This presentation is brought to you by Arizona
State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability, and a generous
investment by Julie Ann Wrigley.
OK, but now let me switch to some of the environmental
questions of animal production.
Firstly, there are local issues which are
worth attention.
A lot of different local issues.
This just shows water pollution.
This is a holding lagoon.
This is not actually just going into a river,
this is an intensive farm.
But it goes into one of these so-called lagoons.
I was always puzzled when I first saw the
word lagoon used in this context, but that's
what they call them.
Here's another slide which talks about lagoons.
This is a overview of a giant intensive pig
farm.
You see these sheds here.
Each one of these sites holds 8,000 hogs,
and there's more of them.
There's another set there.
There's another one over here.
There's probably one back there behind that
lagoon.
So it's a very large thing.
And these so-called lagoons are holding, basically,
the pig manure with water.
And the idea is that it should then sprayed
on surrounding fields, but what sometimes
happens is you get big storms and the lagoons
overflow.
It gets into the water supply.
Or you have so many hogs in such a dense area
that the manure is sprayed too thickly on
surrounding fields for the field to be able
to use.
Because it costs money to transport it further,
and so when it rains it runs off the field
and into the streams and pollutes the streams.
So where there are these intensive industries
there are big water pollution problems.
And that's a significant local issue.
There are other environmental issues, too.
There's air pollution for the people who are
close in the neighborhood.
There's questions about water use, which are
very relevant here in dry states like Arizona.
But I want to move-- sorry, that was too fast.
I want to move to looking at what is the most
pressing environmental issue that faces us
and the world today, and that is climate change.
So here, I didn't show you before, cattle
production.
It's less intensive than pig, egg, chicken
production or veal production, but it's still
highly intensive.
This is a cattle feedlot.
Again, a vast thing stretching into the horizon.
Maybe 100,000 cattle confined in this area.
They do have room to move around and they
are outside, but it's still like a pretty
dull kind of existence for them.
And they're being fed on grain, grain and
some soy, which fattens them up faster, but
they don't digest very well.
Also they produce a lot of manure, and the
other thing is, cattle produce a lot of methane.
Cattle produce methane in the digestive process.
It's a gas.
Most of it actually, contrary to myth, comes
from belching rather than out of the other
end.
But they do produce methane, and methane is
an extremely potent greenhouse gas.
So we have to look at that.
We also have the fact that, as I said, it's
not really an efficient form of producing
food to feed grain or soy to ruminant animals
in particular.
And that has an impact on greenhouse gases
as well, because we use a lot of fertilizers
to grow our grain and transport our grain.
And so that contributes to fossil fuel, especially
if you consider that we are actually wasting
most of the food value of this grain.
So here are some figures on that.
We are actually feeding 70% of the grain we
produce to animals rather than eating it directly.
Or now some of it, of course, is going into
biofuel, ethanol.
And I'll talk about that in a moment.
But of this, we're only getting back about
one-sixth of the food value.
Or actually less than one-sixth if you're
talking about overall food value, which includes
carbohydrate.
But since people say, well, we eat beef for
its protein, that's what's important.
Even if we just focus on protein, we are wasting
a lot of the protein value of the grains and
soy we're feeding to cattle.
So it's a very inefficient process.
Another way of looking at that is by asking,
how much protein can you get per acre if you
use your acre for different kinds of usage?
And the soybeans come out by far the best,
followed by rice and corn, and then peas and
beans, the legumes, wheat.
And it's only these bars down the bottom.
If you're at the back and have trouble seeing,
this is milk here.
This is eggs.
This is meat, all types of meat, and this
is beef in particular.
So all of these columns are the direct consumption
of plant products.
And these ones are the meat production, because
of the wastefulness of feeding grain to meat.
So that clearly has an environmental impact.
Puts more stress on the environment that we
need to grow more in order to get these amounts
of food.
OK, let's go back to climate change.
It's only relatively recently that people
have started to talk about how important an
issue the food we eat is in a contribution
to climate change.
Most people think, have thought for years,
that it's things like transport that are the
big factors.
The fact that we drive these gas-guzzling
SUVs, the fact that we all have our own cars
rather than using public transport, and so
on.
But as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
has said quite recently, actually the livestock
sector is bigger than all transport, both
private and public transport.
The livestock sector is a bigger contributor
to greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2
equivalent.
So what you do is you convert the methane
into carbon dioxide.
Much smaller amounts of methane produced than
carbon dioxide, but it's a much more potent
greenhouse gas.
And that's why it comes out as a higher figure.
So this is going to be significant if we want
to deal with this immense problem, which I
think is one of the great challenges for us.
I think climate change is already with us,
already happening.
We can't stop it but we can at least try and
mitigate it so that it doesn't get worse and
it doesn't spiral unpredictably out of hand
with things like changes in ocean currents,
rising sea levels.
On one model, for example, rising sea levels
over the next century could put a third of
the state of Florida underwater.
And that would be much worse, even, for other
countries where poorer people cannot move.
For example, Bangladesh has tens of millions
of people living on land that is no more than
three meters above sea level.
That's because it has all these very fertile
delta regions that they farm, but they're
very low-lying.
So this is a major crisis which will affect
hundreds of millions of people, billions of
people.
And this is one thing we can do about it.
Changing our diet to make it less livestock-intensive.
This presentation is brought to you by Arizona
State University's Julie Ann Wrigley Global
Institute of Sustainability, for educational,
and non-commercial use only.
