Comment by wcoenen
14 days ago
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.
14 days ago
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.