Real Meat Is Green — It Eats Grass

The Green Wreckers who destroyed Australia’s cheap, reliable electricity are now targeting our cattle industry.

They will use fake science and false advertising to destroy our right to produce and consume real meat.

This stupidity relies on a totally false argument that grazing animals cause global warming by releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

However, grazing animals have already reached “Net Zero.” They add ZERO carbon to the environment — they just help to recycle the same carbon products faster, endlessly.

Grasses and crops extract CO2 from the atmosphere and add minerals, water, and nutrients from the soil. They then use solar energy to create plant sugars and release oxygen.

All grasses are either eaten by grazing animals and termites or burnt in grass-fires lit by humans or lightning. Then comes the rain, the grasses regrow, and the cycle starts again.

Cattle harvest these crops and grasses, creating meat, bones, and exhaust gases. (That’s real carbon farming.)

Some of the carbon products that cattle eat get exhausted from both ends as CO2 and methane, but not one atom of new carbon is introduced to the atmosphere by grasses, crops, or cattle. They are just cogs in the endless carbon cycle that supports all life on Earth.

Moreover, contrary to the usual alarms, the atmospheric warming impact of methane from cattle is negligible since the few radiation absorption lines of methane are swamped by the absorption bands of the much more abundant water vapor.

The same heat cannot be trapped twice. As physicist Dr. Tom Sheahen points out: “Worrying about methane emissions is the greatest waste of time in the entire lexicon of global warming fanaticism. … CH4’s effect is so tiny as to be completely irrelevant.”

Cattle even aid carbon sequestration as their meat gets incorporated into long-lived human bodies. As the decades and centuries pass, prodigious amounts of carbon are transferred from the atmosphere to grasses, to beefsteak and hamburgers, and to human bodies and bones.

Eventually, billions of human bodies are buried (together with the considerable carbon fixed in their wooden coffins). Unlike the carbon temporarily captured in soils, this carbon in human cemeteries is permanently captured and buried.

Not only are Greens ignorant of the full carbon cycle of life, but they also cannot count properly — they just measure what suits their red-green agenda.

Like all carbon sequestration proposals, burying carbon is anti-life and serves no useful purpose. All farmed soils will become severely deficient unless they are fertilized with mined minerals containing lime, magnesite, phosphate, nitrogen, and trace elements.

Cattle have always served human needs by converting inedible grasses into edible proteins and fats. Their hides make leather, and their bones and waste are recycled to make fertilizer.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors treasured meat, supplemented by seasonal fruits, bulbs, and tubers. When threatened by occasional starvation, they learned how to process and eat grass seeds safely. We interfere with this ancient food heritage at our peril.

Men and cattle share millennia of history. Since the days of aurochs and longhorns, men have hunted, protected, branded, worshiped, harvested, stolen, milked, and farmed cows of many breeds.

But now Green wackos from the aptly named “Extinction Rebellion” plan to ration and tax real meat while fraudulently labeling a manufactured plant-based concoction as “meat.”

Australia has about 26 million cattle producing meat, milk, and cream. If meat is to be rationed, why not also ration milk and cream?

Why cull Australia’s cattle when India has more than 300 million cattle and lets millions of them roam freely because Hindus consider them sacred?

Why ration red meat in Australia when Brazil alone has more than 230 million cattle and South America’s beef consumption exceeds that of the USA and Australia, in total and per capita?

Why ration red meat in Australia when China, with about 97 million cattle, continually increases its meat consumption?

Even if we wiped all cattle from the face of the Earth, grass growth would explode to feed mammoth bushfires, or be consumed by termites, or just rot — a real zero-sum game to achieve world starvation. Maybe depopulation is their plan?

Viv Forbes has tertiary qualifications in geology, chemistry, physics, and soil science and is Executive Director of the Saltbush Club. He and his wife have spent a lifetime raising cattle, sheep, and goats on natural pastures using rotational grazing with minimal chemicals or drugs. They understand soil health and the Carbon Cycle of Life. They eat real meat raised on natural pastures.