But how does this help - they will have the same amount of flatulence, defecation, and urine.
The issue is where it goes, and that before it went straight into the ground and now it can be collected and dealt with?
The issue is where it goes, and that before it went straight into the ground and now it can be collected and dealt with?
More ammo against feedlots is a good thing.
One Regenerative Farming's emphasis, widely practiced on many high-quality grassfarms across America, but pioneered on Kiwi sheep farms, is the regular, constant movement of cattle. Whereas most cattle operations in the USA have some kind of rotational grazing system, it tends to be larger pastures with the livestock inside for very long periods of time. What this causes is a large amount of waste of the animal byproducts--the pee and poop are concentrated and oxidized by the sun and wasted. What the Kiwis pioneered was using temporary electrical fencing and frequent movement of the animals, alongside "intensive pasture management" (the management is the intensive part--carefully monitoring the sward and keeping it at optimal growing height--grass growth rates follow a sigmoid function, so if you graze too low, it takes a long time to grow back, but if you graze to just above the peak growth height, it regenerates much more quickly), allows higher stocking rates, lower environment impact, increased carbon sequestration, and many further benefits.
There's an excellent book about this called Greener Pasture on Your Side of the Fence (https://www.amazon.com/Greener-Pasture-Your-Fence-Management...) that goes over the history of this practice.
It takes more labour. Sometimes you move the cows daily, occasionally twice a day, rather than once a month or whatever. But the impact on local ecology is fantastic. Plus, if you move chickens into the pasture after the cows, they help spread the manure, eat all the fly larvae out of the patties, and act as a natural antibiotic (who needs a depreciating piece of farm equipment to spread all that poop when you can use appreciating livestock?).
Definitely better if you can manage sheep cows and chickens on the same property, but that may still be beyond some people to manage. Just the fact of rotation would tend to mean that your cows are on average farther up in the watershed than they would be if they have the entire area to themselves all the time, for some of the reasons you already stated.
How would toilet training reduce greenhouse gases?
(Not that that matters - the bulk of beef cattle can barely move, it's not like factory farms have space for designated potty areas or something).
Training beef cows seems like something of a waste of time since they get slaughtered so young. Milk cows however could be worthwhile.
In fact there's a device for letting cars through but not cows that is basically a grate you put on the road. The fence comes up to the grate on both sides and there is no gate. You just drive over the grate.
> Scattered excrement can cause bacterial infections in cows. And when their poop mixes with pee, it creates an environmental hazard: ammonia, which can transform into the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Half of the ammonia produced in Europe comes from cattle farms, says study co-author Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology. Given the hundreds of millions of dairy cows in the world, he says, studies have shown that capturing 80% of cow urine would lead to a 56% reduction in ammonia emissions.