okay
it is now 10 32. let's get started hello
everyone welcome to Acterra's virtual
lecture
role the role of agriculture and climate
change livestock
diets and soil carbon sequestration my
name's robbie brown and i'm the
community engagement associate for
acterra
before we begin there's a few things i
want to mention let's first go over the
zoom logistics
so for the purpose of this event
everyone is muted and your cameras are
turned
off however if you feel like you would
like to communicate we do have the chat
box enabled
um my intern risa mori is also helping
us out today so if you have any
complications on your end
you can either send her or i a private
message and we'll try to help you the
best we can
we will have a q a portion during this
event as well
to submit a question for pete what you
will want to do is open the q a tab in
the bottom of the zoom application
and then submit your question i guess
we'll also be able to upvote
so there's a particular question that's
been asked and you find that one really
interesting or compelling and you want
to make sure we
get to it please make sure you upload
that i can't guarantee
we'll be able to answer every question
but we'll certainly try our best
uh next on the list who or what is
Acterra
if you haven't heard of us we are an
environmental nonprofit based in the bay
area and to be more specific we are
located within palo alto
we just celebrated our 50th anniversary
which was really exciting
and we are largely driven by
environmental problems occurring locally
and globally
and primarily the problems that have
resulted due to climate change
we engage with our local communities
companies and agencies in the bay area
with a focus on santa clara and san
mateo counties
we have a wide variety of programming
under the categories of electrification
food sustainability workplace
sustainability and education
for electrification we have our carl nat
go ev program so ev as in electric
vehicles
and we have an induction cooktop program
for food sustainability we just kicked
off our healthy plate healthy planet
programming where we focus on low carbon
food choices
and solutions for consumers the
commercial industry and schools and
students
for workplace sustainability we have our
silicon valley green team network in our
business environmental awards
and for our education component we have
our public lecture series
our youth be the change program and the
climate resilient communities
acterra does not endorse or support the
expressed opinions of any of our
speakers but our aim is just merely to
present a diverse range of views to help
advance these conversations
and to allow deeper reflections on
challenging issues
all right next let's get to our sponsors
so of course we would like to thank our
sponsors for the support
with this event we have
factory farming awareness coalition
grounded in community Greentown Los altos
350 silicon valley and specifically
their food and climate team
silicon valley north citizens climate
lobby and the league of
women voters of palo alto
let's talk about our upcoming events for
the next two months
our next event that is coming up is with
Acterra's young professionals and it is
a webinar called taking action for
environmental justice
this is a webinar led by Kristy Drutman
the creator of brown girl green
she will be discussing her career
pathway as an environmental media
creator and activist
as well as provide information about
environmental justice
and how young people can take action to
address environmental inequities in
their communities
we also have a virtual coffee hour with
Acterra's executive director lauren
weston
she invites all of you to attend this
virtual conversation
to learn more about Acterra's programs
and future direction
we have a let's go ev online workshop
this workshop will cover the benefits of
being an electric car
owner and reveal the many EV rebates
programs and other financial perks that
make EVs cheaper to own than gas-powered
cars
and we also have a documentary screening
and panel discussion coming up in
September
based on the documentary the invisible
vegan so the panel discussion will be
centered around jasmine c
leyva's compelling documentary of
invisible vegan
join us for a thought-provoking
conversation with filmmaker jasmine
and other guests about food justice
healthy eating
culturally relevant plant-based choices
and the decolonization of food
last but not least i want to make a
quick announcement that we are launching
a new interactive online community
for those that are interested in
sustainable food and plant forward
eating
it's a great place to share recipes
bounce ideas and get support
as well as find resources if you are
interested please send us an email at
 healthyplate@acterra.org
and we will put you on the list
great so today's lecture is by professor
pete smith
he is a professor of soils and global
change at the institute of biological
and environmental sciences
at the university of aberdeen which is
in scotland
he's also the science director of the
Scottish climate change center of
expertise
his interests include climate change
mitigation soils
agriculture food system ecosystem
services
and modeling he's a fellow of the royal
society of biology a fellow of the
institute of soil scientists
a fellow of the royal society of
Edinburgh a foreign fellow of the Indian
national science academy
and a fellow of the European science
academy as well as a fellow of the royal
society of London
professor Pete Smith I'm going to hand
it off to you now thank you for being
here
thanks very much robbie
so i'll start sharing my screen now
okay can we all see that
i'm assuming that you can so today i'm
going to be talking about the role of
agriculture in climate
change with a particular focus on diets
livestock
and soil carbon sequestration so the
first thing to recognize
is that the food system is part of the
climate problem
so if we look at greenhouse gas
emissions
for all of the sectors all of the
greenhouse gas emissions globally
agriculture and forestry accounts for
about 24
of the direct emissions so nearly a
quarter of the
direct emissions is from the
agricultural sector
when we consider the food system more
widely for example including transport
refrigeration
packaging and retail that number climbs
to about a third of global greenhouse
gas emissions
so very little about what you hear about
climate change
focuses on food and agriculture we often
hear about the need to change energy
generation the need to change
the way that we move around in private
transport
industry and the way that we heat and
cool our buildings
well sort of a cinderella story of the
emissions
sectors is agriculture and being
responsible for about
a third of greenhouse gas emissions it's
a really important sector
so it's worth noting that it's part of
the problem
but that also makes the fact that it
emits about a third of greenhouse gas
emissions it also means that activity in
this sector
can help to reduce climate change and
reduce greenhouse gas emissions
so if we look at the way um some of the
emission categories in agriculture and
forestry i'll just go through some of
these
uh in a little detail so there are
things like um
land use change for forestry so that's
ground clearing um tropical
deforestation and such like
the clearing of the land for agriculture
is a big source
of emissions the draining of peats and
peat fires
um enteric fermentation so that's the
methane emissions that are belched out
by ruminants
burped out by ruminants when they eat
because of their
generated in the room and when they
digest grass and other foods
and that's quite a significant emission
source there's rice cultivation
which is a methane emission source
there's manure management
synthetic fertilizers are responsible
for large emissions of nitrous oxide
which is a very powerful greenhouse gas
um there are other forms of manure and
crop residues
and crop residues and savannah burning
so
adding all these things together they
contribute to quite large emissions
which account for you know without all
the other emissions from the food system
just the agriculture and forestry direct
emissions itself
contributes about a quarter of the
emissions so we can reduce emissions by
either
reducing these emissions categories that
i've shown on here so reducing tropical
deforestation reducing drainage of peats
for agriculture
reducing interior fermentation by
cutting the numbers
of ruminants uh improving rice
cultivation improving
manure management and cropland
management and social life
all of these things can reduce the
emissions of greenhouse gases
but there are also other things that we
can do on the demand side
so agriculture is only is only in
existence because it's
it produces the food that we need and
the food that we demand
so by changing the demands for the food
types of food that we eat and also
reducing the waste
about 30 of all food that we grow on the
planet is wasted in one way or another
if we can reduce waste and we can change
um
change our diets towards a more
sustainable heating
then there's these demand side
mitigation options which which need to
work
income in consult with the supply side
mitigation
and i'll talk a lot more about those
later
so let's move more specifically to the
role of livestock in climate change
livestock feature quite prominently and
there's a reason for that
um when we look at um women and products
so this graph shows the carbon dioxide
emissions per kilogram of product so
here we have kilograms of co2 per
kilograms of product
over on the left of the graph you can
see
we have the beef and the sheep
and uh moving across here different
intensiveness of beef
and such like these are the ruminants so
these are the animals which are
which were evolutionarily bred to digest
grass
some of which we still feed grass today
but some of which we're also feeding
concentrates for example grain fed beef
but you can see that the emissions the
direct emissions
and many many times greater than those
over on the other side of the graph
so per kilogram per kilogram of product
we have minuscule emissions greenhouse
gas emissions from the pulses like the
beans the peas the soy
for the meat substitutes slightly higher
emissions
for eggs poultry and pork so these are
the
they're called the monogastric animals
so these are the they're not ruminants
they're monogastric animals and they
produce less methane
per unit product but the ruminants
over on the left hand side of the graft
are
really important sources of methane
emissions
so the emissions from from these
ruminant meat
rumen and meat and dairy is between
10 and 100 times worse than plant-based
foods
that's not 10 and a hundred percent
that's
10 yards of magnetic 10 10 an order of
magnitude 10 times worse
or two orders of magnitude 100 times
worse
per unit product so if we're consuming
lots of products on the left of the
graph
we're going to have a much higher um
greenhouse gas footprint
than a diet that contains more of the
products
on the right of the graph so more um
pulses and beans and meat substitutes
so that's where the idea about dietary
change
uh to contribute to the climate change
problems comes about
and it's due to this really striking 10
to 100 times
greater impact per unit product
of the meats compared to the plant-based
foods
if we break this down a little bit
further so as i've said
around about 25 to 30 of all greenhouse
gas emissions
uh come from food that's the top are
taking that 26 of emissions from food
if we break it down into animal products
and everything else
animal products are responsible for
about 58
of all the greenhouse gas impacts of the
foods we eat
so it's a disproportionately large share
of the greenhouse gas emissions are from
animal products considering the amount
that we consume relative to plant-based
foods
and of those animal products just two
products
beef and lamb make up about 50
of that greenhouse gas footprint so by
reducing consumption of beef and lamb
we could make a significant uh
contribution to reducing greenhouse gas
emissions
so that's going to be a central message
of today's talk
we'll come back to that a moment in a
moment
so sometimes people have said grazing
livestock
okay they emit a mish they emit they
emit methane
um so they contribute to climate change
but when when livestock are grazed on
grass
they sequester carbon and that benefits
the climates so what about that claim
let's look at that claim in a bit more
detail
so the claim is that grazing livestock
sequester carbon in the soil and that
therefore benefits the fiber
so there's a suggestion that eating
grass-fed grass-fed beef
will contribute and will be a great
solution for the climate
that unfortunately um is unsubstantiated
so unless you have severely degraded
grasslands
the grasslands already contained large
stocks of carbon
so given that they already contained a
large stock of carbon
then there's only so much that they can
store that they can
that is to say that they saturate so
they've got a little capacity to
sequester further additional carbon
you can think of it like a bucket of
water that's already full up with water
just tipping more water in the top won't
store more water in the bucket
it just spills over the side because
it's already full
it's similar with the soils they can
only store so much carbon
and when more carbon is added that
carbon is just lost from the system
through oxidation and respiration
secondly there's little evidence that
changing grazing patterns can increase
increased soil carbon levels so there
are many claims
um made currently with little scientific
basis that if we change the way the
animals graze
we move them around and graze them
intensively on small portions of the
grassland
for short periods of time this will
greatly increase the soil carbon levels
currently there's very little evidence
that that actually happens
and quite a lot of evidence that it has
a negligible impact
another thing to consider is the methane
emissions from cattle
far outweigh any of the benefits that we
get from soil carbon
so even if we've got a degraded pasture
and we
improve the soil carbon in that degraded
pasture
we still have the emissions from the
livestock the methane emissions
and when we look at the climate warming
potential of those methane emissions
they outweigh any of the benefits that
we get from the
and the other thing is that soil carbon
gains is time limited
that's because these they saturate the
methane emissions continue for a long
period after the carbon saturated
so if you've got a field of cows that
you keep for say 100 years
even if you can increase the soil carbon
a little
after 10 years or 20 years that carbon
will saturate and you'll get no
increase in that soil carbon so you get
no net benefit
for the climber but if you keep cal on
that field
for 100 years they continue to emit
methane emissions year on year on year
so the claim that grazing ruminants for
a climate change solution
is unfounded it's unsubstantiated there
are many reasons
to if you're going to decide to eat meat
there are many reasons to choose
grazed livestock but climate change is
not one of them
here's a graph showing um some real data
on
uh conversion of crop lands to
grasslands if you look at the black line
this was a plot lens that was converted
to grasslands there's a number of
separate breeds
after about 100 years those grassland
soil carbon levels it does increase
because the croplands are defeated in
carbon
after about 50 to 100 years those carbon
levels
uh level off that's called saturation
that's what we're showing with
saturation
the thing about grasslands is they
already contain a lot of carbon so what
you're looking at over here
in the red line is the carbon that's
already in the grasslands
so if they have any capacity to store
carbon at all
many don't it's likely to be very strong
so the maximum benefit you can get in
terms of carbon storage
before they saturate is actually a very
small amount
so they've got limited capacity to store
further carbon
so the idea that soil carbon
sequestration
somehow converts roman and meat or
grazing of ruminant meat
into a climate solution rather than a
climate problem
simply doesn't add up so
let's look at then what we can do so
one solution is to eat less meat and
dairy to help tackle climate change
so through dietary change
this was from the last ipc assessment
before the ipcc is the intergovernmental
panel on climate change and for the last
two assessment reports i've been leading
the
agriculture and food chapter of this um
this document which is produced every uh
sick of every five to seven years this
was putting together all the evidence
that they've gathered since the last
report
what we can see over here are the supply
side measures so those
um improve cropland management improve
grazing and management improve rice
improve livestock all of these added
together
add up to around about four gigatons
of carbon dioxide equivalents the
numbers don't really matter but the
maximum we could get
high carbon prices between about four
and five gigatonnes
of co2 per year what's shown
over here in the mustard colored bars on
the right
are the contribution of dietary change
and waste reduction
to greenhouse gas mitigation and what
you can see is that the demand side
measures dietary change and greenhouse
gas mitigation
have far more potential than all of the
supply side measures added together
so really for tackling climate change we
both need to improve agriculture
shown over here in this part of the
graph and we also need to change the way
that we eat
and change the way that we use food so
that we have less weight
and that can have a really large
contribution i'll just show you two or
three studies
that demonstrate this point really
effectively
the first one was a study by alaka
stephen t
and her team in the netherlands and she
looked at a number of scenarios
for future future food consumption she
had a reference scenario
which was based on the projections from
the fao
of how much food we need to clean
she then looked at another scenario
which was the same as the first
it had all the same demands for calories
and protein
and such like but this one had no rumen
in me
so she tried to meet all of the dietary
demand with no room in
me the third scenario
which was no meat at all so that had no
no
consumption of beef pork lamb
chicken any any sort of meat the fourth
scenario she looked at was no animal
products at all
so that's including milk and eggs for
example substituting those
with plant-based proteins so this would
be a fully vegan future
and the last one that she looked at was
healthy eating recommendations
so this doesn't assume that everybody
becomes a vegetarian or everybody
becomes vegan
it just assumes that everybody eats
healthily
so that could mean people in the least
developed countries actually in a bit
more meat
because they currently eat too little to
meet their dietary requirements
in developed countries like in europe
and in north america
in the usa that will greatly reduce the
amount
of meat that we eat so this healthy diet
came from the harvard medical school but
there's also world health organization
recommendations
and just by applying this if you look
for what would happen to greenhouse gas
emissions
if we look at the reference scenario we
have greenhouse gas emissions of about
3.3 gigatonnes of carbon
per year if we look at the totally vegan
world if nobody ate any more products on
the world that would slash
greenhouse gas emissions to a third of
that have the reference scenario
so it reduced greenhouse gas emissions
by two-thirds
but what's happening is even if we don't
think it's realistic
for everybody to become vegan it's not
realistic i think to expect everybody to
do that
just by moving to a healthy diet where
everybody eats healthily
would reduce the emissions by over a
third
and that is largely due to a reduction
in in
meat and dairy consumption and other
forms of meat
so a healthy diet if we if we are unable
to persuade people to come vegan and
it's a very
it's a very difficult choice to make
decide that we're never going to eat
meat again
it's a once in a lifetime decision it's
very binary
but not many not so many people are
willing to do that
but people may be willing to consider
cutting down their meat consumption a
little
just to eat more moderately to eat more
moderately
and this could have a significant impact
with greenhouse gas emissions
another study by alex cox group in
in potsdam in germany shows what will
happen
with technical mitigation and without
technical mitigation
so that's looking at this axis and
looking at the axis up up the page we've
got a scenario with increase me here
and a scenario with decreased me here
you can see that with technical protect
with technical mitigation potential
these ones c and d are lower than a and
b
so technical mitigation that's improving
agriculture
will have an effect in reducing
greenhouse gas emissions
the difference between a and c and b and
d
is much more pronounced so the decreased
knee consumption is having a far larger
impact on reducing emissions
than does the technical mitigation so
again is
suggesting that dietary change is a
really important contributor
to climate change reducing meat and
dairy consumption
and the last one i'll show you is an
example from uh
some work that was done in cambridge in
the uk and it's looking at what happens
if we have current yield trends
what happens if we sustainably intensify
agriculture
so this is a scenario where we just
improve
the way agriculture is done make it more
efficient
and then we superimpose on that these
demand side measures so we have a 50
reduction in food waste and we move
people towards a healthy diet
so this is not an oil vegan or an all
vegetarian world
this is just a world in which everybody
eats more healthily
and what we find is that the current
yield trends if we have a look at this
current yield trends we can see what
happens
to the cropland area it goes up by 44
pasture area goes up we lose we lose
forest cover
we lose pristine tropical forests
greenhouse gas emissions go up by 64
fertilizer use
and water use so current yield trends
would be a disaster we can't feed the
planet and we can't sustain the planet
with current europe trends what happens
if we can close the yield gap by
improving agriculture and making it more
sustainable
well it helps move us in the right
direction but we still have an
increasing cropland of 16
an increase in pasture we lose forest
area
total greenhouse gas emissions still
increased by 40
and we've got an increase in fertilizer
use and irrigation water use
so this clearly doesn't get us where we
need to be just by doing
technology and agriculture just by
improving things
and sustainable intensification doesn't
get us to where we need to be
what if we also use yield gap closure
and those demand side options so that's
a healthy diet for everyone on the
planet and
we reduce food food waste reduction by
50
and here we can get a reduction in crop
land use and pass to use
we get an increase in net forest color
but we still get a slight decrease
overall in the
pristine area we can reduce greenhouse
gas emissions
and whilst we serve an increase in
fertilizer use and irrigation water
that's much lower than in the other
scenarios
so what this study is telling us is that
sustainable intensification
improving agriculture is not enough we
have to
also change the way we eat and change
the foods that we demand from the food
system
as well as reduced waste consumption
and it's not only better for climate
change
if we look at the other impacts the
other environmental
um impacts of plant-based foods compared
to
ruminant-based foods if you can see the
rumen and base foods are at the bottom
so this is room and me at the bottom
going up to the cereals at the top
maize wheat and rice for example and
this is showing
the greenhouse gas impact so the
greenhouse gas impact of ruminant meat
is many times higher than those of
plant-based products
it's very similar to the ones that i've
shown too but not only
is it the greenhouse gas emissions that
are better the land use
is way better for plant-based foods
compared to vermilion meats
the energy use is far better compared to
ruminant meats for plant-based products
the acidification potential this is a
measure of air quality
the air quality is greatly improved by a
shift to plant-based products
and the use of the utilization potential
is a measure
of water quality so water quality is
also greatly improved
by um by a shift of plant-based products
so ruminant meat has impacts about 100
times worse worse than those of
plant-based foods
in all of these categories so we're not
only improving the climate
we're also imp improving a range of
other environmental indicators
the other thing that it does is by
reducing animal product consumption it
creates the head space
for tourists for us to explore other
forms of agriculture
so this is a study where we looked at
whether we could feed the world
entirely using organic agriculture and
as you might expect
the answer is no we cannot do it if we
sustain the same level
of waste and the same level of demand
for livestock products
but if we reduce the demand for
livestock products
and we eliminate animal feeds that could
be fed to humans
we find that we could comfortably feed
the world
using organic agriculture and greatly
reduce the impact on nitrogen for
example
deforestation energy pesticide use
and land use so it creates the headspace
for us to explore different ways of
agriculture
at the moment we're making an express
train um
of ever increasing uh intensification
that doesn't have to happen with a
change in demand for the different
products that we
eat we could step back from that and we
could reimagine
an agricultural future that we all want
so what needs to happen this was a very
complex
study that was published in nature
climate change last year
i won't go through it all but what it
shows us is that business of usual
greenhouse gas emissions uh
would continue to grow greatly but the
land sector could contribute
on our way to getting us towards a 1.5
degree world
1.5 degrees is the ambition cell in the
paris climate agreement
so that's the where we need to head
towards if we're going to control
the worst excesses of climate change and
keep the planet within
um 1.5 degrees of warming
so about 1 gigatonne of that mitigation
potential comes from agriculture so
that's
livestock emissions rice croplands and
synthetic fertilizer
so the source of things we could do a
shift towards plasma plant-based diets
reducing food waste reducing emissions
from agriculture
so those so-called supply supply side
measures
and then a bunch of other measures like
restoring forests and improving forest
management and reducing deforestation
if we break that down into a pathway of
where we need to go
and how soon
the land would have to look like this
the food system has to look like this
going forward from 20 20 23 20 40 to
2050.
so this is the implementation roadmap
and it means that we need to shift to
plus
plant-based diets about 50 of adoption
by the global population by 2050.
so that suggests that 50 of us by 2050
need to be vegan
or the equivalent of that that could be
everybody just consuming
um 25 less for example a significant
number more people
being vegan and the people who continue
to eat meat who decide to continue to
eat meat eating a lot less
reducing food waste restoring forests
improving forest and enhancing soil
carbon
in agriculture so these these measures
the
the um shift to plants based diets and
reducing food waste
and reducing emissions to agriculture
future really strongly in those
pathways to getting uh getting us to a
position where we could meet the paris
target
so in conclusion food production and
distribution contributes up to a third
of global greenhouse gases emitted by
human activity so it's part of the
problem
livestock production is responsible for
58 of all emissions from agriculture
and half of those emissions come from
ruminants such as cattle and sheep
some people have suggested that grazing
animals can sequester carbon in the soil
and even the grazing could help solve
climate change
but i've shown that the numbers do not
head up
women and me has a hundred ten to a
hundred times worse impact on the
climate and plant-based foods
as well as 10 to 100 times worse impact
on land use
water use air pollution and water
pollution
so i conclude from that that the best
thing for the climate and any other
aspect of the environment
is for all of us to eat eat meat eat
less meat
need less dairy
so i'll leave it there and i'm happy to
take any questions i'm sure there'll be
some
i'll stop sharing my screen now
thank you so much pete yeah we do have a
lot of questions
i think a lot of our guests are very
interested wonderful presentation
um so i'm just gonna start on the list
going off of which ones were uploaded
the most so the first one is by suds
jane
and he asks there has been a lot of
debate as to whether agriculture is 24
or 51 depending on the time scale used
for global warming potential
um in comparison of 20 years versus 100
years
do you have a comment on this
can you say that again i got an unstable
connection there
so sud shane um his inputted question
was there has been a lot of debate as to
whether agriculture
is 24 or 51
depending on the time scale used for
global warming potential
uh 20 years versus 100 years yeah
so i haven't had the i haven't heard of
51
thicker the maximum figure that i've
seen is in the high 30s
um as a contribution to overall climate
change
but it's it depends on what you include
and what you don't include
so the 24 tends to be the agriculture
and forestry sector
from the emissions um just from
you know what you're doing on the land
and the food system
um includes all of the other emissions
like the
transport and refrigeration and and all
those sorts of things
that contribute the other greenhouse
gases to make up i haven't heard that
figure of 51
i've only heard the maximum i've seen is
about in the high 30s
great thank you the next one is by
pamela gordon
pamela asks the u.s meat packaging
industry
sorry the u.s meat packing industry has
spread covered 19 among its workers
the president meaning our president in
the united states considers me packing
an essential industry
not to be curved how can we change our
national culture to see me as
non-essential for healthy diets
well i mean that's up to you i shouldn't
be lecturing to you from scotland
that's that's entirely from our you for
you and your voters but you have a vote
in november and i hope you use it
okay ellie asks
have alan savoury's claims that holistic
grazing can reverse desert
desertification been debunked
i would say yes but they they persist
um so so i think scientifically the vast
majority of science scientific
uh studies into into into these systems
have um have largely debunked it
um the problem is with holistic raising
is because
they say it's adaptive management so if
something's not working you adapt it
which is a good thing i suppose because
you can adapt the grazing pattern
just to make sure that you're looking
after the land as best you can
but it makes it basically unfalsifiable
because if you say we didn't find uh an
effect of
this change grazing pattern then they
would come back and say
um you didn't find it because you didn't
adapt it and you didn't do it properly
so that makes it um makes it difficult
to study
in a fully scientifically controlled
experiment
but the fully scientifically controlled
experiments um
show that i mean there are lots of
benefits to it in terms of grasping
biodiversity all sorts of other benefits
but the carbon sequestration the climate
change one is
is not one of them that's not one of the
things that stands up to scrutiny
great thank you this one's from an
anonymous attendee
they said i've read it's suggested
recently in a project i was undergoing
on silvopasture
that if ruminant livestock eat a highly
nutritious diet rich in nitrates
that their enteric methane emissions can
actually decrease somewhat
is this something you've come across and
if so do you consider it be
to be worth further investigating yes
yeah it is
true the the increasing in food quality
so that would be the case if you improve
the nitrogen status of the grass
and reduces the amount of methane that's
um that's emitted
there are other things like dietary
additives extracts of garlic for example
have been shown to have
some effect on reducing methane
emissions
the problem is if they reduce emissions
by 20 or 30
which is the maximum efficacy that they
have and
that only lasts for a period of weeks um
but even if it lasted for a long time
you saw from those figures
you've got 10 to 100 times greater
greenhouse gas emissions from
rumen and livestock so really you're
just fiddling around in the margins
when you're trying to reduce enteric
fermentation the only safe way to reduce
synthetic fermentation is to reduce the
number of cattle
thank you pete see this next one is from
kamal
pretty much all calculations of the
impacts of animal foods use
per kilogram of animal product consumed
this makes it look like consuming
poultry and eggs is better however
doesn't the sheer number of those
animals chickens turkey for instance
spread for human consumption
uh puts their aggregate climate change
contribution on par
with roommates yeah it doesn't
quite um but you're right there's there
are really
large numbers of animals involved um you
know pig and poultry
poultry especially so in almost all
developing countries the consumption of
beef is going down um but the
consumption of chicken is going way up
so chicken and chicken products
um are rapidly increasing so there
is a lower greenhouse gas footprint
because they don't emit methane they're
not ruminants so we don't get those
methane emissions which are the big
contributor to climate change
but it does it does raise the question
you know what if we switch from roman
and meat to
pig and poultry it would reduce
greenhouse gas emissions
but on the other hand remnants were bred
to eat grass
which we can't eat you know as humans we
can't get a humidity protein out of that
grass
so maybe ruminas the best way to do it
the food that's fed to
pigs and poultry is exactly the same
food that we could eat
so it would be better to further process
that food
to grow better food better quality food
or consume it directly
than to go through that intermediate um
sort of shift towards peak and poultry
so much do you have time for two more
questions yeah sure go ahead
great this is an interesting one um they
want to know your thoughts on
plant-based meats such as impossible
foods
um you know currently this industry is
really blowing up there's a huge demand
for it it's becoming more affordable
and there's a wider variety of options i
do have an opinion on these
yeah i became a vegetarian in 1989
and it was really really difficult to
get any vegetarian products
i was brought up eating meat and i love
the taste of meat i love the flavor of
meat
so i wanted to continue eating products
that tasted and smelled and everything
that like meat it was really difficult
in 1989 to get
vegetarian products um now you can find
vegan products that are
million times better than those and it's
really easy to buy in most supermarkets
so those foods we have to think about
the health implications of those
you know plant-based foods aren't
necessarily more healthy if they've got
loads of salt and lots of fat in them
so it's not necessarily it doesn't
always go hand in hand
but a lot of those products are really
really good and impossible burgers and
beyond me and those things i think
they're
fantastic and i do enjoy them
great okay and then the very last one
when advocating for this in our
community what are the primary
counterpoints to this proposal
and how do you address those um of
course every community
can you still hear me again okay when
advocating for this in our community
what are the primary counterpoints to
this proposal and how do you address
those
i suppose the primary counterpoints are
that we have to make sure that
they um that the people could afford to
eat differently
quite quite um is is relatively cheap to
eat processed meat
and it can often cost a little more to
eat vegan and vegetarian alternatives
so i think it's important to make sure
that if with the dietary change that
there's a just
transition that we don't penalize the
the poorest and those with least in
society
and that they end up getting even worse
diets they already have the worst diets
among us
and and that could be exacerbated if we
uh
pushed all the production towards um
towards plant-based foods that were more
expensive
they don't have to be more expensive
they are at the moment because they're
they're feeding a niche market
but because they're so much more
efficient to produce they should
actually be cheaper
uh probably the um impossible burger
don't and
they don't want to know they don't want
to hear that but um
they're probably actually cheaper to
produce than livestock without subsidies
okay thank you so much professor pete
for your time again wonderful
presentation i personally learned a lot
from it
and i thank you for everyone that
attended our event just a reminder we
will be sending out the recording of
this event to all of you via email
um i got a lot of questions about that
and if you have any questions feel free
to send me an email
thank you again and have a great day
thanks bye
