[mfatica]

How do local farmers fall into the mix? I buy a cow every year from a local farm - they raise and slaughter the cow and deliver the whole thing butchered and packaged. I much prefer this to anything I could buy at the grocery store.

[honkycat]

Personally, I don't have a problem with locally raised beef. Factory farms make up the majority of beef.

Stats are here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-end-factory-f_b_1...

[hkyeti]

Oxford and CSIRO scientists already proved grass fed cattle is worse for greenhouse gases than CAFO beef farming. Carbon sequestration no where near makes up for the increases emissions.

[yellowapple]

Do you have a citation for this? Curious about how they figured that, given:

* The emissions from the livestock themselves should be identical given the same number of cows and the same dietary input; CO₂ output might increase for pasture-raised cattle, given the higher physical activity, but methane output (IIRC the primary concern re: cattle and their environmental impact) shouldn't change all that much

* Non-livestock emissions (from e.g. motorized equipment) seem much easier to minimize in a traditional ranch setting - especially considering that independent ranchers once upon a time ran their ranches without motorized equipment at all, and some still do - than for a modern factory farm

[hkyeti]

Sure: http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-10-03-grass-fed-beef-good-or-b...

[yellowapple]

Full report: https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...

Now granted, I haven't read the entirety of the 127-page report, but it doesn't seem to say much of anything about CAFO at all (searching for "CAFO" or "factory" gives zero results, and searching for "concentrate" gives five results that all have nothing to do with CAFO), so I'm not sure how that's supposed to function as a citation for the specific claim that CAFO is somehow more environmentally friendly than free range ranching.

What the report actually seems to be claiming is that free range cattle ranching is not carbon neutral on a global scale. It can be carbon-neutral or even outright carbon-sequestering on a local scale, however, with the right diet / plant availability and other factors, albeit with other environmental tradeoffs/externalities (for example, the crops that help reduce methane output when used as feed tend to require more fertilizer to grow).

[dalore]

Stop misrepresenting the facts, they are not Oxford or CSIRO scientists at all. It's the "Food Climate Research Network" which is a think tank operating out of the University of Oxford. No one has "proved" anything.

In science it's actually hard to "prove" anything. You can disprove something though.

[rhinoceraptor]

If the cow was well managed and grazed, it's probably carbon neutral or even a carbon sink.

The grass grows via the sun, the cows eat the grass and leave natural fertilizer, which sequesters carbon when the grass regrows.