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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Just a note before my comment: my reference is the Netherlands, which is struggling with too much cattle and too little land. I can imagine circumstances being different in Australia.

    Methane is a worse greenhous gas than CO2 though (28 times more) and just growing more grass, which gets eaten pretty much immediately again, does not necessarily compensate for it. Tackling methane emissions is also a pretty effective short term improvement for global warming, due to it not being nearly as long in the atmosphere as CO2.

    But methane is not the only problem with large amounts of cattle. The shit can actually become problematic in for the soil and water due to ammonia. This is a large problem in The Netherlands right now (and sadly we don’t have politicians in power willing to make actual changes here). Biodiversity and water quality are going down significantly and a very big contributor is cattle farming.

    And let’s also not forget that the grass used is for optimizing growing cattle and producing milk (because the farmers get paid like shit). It’s not a grass field full of flowers, herbs and other kinds of plants that are good for insect life. They’re more or less green deserts.