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Research Suggests Cattle Raising May Reduce Emissions

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From Heartland Daily News

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock production causes 11.1 of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, recommending people eat less meat to fight climate change.

Yet recent research suggests that under some climatic conditions or ecosystems, at least, cattle raising may actually result in lower emissions.

Alltech and Archbold examined the emissions from cattle raising in wetlands and ground that is regularly water laden. They found that although cattle accounted for 19 percent to 30 percent of emissions, the vast majority of the methane produced there was from the soil itself and the decomposing plant and animal life. As a result, they found, removing the cows actually produced a net increase in methane emissions.

Vaughn Holder, Ph.D., research project manager for beef nutrition at Alltech, who with Betsey Boughton, Ph.D., director of agroecology at Archbold, studied the impacts that cattle production has on the ecosystem on a wetlands pasture at Buck Island Ranch, about 150 miles northwest of Miami, Florida, notes that the production of agricultural emissions is more complex than simply ruminant eats plants = more methane emissions.

“There is a far more complex process in agriculture than it is in fossil fuel systems,” Holder told Just the News, which wrote:

Cattle are part of a carbon cycle. So if you just model the emissions coming from the animal, you’re missing the rest of the ecosystem, Holder said, which is absorbing carbon as a result of the animal being on the land.

When cattle graze on land, the plants prioritize root growth over the plant matter above the surface. The deeper the roots, the more plants sequester carbon in the soil through the photosynthesis process.

Grazing also removes grasses from a pasture, which reduces the dead plant matter that falls to the soil and decomposes, which also produces greenhouse gasses.

At the Buck Island Ranch, Boughton and her team measured the amount of greenhouse gases emitted on a pasture that had no grazing and compared it to pasture that had grazing. The data suggested grazing livestock were a net carbon sink compared to no grazing.

Of course, what’s true of a wetland’s ecosystem may not translate into more arid lands were cattle are often grazed, so more research is needed in order to know how cattle impact emissions in other environments.

However, as Holder and Boughton point out, quite aside from reducing emissions from wetlands, cattle and other livestock also consume a lot of plants humans can’t eat, turning them into them into edible proteins humans can consume, increasing global food security while reducing the emissions from the decomposition of the plants when they otherwise naturally die. In addition, livestock also consume a lot of food byproducts that humans either can’t or prefer not to eat, like orange pulp used in orange juice production. Although such byproducts can be used in composting, Holder notes, “composting increases emissions five times more than feeding it to dairy cows and byproducts disposed of in landfills produced 50 times more emissions than if it is fed to dairy cows.”

The research suggests that when accounting for livestock emissions, one should do an all-things- considered comparison, accounting for not just the emissions from cattle and sheep, but also from the material they consume that otherwise would have produced emissions by other means.

Sources: Just the News;  Understanding the Carbon Cycle on a Cattle Ranch

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Agriculture

Their Strategy in the War on Food

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From the Brownstone Institute

By TRACY THURMAN  

In my previous two articles, we covered the global war on farmers and the culprits behind this agenda. Today, we will dive into the tactics these organizations use to foist their dystopian vision on the rest of us.

Perhaps you remember Event 201, the pandemic simulation run in late 2019 that served as a dress rehearsal for the 2020 Covid response. Such simulations have been used in the War on Food as well. Take, for example, the Food Chain Reaction Game, a 2015 wargame that simulated the time period from 2020 to 2030. Cargill and the other participants have removed the Food Chain Reaction Game data from their websites, but Cargill’s version was archived by independent researchers, so you can still see it here.

In the simulation, the decade brought “two major food crises, with prices approaching 400 percent of the long term average; a raft of climate-related extreme weather events; governments toppling in Pakistan and Ukraine; and famine and refugee crises in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Chad and Sudan.” When the game ended, its organizers had imposed meat taxes in Europe, capped CO2 emissions, and instituted a global carbon tax. The time period of the Food Chain Reaction Game handily coincides with the 2020 Covid crisis and ends with the culmination of Agenda 2030. If you don’t think those dates are significant, you aren’t paying attention.

The parties behind this simulation include the World Wildlife Fund, the Center for American Progress, the Center for Naval Analyses, and Cargill. Note the participation of US military and intelligence-linked organizations in this simulation, much as they appeared throughout the Covid power grab. Cargill, as I mentioned before, is one of the most powerful members of the global Big Ag cartel and have excelled in crushing independent farmers globally to establish total control of the food supply. The Center For American Progress is a Soros and Podesta-affiliated think tank.

The World Wildlife Fund has a shady Malthusian history dating to its eugenicist founders like Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, co-founder of the Bilderberg Group; transhumanist Julian Huxley (brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley); and Britain’s Prince Philip, who said he wanted to be reincarnated “as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

Note that the measures these conspirators concocted – meat taxes and a global carbon tax – have nothing to do with increasing the food supply to end famine – much as Event 201’s participants obsessed about vaccines and controlling misinformation rather than providing effective early treatment for disease. To state the obvious, neither simulation is really about solving hunger or viral contagion. They are designed to game out how to ram an agenda down the throats of an unwilling populace.

Both exercises are classic examples of Hegelian Dialectic, the problem-reaction-solution strategy whereby a problem is created or used to stimulate public demand for a solution. The solution always involves pre-planned actions or legislation that never would have passed public approval before the problem was created. To quote Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste. By that I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

The goal of the Food Chain Reaction Game simulation and the global elites who share this vision is simple but devastating: the controlled demolition of the current food supply and supply chain network – not to end factory farming and replace it with regenerative, earth healing agriculture – but to replace it with a global, centralized, fully surveilled, and tightly controlled food system based on lab-created and industrially processed so-called foods, with little dietary choice and abysmal health outcomes for all but the elites, using climate change as the excuse for it all.

As Bertrand Russell predicted, diet will not be left to individuals, but will be such as the best biochemists recommend.

If you’re new to this topic, you may feel that statement is hyperbolic. It is hard to grasp that there are people planning something this far-reaching and diabolical – it’s as far-fetched as a network of global elites using a lab-escaped virus as an excuse to destroy the economies of the world and forcibly inject billions with experimental poisons. But it is reality, and as the quotes from Bertrand Russell and Monsanto’s CEO hint, this agenda has been in the works for decades.

In my next article, we will look at some of the publicly acknowledged projects that are in the pipeline for achieving this goal.

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Tracy Thurman is an advocate for regenerative farming, food sovereignty, decentralized food systems, and medical freedom. She works with the Barnes Law Firm’s public interest division to safeguard the right to purchase food directly from farmers without government interference.

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Agriculture

The Netherlands Reverses Host of Climate Policies

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From Heartland Daily News

Agriculture-focused polices the new government is reversing include the previous government’s forced buyout and retirement of farms to cut fertilizer use and associated nitrogen emissions

The Netherlands recently elected a new right-of-center government which is downplaying climate alarm and European Union (EU)-driven climate policies that harm the country’s residents and agricultural producers.

“Geert Wilders, a prominent figure in Dutch politics, has led a coalition that marks a decisive shift in the Netherlands’ approach to climate policy. Wilders, often dubbed the “Dutch Trump,” formed a new government that includes the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB),” writes Charles Rotter at Watts Up With That. Rotter quotes a report in The Telegraph on the political right’s rise in the Netherlands and what it means for climate policy:

The Netherlands will tear up rules forcing homeowners to buy heat pumps as part of a war on net zero by Geert Wilders and the Dutch farmers’ party. Six months after his shock election victory, Mr. Wilders this week struck an agreement to usher in a Right-wing coalition government of four parties. “We are writing history,” he said as he announced the program for the new government.

Among the EU-endorsed climate policies Wilders’ coalition government is rescinding is the heat pump mandate, which would have forced homeowners to switch to expensive, inefficient hybrid heat pumps  from traditional air conditioning and heating systems.

The EU had established a goal of installing a minimum of 10 million new heat pumps by 2027 as part of its 2050 net-zero ambition, a plan the previous Dutch government had endorsed and imposed. As The Telegraph reported, the Dutch government’s heat pump mandate was intended to drive “down Dutch household use of natural gas for heating, which is the largest source of its gas consumption, equivalent to about 30 percent in total.”

Commending the new coalition government’s reversal, Caroline van der Plas, leader of the BBB,  cheerfully said, “Thanks to BBB’s efforts, the mandatory heat pump will be abolished.”

Agriculture-focused polices the new government is reversing include the previous government’s forced buyout and retirement of farms to cut fertilizer use and associated nitrogen emissions. In its place, the new government will establish a series of voluntary incentives to reduce emissions and offer interested farmers voluntary buyouts to end production.

Wilders government is also set to end subsidies for electric vehicles by 2025, which, as Rotter notes, is “a departure from the EU’s blanket approach to climate policy. These subsidies have been criticized for benefiting the wealthy who can afford electric vehicles while doing little to address broader environmental issues.”

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