For years people have been wringing their hands about cattle methane emissions. As usual, for the wrong reasons.
What they generally don’t talk about is that cattle eating their natural food (grasses) don’t fart any more than any other animal.
The bulk of the methane is being produced in giant feedlots where thousands or tens of thousands cows are kept in insanely overcrowded conditions. They walk in bare dirt/mud covered with manure and not a single blade of grass. They are fed corn, molasses and other supplements intended to (a) fatten them up quickly and (b) soften their muscle (meat). This unnatural diet of course produces flatulence.
It also produces disease. Tissue breakdown, which brings bacteria to remediate. So then the feedlot operators pump the cattle full of antibiotics to suppress the infections until the cattle are butchered. This also happens with chicken, pigs, etc, and it is why better (non factory-farmed) products now proudly proclaim “no anti-biotics ever”.
In California’s central valley there are numerous of these feedlots and motorists passing by on Highway 5 can smell them for miles approaching. Its that bad, and everyone knows it.
So basically we humans force cattle into unnatural conditions, feed them a horrible diet, deprive them of exercise, and then complain that they fart.
Apparently the next step is to add even more poisons (propylene glycol is anti-freeze) into their diet to prevent the farting, which probably will be inducing more cancers, etc. And yes, is being passed on to humans in the meat and milk.
The whole thing is insanity.
And that’s just the USA beef industry. The dairy industry is probably worse. The poor calves that are taken from their mothers at birth and often die. The mothers that are grieving the calves and the emotional stress adds toxins to their milk due to mammary tissue breakdown and bacterial remediation, a possible source of TB (my theory). Also overcrowded conditions in huge operations ever since the family dairies were paid ~$100,000 each by US gov to get out of the business in the 80s.
For my part, my family eats much less meat than we used to, and only grass-fed, to avoid the entire feedlot mess. We no longer buy milk, except every once in a while some raw milk from a local dairy. We buy european (usually french) butter, or have sometimes made if ourselves from raw milk cream.
