Recently the National Pork Board and AgriPulse held a webinar about the pork industry and its sustainability goals. They discussed the WeCare? Ethical Principles and more. Those goals center around Animal Well-being, Food Safety, and the Environment. Animal Ag has been under attack by environmentalists for some time. They like to use talking points on the carbon footprint of the industry. However, one climate and air-quality expert says that these groups need to take a second look at what is really going on.
Dr. Frank Mitloehner is a professor at the University of California, Davis. He has talked all over the world about the findings he has on the carbon neutrality of livestock. He has talked at Iowa State University?s Swine Day, and also testified about it in the halls of Congress. On the webinar, he was driving some of the points home. Educating farmers on what they need to know when they enter a climate discussion. The first thing he did was give the attendees a crash course on the Greenhouse Gases.
Mitloehner adds that environmentalists like to focus on methane, and it is the Achille?s heel of animal ag. That?s because the way it is tested hasn?t changed in three decades. Also, the tests only account for methane produced, not methane destroyed. This means that a much smaller number is actually staying behind. Mitloehner says while our goal should be to reduce that number even further, it is nowhere near as bad as animal ag opponents claim because they leave out how much methane is naturally destroyed.
Mitloehner adds that while livestock is a greenhouse gas producer, it is unlike the fossil fuel industries, that produce them as well. Livestock has the ability to help the environment break down GHGs, not just produce them.
This means that the environment and animals in agriculture naturally form a cycle that produces carbon dioxide which is needed in our atmosphere, is sequestered into the ground as plants that provide oxygen and nutrients, and then is eaten or breathed in by the animals in the carbon cycle. Mitloehner says these natural cycles form a path of climate neutrality.
What Mitloehner also highlighted was that the way of calculating GHGs was misrepresenting animal ag and inflating their impact by a factor of four. A fact that was finally realized by the Inter-Governmental Panel for Climate Change in 2021. They are now suggesting new methods be used to calculate animal agriculture?s true impact more accurately.
