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| Cris Bennett Floating Cows |
Greenhouse grown fodder for dairy cattle Von Helman April 2012
We have had a greenhouse here where we produced fodder (Barley) for sheep and it worked out really well. Now I am building a new greenhouse and larger project and would like to ask a few questions and see if anyone else is feeding dairy cattle with greenhouse fodder such as miniature lettuce or other types of greenhouse grown fodder.
But times change, and so does taste.
Serious European painters once focused on prize cows and bulls, but now the methane-belching ruminants are shunned as harbingers of climatic disaster, witness Conde' Nast's decision to ban bovine meat from its culinary flagship journal, Epicurious.
But could that vegan manifesto one day be recalled as the shot that launched a stampede past the limits of Beyond Beef ? Greentech is a big tent. Could it one day encompass sequestering greenhouse gases in carbon-neutral -- or negative-- vegetables, fodder, milk cheese and meat?
Enthusiastic virtue signaling already funds pilot plants capturing thousands of tons a year of CO2 from the air. But few Greentech investors have given much economic thought to what is to be done with captured gas. The cost of extracting it from the open air is so high that, even with carbon taxes in place, few expect to see unsubsidized profits from using it as a green fuel or chemical feedstock.But there is already a thriving market for the otherwise superfluous greenhouse gas: enriching the air in greenhouses.
Vegetables grow and ripen faster when given more CO2 than the 400 parts per million the atmosphere. So much faster that, by spiking the air within its sprawling greenhouses, tiny Holland has become a great vegetable exporting nation.
As surely as some bien pensant folks feel justified in spending millions to obliterate their carbon footprints, ( Bill Gates is the largest angel investor behind the first thousand tonne a year carbon-from-air plant) others may cheerfully fork over hundreds for a guilt-free, carbon negative steak.
Fed into the better sort of greenhouse, a thousand tons a year of CO2 can yield ten times its weight in nourishing cow chow. As a single cubic kilometer of air contains over a half million tons of CO2, that could translate into a lot of beef.
Making ethanol out of airborne CO2 is an energy intensive and money losing proposition, because farmers can use free sunlight to turn atmospheric CO2 into fermentable corn syrup. However, the added value of steaks, schnitzel, and hamburger far outstrips the margins of the gasahol trade.
Beyond Beyond Burger lies the brave new world of real Greenhouse Beef. Reversing global warming by drawing down CO2 requires the extraction of billions of tonnes a year from the air, and there's scarcely room enough for the trillion trees needed to do the job. But cattle are second only to humans as the most numerous large animals on Earth. There's a billion head on the hoof, and many weigh a ton!
If the establishmentos of The Beefsteak, and The Beefeaters of The Yeoman Warder's club prevail over the tofu slurping overlords of The Guardian and BBC, red meat will become the beau ideal of Green Cuisine, and social entrepreneurs will demand the shotgun merger of the greenhouse and carbon sequestration industries.
Prats who decry environmentalists as 'watermelons' -- green on the outside, red on the inside, may soon be haunted by the fact that beef Wellington on a bed of watercress presents the same color scheme:
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@Russell: That post on beef is a joke, right? A less obviously wrong claim about beef is that well-managed pasture can take up enough carbon to offset the emissions of beef. Note that what is commonly sold in North America as “grass fed beef” actually involves a lot of external inputs, and winds up being worse on all three GHG emissions (CO2, CH4, N2O) than feedlot beef. (see the “Midwest Pastured System” results in my ERL paper with Gidon Eshel). But even for well-managed pasture, people in the Oxford Livestock, Environment and People project whom I respect have concluded that the carbon storage potential for pasture has been oversold, in part because a lot of studies involve rather short term uptake and don’t take into account the saturation of the soil carbon stock. There is a good overview in “Grazed and Confused” https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/publications/grazed-and-confused/
After reading Raypierre's ATTP comment, I ran some numbers using data provided by the hydrophonic cattle feed links in Cattle Today.
The results are counterintuitive– in praxis, you can grow 100 KG of barley sprouts a day in an area of five square meters:
“The FodderKing 12-24 is CropKing’s largest hydroponic fodder system, with the capability to produce upwards of 210 pounds of fresh green sprouts on a daily basis… With a footprint of only 13’ x 4’ x 6’1”
for six to ten cents a kilo:
“FodderTech sprouting systems are extremely efficient and cost effective. The costs of grain, energy, labor, water, and nutrient range from $0.03 – $0.05 per lb across different parts of the globe. “
As roughly 20 kg of sprouted feed can add 1 kg of edible beef a day to a growing steer, these closet-sized cornucopias : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C-P-C6sFnc&t=94s
could, in theory yield a tonne of beef a year at an added cost of only a few euro /kg.
The catch is that you need captured carbon barley to start with, and the CO2 needed to render this modest proposal carbon negative costs hundreds a tonne to capture from the air, and hundreds more to convert into the greenhouse- raised barley the system sprouts.
The surprise is that, while captured carbon cattle may cost an order of magnitude more than the corn fed sort, that marginal cost is still an order of magnitude less than Japanese Wagyu beef- a 6.5 kg sirloin strip roast presently sells for $2,500 !
https://www.markys.com/Deli-Meats-Pate-Poultry/Origin-Japan/
So Beyond Beyond Burger may not be a joke after all.
