- Researchers have won a prize for discovering that a cow's genetics determine which microbes populate its gut. Some of those microbes produce the greenhouse gas methane that comes out of cow belches and farts and ends up in the atmosphere.
Hmm. I wonder if feeding cows what they are actually genetically designed to eat, would do the trick? Rather than, ya know, feeding them corn because it's cheap because it is subsidized by the government because there was a corn surplus one year and the government started buying corn from farmer to avoid a farming crash, and the new system was poorly designed so it actually encouraged the farmers to grow more corn, so the federal government then funded a government program to find more uses for this huge corn surplus, which led to the development of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which was then integrated into all kinds of foods like soft drinks and bread and canned food, which led directly to the obesity epidemic due to the incredibly high caloric count of all these HFCS-containing foods, and... Nah. Cows just fart too much. Let's mess with their biology so they can consume this food these ruminants were never supposed to eat.
Goobster, you clearly don't have the bottom line on your mind. Do you know how long it takes to bulk up hoofstock to market weight on GRASS? We're in this business to make MONEY goobster, and TIME is MONEY.I wonder if feeding cows what they are actually genetically designed to eat, would do the trick?
I have a friend who is an Iowa corn farmer. Well, he owns the land and leases it to farmers, who grow shit and pay him a cut. He hates that corn is so profitable, but it is so massively underwritten at every stage by the government, that NOT growing corn is stupid. So we have more corn surplus. So the farmers get a stipend from the government to make up for low corn prices (because the market is saturated with corn), which makes their businesses more profitable than growing watermelons or gladiolas or soybeans, so they grow more corn, which the government subsidizes, which increases the surplus problem, which... ... you get it. Grr.