Talking point efficiently and profitably, with methane emissions reduced for every kilo of meat produced. Illustrations by Michelle Thompson/Handsome Frank Cows burp a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas over 25 times more potent than CO2 when it comes to its global-warming potential over 100 years. But because of the way methane degrades, over 20 years that warming potential is in fact 86 times greater than CO2. A faster fattening up period compared to grazing systems, a feed that’s ‘easier’ to digest, and a cocktail of chemical additives (such a Rumensin, an antibiotic that kills naturally occurring bacteria in a cow’s rumen that normally break down grasses and produce methane as a result) make this reduction in methane emissions possible. But considering the staggering amount of meat in production – an estimated 335 million tonnes were produced globally in 2018 – is this making enough of a difference? The meat industry alone currently produces more greenhouse gas emissions than the running of all our transport (cars, planes, freight, ships). CATCH UP MEAT: A THREAT TO OUR PLANET? Available on BBC iPlayer. was lost every minute. Farmers slash and burn the trees and overgraze the cleared patch until the ground is rendered useless, before moving on to clear a new area of forest. The Amazon has already been reduced by 20 per cent, but we only need to lose another 5–10 per cent to reach an ecological tipping point beyond which the forest will no longer be able to recover. According to WWF, we are on course to reach this tipping point by 2030. Each year, the Amazon stores up to one quarter of the carbon taken up by all the forests around the world, playing a vital role in the cooling of our planet. Every tree also draws up 1,000 litres of water through transpiration each day, creating what indigenous people call “flying rivers” of mist over the treetops. In fact, the entire Amazon forest creates more water in vapour form than the Amazon river pours into the sea every day, playing a huge part in regulating global weather patterns – the Amazon is not just the lungs of our planet, it is its circulatory system, and its beating heart. Adriana tells me that her fight to protect her little boy’s future can seem futile at times. She fears we are about to lose everything. “It’s crazy, because when people are buying their piece of beef, eating their hamburger, they don’t realise that in each piece of burger there is a piece of the forest.” With demand for meat on the rise around the globe, some countries are striving to produce as much beef as possible, using less land and fewer heads of cattle. America currently produces a mighty 10 billion kilos a year, and most of it is reared in CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations. Paul Defoor oversees the Wrangler Feedyard in Texas (one of ten under his supervision) that holds up to 50,000 cattle, every six months. The cattle are kept in small pens as they fatten up on a diet of corn, various crop by-products and chemical additives. This allows them to rear cattle As I look at the cows, standing in their own manure, Paul tells me his cattle are happy. When I ask him how he knows this, he says they are in the business of knowing cattle. We’re making a programme about the environment, but everything about this feels wrong to me. It’s clear that Paul and I are not going to agree about the welfare of these animals. Critics of intensive farming have long questioned the conditions animals are kept in. But this type of meat production has also raised grave environmental concerns, not least because of the increased risk of antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria that are easily transmitted from animals to humans, as food animals are given prophylactic doses of antibiotics to prevent infection and increase growth rates. And all that manure must go somewhere. Farmers store it in slurry pits or, in countries like the US, Denmark and China, in even larger open-air ‘lagoons’, and then spray it onto fields as fertilizer. But often, there’s just too much of it. From the air, in North Carolina, I watch the liquid – a heady mix of manure, bacteria and chemicals – drain off the oversoaked crops into surrounding hedgerows and rivers. Research by the Waterkeepers Alliance, a non-profit January 2020 BBC Wildlife 55