Industrial livestock farming has long been on the defensive in the fight against climate change. But what if it’s better at curbing emissions?
That’s the position a food and climate researcher at Harvard University takes in a new discussion paper that shows the debate about what makes agriculture “climate smart” far from settled.
Robert Paarlberg, an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, said in a June 13 paper that countries still dominated by smaller pasture-feeding cattle herds could learn something from the United States: confined animal feeding operations can cut down on methane emissions.
By Paarlberg’s reasoning — which he said is backed up by research — cows fed controlled rations grow faster and thus spend less time belching out methane before they’re producing a lot of milk or are ready for slaughter. Their diets can be more closely controlled, too, and the animals are often the product of more advanced genetics in the Global North, which he defines largely as Europe and North America.
