Comment by himinlomax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by himinlomax | Hacker News Reader

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The water usage metric is a joke. Do you think dairy cows in Normandy or England lack any water, or that anyone is impacted by said water usage? Just visit there, you'll see what I mean.

The carbon metric is also a joke, for a different reason: cows raised on mostly grass can have a negative impact. Cattle fed corn is another story, but the problem here is not the cows or the milk but industrial agriculture.

Next we have land usage. I just came back from a hike in the mountain. Saw plenty of cows munching on ski slopes, they make excellent cheese. What kind of food could be produced there instead? Certainly not rice or almonds or whatever.

Finally the nutriments is all dependent on what you make of fats. Ansel Keyes and his followers have been claiming saturated fat was bad for your heart, in the mean time France has the highest butter consumption in the world by far and we also happen to have among the best heart health numbers (and no, it's not red wine).

I don't know which mountains you were hiking, but the cows in the alps remain there because they get huge subsidies[1] to do so (beyond the subsidies all agriculture gets). The argument being that it's useful and traditional and there's no way to compete under such difficult circumstances.

Anyway, I couldn't find any numbers, but I expect it makes up a small percentage of overall milk production, even in countries like Austria or Switzerland, which have a lot of mountainous area. If we exclusively produces milk that way, it'd be a luxury good.

Again, I haven't looked up the numbers for Normandy or England, but I expect it's similar to Northern Germany, where you do see cows in pastures (which is lovely, I love cows, they seem very happy), but a) most of them are fed additional grains, b) during the winter you'll see much fewer and c) for every cow you see there, there must be a dozen being kept in a stable year-round. Source: cow farmers in the family.

[1] e.g. https://www.bluehendesoesterreich.at/bauernlexikon/bergbauer...

It's just an example of how land use is the wrong metric.

> a) most of them are fed additional grains,

Yes, but there is a difference between feeding them additional grain and feeding them exclusively grain.

I think you're engaging in some wishful thinking with grass-fed carbon-negative cows. The climate impact is from methane they produce from digestion, regardless of the food source.

Any sources on the cow carbon footprint? This is an interesting point and I'd like to get some detail so I can judge for myself.

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