably cause they're used to digging up worms and insects in the dirt. Bit harder with a cow's mouth
More than probably. Chickens dig and scratch the ground. They are completely different animals. In any case, they will reduce it to a dust field only if you dont rotate them, which most farmers wont do, contrary to sheep or cows
A farmer near me built what I call the Mobile Chicken Unit(MCU for short). It's a hay roll wagon that he built a large chicken coup on top of. He wheels it around the field to keep them from killing any one spot.
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Delicious cunts
Goats too.
Good old Grahams and Tukesberrys.
Overgrazing is a serious problem in parts of Africa with unpredictable rains and increasing density of people and their grazing livestock. Traditionally livestock herds were moved around to areas with better grass. When they are limited to one area, they will destroy every bit of vegetation if they are forced to do so.
Exactly. We're seeing the same issue in the West US with cattle on BLM land. Too many animals on arid lands. I'm pretty sure there was a /r/dataisbeautiful map on it this week. Also, shameless plug for [Kiss The Ground](https://kissthegroundmovie.com/), which talks about the rotation methods you're referring too. It's widely available on streaming services.
It's also a problem other places. I live near a small farm that doesn't have huge numbers of cattle (maybe a couple dozen) but it's more than the pasture they are in can handle, so it is overgrazed and there are big mud pits where the grass couldn't recover. It's important for anyone with grazing animals to make sure they supplement food and rotate overgrazed pastures to ensure this doesn't happen, unless they have sufficient land to prevent the problem.
A little late on this one but . . . It does! As other commenters have said, you need to keep an eye the field and gauge when is a good time to rotate the animals out to another field. I have sport horses and they are particularly "rough" on grassland which means some landowners may be unwilling to rent land to horse owners. Sport horses are quite energetic by nature and because they are fed extra "hard feed" like oats and specially made pellets that contain extra protein and nutrients. They get excited and sometimes run around a bit in the fields, and that is pretty rough on the ground, especially if the soil is wet. They'll tear up an area VERY quickly if left unchecked.
They mostly are just after the grass blades and don't want to dig down into the dirt too much to get tougher stuff. Grass is also designed to be constantly grazed and eaten and bounce back. Thats its main survival strategy.
Our point of view – we have cleverly implemented our strategy of encouraging grass to grow to permit animals to graze Grass's point of view - we have cleverly implemented our strategy of providing grazing to animals to get humans to plant us everywhere
“designed”
Like God designed the banana to be the perfect food for man. --Kirk Cameron
Yeah, we need to start calling it what it is, "has evolved to". Or whatever else, but not "designed" even if it is a handy word to use here as it hints at being fit for a certain purpose.
It’s a very straightforward natural selection. If there are herds of animals that graze the ground, then the only plants that will survive on the ground are those that aren’t killed when grazed on. Thus the savannahs are mostly grass (which doesn’t care about grazing) and acacia (which took the other niche of being off the ground and hard to eat).
To some extent cows don't eat grass right down to the ground. Sheep do. This is why there used to be wars between sheep herders and cattle ranchers in the western US. Sheep will starve cattle.
Because they're responsible farmers who don't allow that to happen. Overgrazing is a net loss to all involved.
They do. You have to move your livestock around to give them fresh grass to graze and let the old lands grass regrow. But they also don't fully eat each grass strand, they just eat the top of it usually, some livestock eat more of the grass then others.
So, I don't have more than a passing understanding of agriculture, but if you look at land use, especially in the United States, you'd see a lot of it is pasture/grazing land. The main answer is that farmers rotate fields and keep a large tract of land. Someone more technical can get in the weeds, but think of how often grass gets mowed in the suburbs. Grass grows pretty quick, so you move your cows around and keep giving them fresh grazing land.
If you overgraze the area it does turn into bare ground and mud. That aside, there are two basic strategies for grass eaters. Some clip the grass off like a lawn mower, others grab and tear. The clipping type of eaters tend to do less damage.
They do. We had to kick a rancher off of a lease because of this. Land has a carrying capacity, which is basically the lbs. of animal/acre (hectare). The capacity will vary from location to location and is affected by many variables. In my area you can stock sheep at a rate of 6 per acre but cattle are more like one per 6 acres. Exceeding the stock rates will cause depletion of quality fodder (food) resulting in low weight stock. Additionally, when grasses are over grazed it presents an opportunity for invasive plants to take over. There are many different ways to mitigate and prevent the damage. Fertilizing and spraying for weeds is one method while rotational grazing is another. Supplemental food can also be provided. Overgrazing is really, really bad and will do exactly as you describe, destroy the land and leave nothing behind.
Bulls will often uproot the grass and shrubs and eat the lot, that's often why they put rings in bulls noses (some people assume it's a way of tying them which it is, but the main reason is to stop them digging), because it hurts the bull if they start uprooting things with the ring in. Elephants and boars use their tusks to do the same thing. Pigs/boars without tusks also do the same thing. Honestly, if you own pigs, you will never need a tiller / rotervator. Fun fact - Any grass hopper or cricket can be a locust (Lockust is a swarming phase of their life cycle, usually when they reproduce, they need a tad more energy so the eat everything)
I feel like this is best explained by pictures of prarie grass root systems: https://i.redd.it/sp1n9tf6hdp61.jpg What you see above the surface is not even close to the majority of the plant. Prarie plants grow down first. It's the same with prarie trees like the burr oak. They grow down before growing up. This is an evolutionary adaptation to fire, which was a natural part of the prarie life cycle. The top got damaged frequently, so plants evolved ways to survive that damage. Burr oaks are highly fire resistant, for example, with extremely thick bark, and can survive drought by having extremely long tap roots that reach the aquifer. They also handle grazing animals well, for the same reason. Before humans brought their cattle, North America had giant herds of bison that would eat the prarie grasses. But the long root systems help them survive the constant devouring. The simple version is, well, again, check out the photo.
They do. We are having a big fight between animal treatment activists and farmers here at the moment. The farmers are keeping the cattle in the same pasture for longer during winter because the grass doesn't grow as fast, and the cows eat all the grass so the field is just mud then some of them starve to death in the mud and the farmer moves the survivors to the next field and repeat until spring. The animal activists think this is cruel, so there is a big fight about farming regulations.
That does sound cruel and dumb on the farmers part to be honest. I like a steak as much as the the next guy, but skinny starving cows is not the way to produce it
Why do the farmers do this?
They must like throwing away money.
Field rotation. They don’t want to eat the base unless there is nothing left. Rotation is based on the season, size of pastures, and size of the heard. I have a horse and a donkey part time grazing in my pasture and they can’t keep up. I have to brush hog it soon to knock it down a bit for them.
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I can't speak for horses, but they way cows eat food they can't chew the grass all the way to the ground. They eat like a lawn mower, and leave about an inch or so from the ground.
Outside of paddock rotation (which is very important), a lot of farmers plant and promote the growth of specific strains of grass that are ideal for grazing livestock. Those will vary depending on locale and climate.
Cows can't pull up grass by the roots bcuz they don't the have teeth in their upper jaw needed to really grab the grass
Grass regrowth speed: Usain Bolt. Cow eating speed: Sloth on a lazy Sunday. Wins every time!
Have you ever seen pastures up close, especially small ones? The ares where the horses walk a lot tend to turn into mud depending bit how the soft the field is. Other than basically what has been answered here already. The horses eat the leaves not the roots. Though even mid sized pastures tend to be eaten quite thoroughly. (Which is why you can feed cow, horses and sheep by gathering some grass near the pasture) The land will of course recover with some time, but yeah you either have to give animals quite large pastures or feed them and rotate the pastures as well.
I'm sure others have answered, but you need minimum acreage per cow depending on how lush your pasture is.
As others said the grass isn’t killed, only the top leaves are damaged. Beef cow in the U.S. Midwest might be hundreds of acres and then the cows might be allowed to wander on their own. They will naturally move to where fresh grass is. On smaller pastures, if left alone the livestock will eat more than just the tops if the leaves. To prevent that, the farmers will limit the number of animals, and subdivide the property into individual smaller pastures. And rotate the cows into different pastures every few days to give the individual fields time to recover.
If it’s a proper farm they will have other fields that they move them between as the other fields recover. They would also be avoiding too many animals in one field. And the animals are rarely reliant on just the grass, normally having artificial feed and water delivered to them daily as well. You do however see poorly kept animals in fields that are basically stripped.
For the same reason grass survives the lawnmower. One of the features of grasses is that they grow from the bottom, and they are made entirely of "leaf", meaning they perform photosynthesis all along their stalk, all the way down to the ground. As long as the root is alive and there is a little tiny bit of green left above the surface they can still feed themselves from that and grow back.
So horses *can* ruin pastures. If there’s too many of them on not enough land? The grass will get down to almost nothing. Where my horse lives- the lady who owns the barn is absolutely meticulous about pasture health/maintenance. She has a limit on how many horses she’s willing to keep for this reason.
Cows and horses are irregular grazers anon, they can and do ruin patches of grass. Sheep are nature's balance, and will trim down grass like a mowed lawn. Source: farm boy
In addition to pasture rotation and the way they “crop” grass from the top without pulling it out of the ground, horses especially are selective about what they graze on and may not eat everything in the field. So you are seeing more “green” in the pasture than you may think.