#seawood

Ochre Sea Star, Olympic Coast

A classic tidepool scene of vibrantly colored sea anemones, seaweed and a sea star along the Olympic Coast at low tide.

Excerpt from this story from Medium:

Is seaweed the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions? This question points to a trend in agricultural industry efforts to tell the public we can have our cake and eat it too. Or in this case, have our climate-intensive beef burgers and call them climate-friendly.

It’s an academic question that keeps getting funding in pursuit of climate-friendly cows. Certainly, as we face the intensifying impacts of a climate crisis in which food production is the number-two source of greenhouse gases, we need every solution on the table.

In a new study out of UC Davis’s School of Animal Science, researchers wanted to see if feeding seaweed pellets to grazing beef cattle could reduce methane emissions from cow belches. It’s a novel take after first trying to adjust the feed of confined beef cattle, and then dairy cattle, with poor results.

Most beef cattle emit the vast majority of lifetime emissions while grazing—before being sent to feedlots, where they live for a short time to be fattened for slaughter, consuming corn, soy, alfalfa, and easily digested feed, thus producing less methane.

However, the UC Davis study required intensive amounts of supplemental feed for grazing beef cattle multiple times a day, which isn’t a viable or realistic solution for grazing systems, where cattle are often left out to pasture. As with most feed-additive studies, the scalability isn’t in reach.

Predictably, the UC Davis study ultimately ignores a crucial reality — that the most effective way to reduce the agricultural emissions of cattle is to eat less beef.

It’s true: Cattle are the leading source of agricultural emissions and a top source of U.S. methane. They’re also a leading driver of deforestation, habitat loss, direct wildlife killing, and species endangerment — and require the most land and water to produce. So while factory farms aren’t climate solutions, grass-fed systems where cattle belch methane for longer periods aren’t either.

The serious industry problems we face need more than just … producing beef slightly differently. The reality is that feed additives aren’t a silver-bullet solution to the ecological problems caused by beef in the first place.

The fact is there’s no solution for “climate-smart” beef that will work without transitioning away from the overproduction of beef. In the United States, we consume more than four times the global average. Just as we can’t “clean coal” our way out of fossil fuels, we can’t “seaweed” our way out of beef’s climate destruction.

A female Atlantic grey seal in the sea covered in seaweed in the Marloes Peninsula in Pembrokeshire, Wales

Intertidal spiders are playing on hard mode

Yep, that's a spider among seaweed.