Dean
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Eat a Burger, Stop Global Warming?http://www.care2.com/greenliving/eat-a-burger-stop-global-warming.html
| Quote: | | Carbon farming is new but carbon sequestration is not. Sequestration figures prominently in the popular carbon offsetting programs that allow people to pay a firm to plant trees–which absorb atmospheric carbon in their trunks, branches and roots–to compensate for their carbon emissions from air or auto travel. But initiatives to sequester carbon in soil with the help of grazing animals are less common, but perhaps more promising since croplands and grasslands cover more of the Earth’s surface than forests and grow faster. |
| Quote: | | Wick and Rathmann are running 180 head of cattle on 340 acres using an intricate grazing system designed by Collins to mimic the ecological conditions that occurred when wild bison and elk thundered across the grasslands of North America. |
| Quote: | | It’s true, of course, that meat-eating is a major cause of global warming due to massive emissions of nitrous oxide, methane and other greenhouse gases from livestock operations. “That’s absolutely correct about feedlots and absolutely wrong about grass-fed livestock,” Wick counters. “Sustainably raised grass-fed beef is a natural system and the methane and other greenhouse gases are mitigated by the carbon sequestration in the soil. We see this as a way to phase out feedlots.” Collins adds that nitrous oxides are in huge part the product of chemical fertilizers, which don’t make any sense in a farming system based on restoring the soil. |
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