CALF_News_June_July_2019

36 CALF News • June | July 2019 • www.calfnews.net By Blaine Davis Contributing Editor Beyond the Ranch Gate Sustainability T hrough the ranch gate and on the road again, the oncoming travelers witness me pounding the steer- ing wheel, not with road rage at their driving skills or the traffic snarls and back-ups caused by the fleets of trucks and their escort vehicles transporting the infra- structure for yet another wind farm. No, my consternation is from what was spewing from my car radio, news reports from the nation’s capitol, socialism-based rhetoric and the inane bias by those reporting it. The big culprit though that day was the report that more than 90 percent of our national parks have unbreathable air. How can this be? Seeing Mount Rushmore with a gas mask? Hiking Rocky Mountain National Park with an oxygen tank? Upon parking my steel steed at the office and before attack- ing the drawing board, further research was warranted. I uncovered this story from the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). What the media’s announcement didn’t include was a small phrase,“at times.” Is that once in the last year? Or 10 years? Or since the inception of the national park system? But, I’m sure we could all agree that one such time might be in the height of a raging forest fire. This report goes on to state that hazy skies in 370 parks caused visitors to miss out on 50 miles of scenery. In Texas’ Big Bend National Park, visibility was reduced to fewer than 30 miles, 6 percent of the time. I question what the NPCA might think of the Smoky Hill River valley here in Kansas as its naturally hazy skies are where its name originated, not that of man-made emissions. As I have written before about checking ingredient labels and what’s behind them, now I can add, let’s check the math. Even my own professional association, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), is spewing doom-and-gloom scenarios of a world too hot to live in. Siding with the United Nation’s (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we are supposedly nearing an environmental point of no return. AIA has been expounding on a carbon-neutral built environment by the year 2030, but now with a new“Chicken Little’s the sky is falling” attitude they are revising the deadline to the coming year. With more than 40 years’ experience in the architectural field and living in Middle America’s agriculture-rich region that is a major player in feeding the world, I question these scare tactics and liken it that of the bust of the year 2000’s Y2K hoax. I don’t profess we all ignore the environment and mismanage our emissions, but does this drastic revision of their mathematical model hold true? Back behind the steering wheel and with a calm sense based on the news that University of California-Davis Professor Frank Mitloehner, Ph.D., was the 2019 Borlang CAST Com- munications Award recipient. The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology recognized this professor and air quality Extension specialist for debunking the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), 2006 report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” saying livestock production accounts for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. A native of West Germany and educated at the University of Leapzig, Germany, and a doctorate in animal science from Texas Tech University in 2000, Mitloehner, also known as @ GHGGuru on Twitter, questioned their math. Through his concept of lifecycle cost analysis (LCA), he found the results to conveniently support their desired end results by adding all GDG emissions associated with meat production, including crop fertilizers, land clearance, methane emissions and even vehicle use through the farm. In reality, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data states beef cattle contribute 2.2 percent, dairy cattle 1.37 percent, swine 0.47 percent, poultry 0.08 percent and sheep, goats and other livestock 0.08 percent of GHG emissions. By comparison, transportation and electricity generation together make up 56 percent of the total GHG emissions in 2016, with agriculture in general just 9 percent. Livestock GHG emissions have declined over time in the United States, largely due to our improvements in production efficiency. Just as farming has grown more crops on less land, so has the cattle industry. Mitloehner’s paper states, in 1950 the United States had 22 million dairy cows producing 117 million tons of milk annually. In 2015, U.S. dairies had just 9 million cows, but produced 209 million tons of milk. Doing the math, this was a 59-percent reduction in cow numbers with a 79-percent increase in milk production, resulting in a one-third reduction in GHG emissions since 1950. The beef cattle industry generated similar results with a reduction from 140 million head to 90 million head in the same time period, while maintaining production at 24 million tons of meat. In a further report,“Environmental Footprints of Beef Cattle Production in the United States,” research found that cattle consume just 2.6 pounds of grain per pound of beef carcass weight, comparable to the efficiency of pork and poultry. Let's Do the Math Continued on page 39 