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100% this. These dairy cows aren't magically unlocking some deeply seated fossil carbon and farting it into the atmosphere. Nature already has a carbon cycle that works in harmony between plants and animals, let's try and work with it and emulate it rather than use even more energy and other resources to produce these highly processed goods. If you are vegan go for it, if you care about the environment stick with milk made from cows which graze on open grass land.

I spot at least 2 common fallacies here:

1. "Work with nature" - what does that even mean?

2. "Stick with cows which graze on open grass land" - the amount of such cows is a tiny fraction of all cows. How will I know how to get to those cows?

I'm not even a vegan, but also hold no delusions about milk products.

Working with nature emulating it, as in biomimicry, something we so far seem to be terrible at as a human race.

I guess it's a very localised problem because just under 90% is grass fed in the UK. I can Google grass fed beef and get a lot of hits to indicate where I need to shop or I could ask the local butcher.

This is talked about literally daily. Unfortunately your message comes off as whataboutism in disguise. Let's focus on the fact that milk alternatives are good and cow farming is problematic in this thread.

gmuslera 1509 days ago

In the other hand, it may be about shifting blame. Sugar industry did that with fat.

Can you explain why cow farming is bad?

Methane emissions and ethical reasons (if you care about such things).

Edit: also they take a lot of land to feed. Soy grown in where Amazon rainforest used to be and so on.

If you eat meet which has been raised on ground where trees have been felled for the sole purpose of creating that meat then yes the amount of carbon released is going to be insane. Here in the UK (nearly?) all the meat we consume is grown nationally, i.e. doesn't originate from places like the Amazon.

And on the methane front, they eat the carbon in the grass which has literally just captured a bit of carbon from the atmosphere. They fart it up and then it comes back down in a reasonable period of time and goes back into the grass they are grazing upon.

The cycles and definitely complex and opaque but we need to get better at working with nature rather than engineering new ways to ignore the real issues.

The amount of resources, e.g. land, water etc. you need to raise cows is about 10 times more than what you'd need to grow the same calorie content of vegetables.

It actually doesn't matter if you grow the feed nationally or import from Amazon, the fact remains that those fields replace a natural ecosystem that could be contributing to biodiversity and much more efficient carbon capture.

Grass captures CO2 from the air, and the cows fart (actually mostly burp) out methane that is about 25 times worse GHG over a 100 year period.

You want to get better at working with nature? Hunt your own meat from the wilderness.

Rury 1509 days ago

You're ignoring that cows are also carbon stores (and relatively dense ones as far as biodiversity goes).

Look, the problem is real simple. Simple math says that we can do this:

Carbon(in atomosphere) + Carbon(biomass) + Carbon(underground) = Carbon(total on earth)

Biomass gets it's carbon from atomosphere, and releases (most) of it back to atmosphere, and hence not a real problem as it undergoes a stable cycle and is limited by the total carbon between the two. Even if it's form changes, it's not a real problem as the math shows it's inherently limited. Additionally, some carbon does escape this cycle and ends back in underground stores - but it's an extremely slow process.

The real problem is taking carbon from underground, and putting it into the atmosphere - via an unnaturally rapid process. Anything else, is comically trivial to the problem that is the fossil fuel industry.