Eating for the Planet Part 3: Waste Products
by Climate Leader David Gladson
What’s the connection between what we eat and the atmosphere? In the first two parts of this series we looked at food conversion and land use; today we’ll look at how the waste products of animal agriculture impact our atmosphere.
The most discussed impact is probably the methane burped out by cows, but that is not the only issue. Raising animals in industrial conditions turns what would have been fertilizer into a toxic waste product.
First, the methane thing: It is true that cows digest with the help of microbes in the gut, and those microbes create methane which the cows burp out throughout the day. Methane creates 30x’s more warming impact on the atmosphere than CO2 does, so a little goes a long way. There are ways to manage the amount of methane that cows burp by switching up what they eat, but in general, large numbers of cows are not great for the environment.
But the bigger impact is from all the manure these animals produce. When living in a natural environment, animal poop helps the soil by acting as fertilizer. But, 99% of the animals we eat in the United States are raised on Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFO’s. When you cram 1000 cows or 100,000 chickens into a single barn on a CAFO, the quantity of poop becomes toxic. Stored in lagoons, CAFO’s create literal lakes of poop. These poop lakes release more methane as bacteria work to break down the waste products. These lakes also impact water quality, contaminating drinking water as the concentrated poop leaches into the soil.
CAFO’s also contribute to ocean dead zones. In reasonable quantities, animal poop contains nutrients that fertilize the soil. But when you concentrate so many animals in a single location, it overwhelms nature’s ability to break down the waste products. When these concentrated nutrients flow down into lakes or the ocean, it create algal blooms as microbes feed on the nutrients. These blooms then use up all the oxygen in the water, creating a dead zone where sea life can’t live.
There are more than 400 ocean dead zones currently. One example is at the mouth of the Mississippi River, where the agricultural runoff from the midwest has decimated the fishing industry along the Mississippi delta. The once thriving shrimp industry has been destroyed by runoff from farms and CAFO’s along the river.
To sum up this three part series, eating animals contributes to climate change in three key ways. It increases the amount of food we have to grow, contributes to deforestation, and creates toxic waste products when animals are raised under industrial conditions. It is possible to raise animals in ways that don’t harm our environment, but not in the quantities we currently eat them. Restoring balance to our food system would require reducing the quantity of animal products we eat by more than 90%.
One of the simplest and most direct actions an individual can take to make a difference in the climate fight is to change what you eat.