Having scanned the scientific literature (100 journal articles) on the impact of milk production on reducing poverty, Torsten Hemme, managing director of the IFCN (International Farm Comparison Network) Dairy Research Center, in Kiel, Germany, says that dairy is improving lives in multiple ways. Continue reading
Livestock experts Anne Mottet and Henning Steinfeld, of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), warn of the pitfalls of simplification when looking at greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock and transport are often compared, but in a flawed way. Continue reading
What the evidence shows is that becoming vegetarian might help reduce your personal footprint—but it will be better to focus on a range of solutions if we want to have an impact on climate change.
Continue reading
A team of researchers at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) are testing Napier, Rhodes and Brachiaria grasses for cattle feed, and then physically measuring the emissions in a respiration chamber within the institute’s laboratory. Continue reading
A new research paper by Michigan State University scientists analyses the impacts of soil carbon sequestration on life cycle greenhouse gas emissions in Midwestern USA beef finishing systems and finds that eEmissions from the multi-paddock grazing system were offset completely by soil carbon sequestration and that soil carbon sequestration from well-managed grazing may help to mitigate climate change. Continue reading
Researchers are on the hunt for a cow that produces less methane, one of the major contributors to climate change. If and when those green genes can be easily isolated, they could be spread throughout global cattle populations. Continue reading
We can shrink the carbon footprint of livestock, but we need to properly measure their emissions first. Opinion piece written by Polly Ericksen. Continue reading
California has a lot of dairy cows, and all that belching and farting and decomposing poop accounts for 5 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas output. If you want radical emissions cuts, you gotta go for the belches. Continue reading
Using the state-of-the-art laboratory established in 2015 in Nairobi called the Mazingira Center, scientists are measuring greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture in Africa, key to improving the accuracy of emissions data for both national reporting and mitigation. Already, scientists found that Tier 1 emission factors established by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) overestimate both methane and nitrous oxide emissions from cattle excreta, given typical smallhoder practices in Eastern Africa. Continue reading
The following is an unusually sane and well communicated multimedia primer on the sustainability of the global food system. Food Matters, republished here in full with permission, is published by the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. Continue reading
ILRI Clippings 