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It's that time of year again for the Gulf of Mexico: Dead Zone time. This year's dead zone is among the largest ever -- somewhere between the size of Massachusetts (10,555 square miles) or New Jersey (8,722 square miles) depending on who you ask.
The dead zone -- a region of the water chock full of oxygen-depleting algae that allow no other organisms to live -- is an annual occurrence in the Gulf (as well as in other bodies of water), caused by excess fertilizer runoff from the farms of the nation's heartland.
Because of its impact on the environment and economic livelihoods in the Gulf, the dead zone has also been the focus of some scrutiny lately. Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey found the watersheds most responsible for polluting the Gulf, almost all of which were in the Corn Belt of Illinois and Indiana.
And a report just published in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology takes a different look at the causes of the dead zone: Which foods have the highest nitrogen and phosphorus footprints, or "eutrophication potential."
The study, by Xiaobo Xue and Amy E. Landis of the University of Pittsburgh, ranks foods on their carbon footprint and dead-zone footprint, and finds some correlation, and some surprises.
As Emily J. Gertz writes in Chemical & Engineering News:
Red meat topped both footprint lists, making it the food with the greatest impact on both climate change and eutrophication: Eating a pound of beef creates about 22 lbs. of greenhouse gases and about 2.5 oz of nitrogen pollution. Cereals and carbohydrates had the smallest footprints, with each pound of food releasing only 3 lbs. of greenhouse gases and almost no nitrogen pollution.
But many foods had diverging impacts on the climate and coastal ecosystems. Dairy products landed at the bottom of the carbon footprint list with carbohydrates, but sat second only to beef in eutrophication potential, releasing 1.1 oz of nitrogen pollution for every pound of food produced.
The takeaway, then: Carbs good, cows bad.
Once again, with less snark: Landis told Gertz in the article linked above, "We showed that carbon footprints are not necessarily the best metric in evaluating the sustainability of a product."
It's a good point, and one that applies well beyond food: Measuring sustainability of anything -- food, your shoes, an entire company -- is highly complex and reducing any metric to a single element is an oversimplification that hides the true impacts.
In this case, looking solely at greenhouse gas emissions hides the water impacts of products. If you're looking just at CO2e, dairy products are a fine, greenish product, but coming as they tend to do from livestock, the dead-zone impacts are all the way up at the top.
To some extent, these high impacts are endemic to industrial agriculture -- large-scale farming and ranching serve to concentrate all this pollution, and it ends up being bad for animals and bad for the environment, as the picture below, from Farm Sanctuary, shows.
Of course, just to bring it back to snark one last time, if we could just genetically modify cows like we can with pigs, we could negate all those harmful environmental impacts of factory farms...
Animal agriculture is destroying the earth...
@ Demosthenes Locke: In 2006 the United Nations put out a report that states that animal agriculture is one of the top two to three contributors for all the environmental problems we are experiencing today.
“Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
Here's more on the same topic: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=warning
"According to a 2006 UN report, globally, greenhouse gas emissions from all livestock operations account for 18% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, exceeding those from the transportation sector. IFAP can produce greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide. Other greenhouse gases, primarily nitrous oxide, arise mainly from the microbial degradation of manure."
http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=38438
The facts speak for themselves. Gem made an excellent point stating that 9 billion of the 10 billion animals slaughtered every year are chickens, that's 90%. If you don't think poultry farming effects the environment negatively think again, this is just one example...
"Pfiesteria piscicida is a one-celled microbe that has been linked to the abundant excess of poultry and hog manure on the eastern United States seacoast, eating holes in flounder and in menhaden, a fish that is used in farm animal feedstuffs and as fertilizer (Weingarten F5). Humans exposed to the toxic aerosol released by pfiesteria have experienced neurological injury, headaches, skin sores, memory loss, stomach cramps, respiratory restriction, and violent moods (Barker 117, 129, 168). And even though "water pollution from dry poultry litter is greatest after it is spread on crop land (Harkin 4), poultry litter is routinely applied to crop fields near the water. It is fed to cattle as well. In West Virginia, for example, "80,000 head of cattle, many raised adjacent to the chicken houses to take advantage of the litter-based feed, produce more waste" (Gerstenzang A7)."
http://www.upc-online.org/fouling.htm
Plants don't produce manure, take 70% of the farmable land to grow food to feed them, or show fear and other emotions, so i would have to agree with The Lorax in that it seems you are just trying to justify and, rationalize your own selfish desire to eat meat.
Are you prepared to pay 5 times for meat what your paying now?
Demosthenes Locke : First, have you any idea how much space a grazing cow needs in order to grow properly? Thousands of acres of land have been cleared to graze cows and it can only be used a few years before it becomes desolate and nutrient deficient, allowing nothing else to grow. In order to keep with Americans need for meat it would be impossible to graze that many cattle. Second, did you know that out of the 10 billion animals slaughtered in the USA per year, 9 billion of them are chickens? Last I checked chickens don't eat grass but their fecal waste is just as damaging. How about the fact that Americans eat three times more meat than their European counterparts? 80% of the crops grown in the USA are fed to livestock, 50% of the antibiotics in the USA are given to Livestock. It takes 50 gallons of water a day just to keep one cow and aquifers in the west are going lower and lower every year! None of these problems are associated with a vegetarian/vegan diet as we take less water and food than a cow, and it costs less too. As a last note; it has been proven that a vegan diet not only slows diabetes, but can reverse it. Your 'facts' are actually the inverse of the truth, you find excuses to justify your diet. Even if it wasn't healthier, how can you feel comfortable knowing that something (actually many things) are dying so that you can live?
Sentient creatures who aren't as smart as you serve your palette
"Demosthenes Locke", need I say any more? Elitist corporate whores who are afraid compassion might affect their pocket and their palette. I love how they rationalize this with high-minded rhetoric and self-righteous pageantry. They talk as if caring for animals on the planet is a sin. They spread irreverence wherever they go but then do a quick about-face when it comes to preservation of any kind. Yeah, compassion is a conspiracy against you (rolleyes). The world is run by people like this; sociopathic self-serving tools who treat the world as their personal slave and have not an ounce of humility because they know it all already. God forbid you may have to show some discipline for something other than your health or your ego. Some things aren't about facts and figures but about treating all living things how you yourself would want to be treated. This type of emapthy is impossible to the self-appointed royalty who see the world as a potential serfdom created for the sole purpose to entertain them. Any type of conservation stands in the way of their enjoyment. Those/that which cannot serve they destroy, that which is not a slave is their enemy and that which is stronger then themselves they grovel at the feet of...
or, to be more polite about it ...
... I would have liked to have seen data for 100% grass-fed, pastured, humanely raised cattle, using zero fertilizer, the cow poop being the fertilizer for more grass.
Oh, what a great idea!
Oh, yes, fertilizer is causing a dead zone, so let's GROW MORE CROPS! There's a little piece of leftwing nutburger (can't make burgers out of meat, might as well make them out of NUTS) nonsense that's just ACHING to get the stuffin's kicked out of it.
You're right about one thing, we should change how the cattle and ranching business is done. It does result in too much nitrogen pollution. But not because of the ANIMALS. Because of the CORN grown to feed them. You see, animals fed corn grow fat, but don't grow healthy. They get terrible degenerative diseases and cancers, and grow horribly obese. Now, obese animals might sell well at the slaughterhouse, but they don't taste as good as a well-marbled, healthy grass-fed animal. (Ever notice the grass-fed stuff is more expensive? That's because it's BETTER.) So here's an idea, stop growing extra corn to feed to cattle and raise grass and pasture the things. There goes a lot of the nitrogen AND a lot of the carbon from the added megafarm industry needed to grow the corn. Grass doesn't need a huge megafarm industry, just leaving it the hell alone.
Next little whack on your pointy little vegan heads -- carbs aren't good for you. Hate to burst your third-world bubbles, but you can't live off rice cakes, soda, and tortillas. You get fat, diabetic, and artery-clogged. Even beans (yes, even the holy soybean) aren't good enough to reverse this process. We were NOT BUILT to absorb all that carbohydrate. It turns to sugar in our bodies and the pancreas can't take it. And the fructose portion of the disaccharide in sucrose becomes all sorts of nasty things, from going straight into belly fat to cancer-causing formaldehyde, gout and hypertension causing uric acid, and preventing the effect of Nitrous IOxide in the body, which causes hypertension and leads to heart disease. The effects of carbohydrate eventually damage the pancreas, the liver, and the kidneys and are, in the long term, deadly. And the current epidemic of obesity can be DIRECTLY LINKED to the USDA's emphasis on huge quantities of carbohydrate to replace the usual staples of meats, cheese, eggs, and good fats in our diet back in the 70's and 80's.
Cut down on the overproduction of carbohydrate agricultural products, switch BACK to animal farming and meat foods, and there will be less need for huge quantities of fertilizers that run off. Better yet, collect and compost the waste from the animals as a disposal method, use the gas generated for fuel (getting rid of the methane in the process), and use the digested effluent for a safe and natural fertilizer instead of artificial chemicals. They've done this successfully in India for 40 years without ill effect. (Look up Ram Bux Singh if you don't believe me.)
The recent studies into the so-called "lipid hypothesis", connecting saturated fats to heart disease, have shown that fats were not the culprit we were led to believe they were, that there is NO correlation between fat and serum cholesterol, and no link between meat or saturated fat and heart disease. Carbohydrate, however, IS linked, and strongly and provably so. Notably, sugar. The criminal discounting of sugar as a factor by Ancel Keys in the 7 Nations Study was finally discovered and proven to be the actual causative factor, instead of the fat he did not actually prove to be the cause. Remove sugar from the equation, and add back the countries he excluded from the study, and you find that fat has ZERO correlation to heart disease. Add back in sugar, and the correlation is plain for carbohydrate.
So stop with the vegan idiocy with "eat more pasta" and get yourself a nice steak with some butter and some cheese, maybe eggs on horseback, a nice steak with eggs sunnyside up on top, and get healthy, and do the world a favor.