Comment by trollbridge
13 days ago
A somewhat passive fertiliser generator scattered around your fields is also known as a "cow" and a "chicken".
13 days ago
A somewhat passive fertiliser generator scattered around your fields is also known as a "cow" and a "chicken".
Cows and chickens cannot fix nitrogen from the air. They eat the nitrogen-fixing plants. So in a sense they don't "generate" fertiliser, they only concentrate it.
The cows also “stack shit up”, building a thick layer of soil: “carbon sequestration”.
All in all, cows are around zero emissions when held outside and fed grass only.
In Western Europe at least, cows are kept in pastures, which are permanently dedicated to that use and not used as fields to grow crops. All in all, cows are probably only low carbon in premodern rural contexts in West Africa and Asia for instance.
And distribute it across acreage.
Of course you can't have cows wandering through your corn or soybeans, they'll eat and/or crush it. But if you had fields that you could rotate between pasture and planted that could work.
You don't need soy or corn if you have cows on grass instead: much less carbon dioxide and more nutritious.