Greenhouse emissions with many unknowns: how cows will save the ecology of Russia

We believe that global warming is a non-essential thing. Just think, the planet warms up by one degree in 10 years. We believe that in Russia all this will end happily with the fact that it will simply get warmer here – so who is against it? Maybe bananas will begin to grow, but not all of them are brought from Ecuador through crooked logistics.

However, the problem is that the Earth is not just getting a little warmer, but the frequency of extreme weather events is increasing. How many times has Crimea and the Krasnodar Territory been flooded this summer? This is only in Russia. In some countries, the situation is much more serious. According to world news agencies, due to the heat, the source of the Thames in Britain has dried up, it has shifted by 8 kilometers. In the US, the West and the Midwest just burned out this summer. Reservoirs evaporate before our eyes, farmers use water from sewage treatment plants to irrigate fields. California winegrowers stopped making wine. As a result of large-scale forest fires, ashes remain on the grapes and no one buys wine.

More recently, Americans have bought property on the coast. 500 meters from the water. Today, in places it is already 100 meters from housing! And this is not on TV, but in real life! Glaciers are melting, the level of the World Ocean is rising, water is flooding roads – and people are forced to build bridges and viaducts to travel.

“The American press is full of alarming reports,” says Dmitry Salnikov, a farmer near Moscow who has been on probation in the US for over a year. – Two main topics: covid, which again “raises its head”, and global warming – Americans today do not care about anything else. Newspaper spreads are devoted to analytical materials on how to slow down greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Serious scientists, Nobel laureates are involved as experts.

Red meat tax

The Paris climate agreement, adopted in 2015, is designed to prevent the average temperature on the planet from rising by more than 2 degrees by 2100 compared to the pre-industrial era.

Already at the Glasgow Summit in 2020, states representing 70% of the world economy committed to achieve zero CO2 emissions by 2050. And Finland, Austria and Sweden – even earlier, respectively, by 2030, 2040 and 2045.

Events are also being forced in the Netherlands, where farmers have been rioting for two months. The government announced an agrarian reform aimed at reducing nitrogen oxide and ammonia emissions by 50%, and allocated about $25 billion for this purpose. The local farmers do not know what to do next. Europe has set a “carbon tax” that countries will have to pay for exceeding emission limits.

This cup does not bypass Russia either. At the initiative of the EU, from 2023, countries that do not fit into emission limits will be subject to serious penalties. Ecologists estimate that Russia can pay about $33 billion to the EU treasury within five years. Analysts are mostly talking about extractive industries, which will suffer the most from their carbon footprint. Which, of course, will affect the country’s budget.

It is possible that the current geopolitical and economic situation in the world will postpone these dates. But it will not cancel the very program of saving the environment. And in addition to the raw materials industries, Russia also has an agro-industrial complex, which, as a rule, is not mentioned.

It has already been suggested in the media that in the fight against CO2 emissions, after coal and oil, it will also be the turn of cattle. To prevent cows and sheep from breeding especially, the authorities can impose a tax on red meat. If today most Russians cannot afford beef (600 rubles for bones per kilogram), then with such a tax it will become even more inaccessible.

Whether we like it or not, today one of the main culprits of CO2 emissions on the planet is agriculture. Not gasoline-powered vehicles and not coal-smoking factories, but farm animals that leave “cakes”.

According to UN experts, a cow that eats 12–14 kilograms of feed per day emits 7 kg of CO2 equivalent in the form of waste products, and 2.5 tons per year. There are 1.5 billion cows on Earth – according to experts, they emit 18% more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than vehicles.

As you know, the United States and Western Europe are actively preparing for the transition to regenerative (restoring) agriculture. They are shouting about the food crisis, asking, even demanding grain and other foodstuffs from Russia. But they themselves are changing approaches in the countryside, thereby reducing the burden on the environment. In order to establish their own agrarian order in the world at one moment. And our “weapons” will begin to fine us.

In Russia, almost no one thinks about it. Although the world’s largest brands, still operating in our country and associated with agricultural production, are already drawing up plans for such a transition.

Will the domestic village follow them? And he has no other alternative. Attempts by agrarians to “sit out in the trenches” and to brush aside this program are doomed to failure. You can’t say that we have a zone of risky farming or that we already have enough problems …

During the Russian Energy Week in 2021, Vladimir Putin instructed the government to reduce CO2 emissions by 70% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. And achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. How many greenhouse gases a country emits into the atmosphere, it will absorb the same amount.

The Cabinet is preparing the economy for a global energy transition. According to the pilot project, the Sakhalin Peninsula should achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. There will be clean energy, based not on coal or oil, but on renewable fuels: sun, wind, sea tides.

Only here is what is being undertaken separately in agriculture – we know nothing about this. According to the plans of European futurists (architects of the future village), the village will only get better – more beautiful and picturesque, and the products – more natural.

Front and back view

According to scientists, once released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide will be removed from it, scary to think, about 10 thousand years. After about this period, the CO2 molecule will become solid, fall into the soil and someday turn into wood or coal. In this regard, methane gas is much simpler, it decomposes in the atmosphere for 10 years. But the problem is that methane traps heat 20 times more densely than CO2.

When digesting vegetable feed, cows release methane in the form of belching – they have methanogen bacteria in their stomachs. For this reason, environmentalists are calling for a reduction in the consumption of red meat – beef or lamb. By the way, this does not apply to pork, the pig is not a herbivore, and it does not have methanogenic bacteria.

Well, today there is a struggle on the planet to reduce beef consumption and switch to artificial meat.

In fact, animal husbandry poses a certain threat to the environment. If a cow stands in a stall or on a feedlot, does not see a pasture, hay and grain-based feed are brought to the feeder. From them, she quickly gains weight. As a rule, in industrial conditions, it is precisely this procedure for keeping cattle (cattle) that is practiced.

Feed is brought to her, and manure is taken away for her – this consumes a huge amount of fuel, which, when burned, emits greenhouse gas. The cow itself is the source of its excretion both from the front (in the form of burping with methane) and from behind – with manure. It immediately begins to oxidize and volatilize into the atmosphere in the form of CO2.

It turns out that if we want to stop global warming, then the cow has no place in our lives. But we are also trying to prevent a global food crisis. After all, it is still unknown from what humanity can die faster: from hunger or from heat, similar to that on Venus. Astronomers claim that the temperature of 400 degrees on this planet is not only because it is closer to the Sun than the Earth, but also because greenhouse gases have “plugged” it.

Supporters of recovery agriculture have a different point of view. Yes, the cow is a source of greenhouse gases, it’s true. However, in the event that the cow is on a leash. But we do not use the resource that herbivores provide in the fight against the greenhouse effect – that is the question.

Long before the rapid human activity, from the present Voronezh to India, along the Great Silk Road, millions of herds of herbivorous saigas, bison and wildebeest roamed on different continents. And there were no environmental disasters. Moreover, chernozem accumulated on the planet and the fertile soil layer increased. No one brought grass to the animals and no one cleaned up after them their waste products in special storage facilities. Grass over millions of years has learned to coexist properly with herbivores.

In the pasture, that is, free-range, the cow also emits methane and CO2. However, there the manure is processed by insects into organic fertilizer (about 5%) of the volume, and 95% is practically ready-made soil. Due to fertilizers, the grass grows at a more active pace and, like any vegetation, takes CO2 from the atmosphere.

The cow is the savior of the planet

Note: a cow in a pasture emits a greenhouse gas, and the grass takes it away. What is the balance? According to the standards of the non-chernozem zone of Russia, with grazing livestock, one head of cattle needs 2.5 hectares of land. As we have already said, cows emit about 2.5 tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

According to scientists, a hectare of grass absorbs two tons of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and drives it into the soil through its root system. If you make an equation, then the cow, having allocated 2.5 tons of CO2, absorbed 5 tons through the grass per year.

It turns out that she is the most faithful ally of man in the fight against global warming! Let’s add other benefits here. She does not need to bring food, burn tons of fuel for this. And for the transportation of manure, no diesel fuel is also required.

Manure itself as a fertilizer stimulates the further growth of grass, which captures CO2, and also becomes a fertile layer. The fact that the cow nibbles on the grass also creates an additional incentive for it to grow back.

The same cow with different ways of keeping shows different results. It just gives out 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide. Or captures 5 tons from the atmosphere.

Domestic experts often overlook the fact that when cows are kept on farms, manure storages periodically overflow with contents and organic matter gets into water bodies through rains. For example, through the Balashikha river Pekhorka to the Oka river, from it to the Volga, and then to the Caspian Sea.

In order to achieve “carbon neutrality”, the domestic village (with our open spaces) just needs to be put under state protection, like ancient monuments, pastures. So that they are not built up, as they are today, with high-rise buildings. Then all environmental fines will bypass us.