Livestock
-
The Sustainable City Network posted an intriguing article today on the potential for increasing cattle production reducing the emission of greenhouse gases, based on new research from Iowa State researchers. The potential to reduce carbon emissions comes from switching land from production of row crops like corn to pastures, which would reduce erosion and loss…
-
AgWeb posted an interesting story earlier this week about problems that farmers in the Pacific Northwest are having growing alfalfa this year. Spring has been very warm and that has caused the crop to mature earlier, which the author said resulted in stems growing at the expense of leaves. This means that while tonnage is…
-
A new study that was published recently in Geophysical Research Letters shows that “Emissions from farms outweigh all other human sources of fine-particulate air pollution in much of the United States, Europe, Russia and China, according to new research. The culprit: fumes from nitrogen-rich fertilizers and animal waste combine in the air with combustion emissions…
-
Now that hot summer temperatures are coming on, you might need information about the likelihood of heat stress injury to your livestock. USDA has a set of forecast maps which show the likelihood of heat stress each day for the next week based on weather forecast models (the forecasts are produced as a partnership with the National Weather…
-
One area of hot research in reducing carbon emissions is work on reducing the emission of methane from cattle digestion. While cow belches do not put as much carbon into the air as the burning of fossil fuel for transportation and energy production, it is one area in agriculture that is being studied to see…
-
The latest Southern SARE newsletter is now available. You can view it here. It lists a variety of workshops and other activities in sustainable agriculture, including livestock and cover crop workshops, that might be of interest.
-
There has been a lot in the news recently about how carbon emissions would be drastically reduced if we just stopped eating red meat (or in some cases, any meat at all). I get questions from extension agents and producers about the impacts that producing animal protein has on the increase in carbon dioxide in…