Punatang - It's mind blowing for myself and I'm guessing many when you admonish me about snark.
The full clause was "personal attacks and snark" - you seem to keep skipping past something as if it never happened. If you don't remember then go with Tom and have your memory checked, but Pepperidge Farm remembers. While snark with a reply is pretty standard fare, and yes I find it to be part of the entertainment of reading and posting on Punaweb, snark as the reply is often seen as dickish, which is why it tends to get called out, to you, repeatedly.
You jumped on me the very first time I said hello and have been relentless ever since.
Was this was back when you were calling the historic climate settlement won by kids in Hawaii who care about their world and their future "greenwashing", and making impossible demands on how you'd be more impressed if they personally committed exclusively to walking, biking, and/or riding public transportation, buying only locally produced food and clothing, etc? I can't ever imagine why such an attitude might result in some pushback...
Anyhow, trying to get back on topic and not too deep into the weeds (as those are best left for the goats)
Edge - It was measured that goats have a greater output on CO2 per unit of milk produced compared to cows, but there was no statistic for methane. I'd like to see the numbers for methane as it's a much more dangerous greenhouse gas.
See Figure 23a on page 46 of the ruminant FAO report as it gives a breakdown of the CH4 contributions for emission intensity for milk from cows, buffalo, and goats/sheep. Goats/sheep on average make more methane per unit of milk than cows as the goats/sheep tend to produce less milk and rely on lower quality feeds. But just methane alone doesn't tell the whole story and the System Boundary used by FAO does a good job of compiling a CO2-equivalent total number that includes other factors such as fertilizer needed for feed, CO2 produced in transport, and NO2 produced with manure and its management.
As you highlighted, there is a vast difference between large-scale commercial cow dairies and small-farm goat operations (such as backyard goat milk needing no transportation or cartons for instance :) For the FAO report, most of the cows are Western world commercial operations that benefit from high quality feed which lowers their CO2-eq per unit milk. This benefit is largely lost when those cows have to subside on lower quality forage, such as being mostly grass-fed, which is seen in some of the region analysis in the FAO report and in the National Academy study. Most of the goats/sheep in the world are small-scale, even subsistence level, farms such as in Sub-Sahara Africa which have lower quality feeds and smaller yields resulting in higher CO2-eq per unit milk. The goat numbers also take a hit as the low-dairy producing sheep are averaged into their totals.
I actually thought the attached graph was most useful in making these comparisons which is from FAO 2013a, a comparison compilation of that Cattle, Buffalo, Goat/Sheep report with their reports on Swine and Chicken. While the average cattle milk has lower CO2-eq per unit than the average goat/sheep milk, there is a lot of overlap in the 50% production so some dairy goat operations are better than some dairy cow operations and vice versa. Could goats with high-quality feed consistently compete with cows, especially those mostly on grass? The range of values there seems to suggest so.
Maybe Sweet Land Farm on Oahu might be the ones to find out - apparently they're running a 500 head dairy goat herd (god help them and their sanity) and are growing 30% of their feed onsite with the goal to make it 100%. If the resulting products stay local, the total CO2-eq per kg of protein would likely be quite competitive and impressive.
Regardless, the graph also makes clear that cows and goats/sheep uniformly suck on CO2-eq costs compared to chicken meat and eggs (and suck even more compared to soybeans which are in the single digit CO2-eq). So I guess it's the HPP chicken lots, Lisa the Vegetarian Simpson, and Woody the Vegan Harrelson that win at the end of the Earth Day anyways. Cheers! (making your way in the world today, takes everything you've got...)
The full clause was "personal attacks and snark" - you seem to keep skipping past something as if it never happened. If you don't remember then go with Tom and have your memory checked, but Pepperidge Farm remembers. While snark with a reply is pretty standard fare, and yes I find it to be part of the entertainment of reading and posting on Punaweb, snark as the reply is often seen as dickish, which is why it tends to get called out, to you, repeatedly.
You jumped on me the very first time I said hello and have been relentless ever since.
Was this was back when you were calling the historic climate settlement won by kids in Hawaii who care about their world and their future "greenwashing", and making impossible demands on how you'd be more impressed if they personally committed exclusively to walking, biking, and/or riding public transportation, buying only locally produced food and clothing, etc? I can't ever imagine why such an attitude might result in some pushback...
Anyhow, trying to get back on topic and not too deep into the weeds (as those are best left for the goats)
Edge - It was measured that goats have a greater output on CO2 per unit of milk produced compared to cows, but there was no statistic for methane. I'd like to see the numbers for methane as it's a much more dangerous greenhouse gas.
See Figure 23a on page 46 of the ruminant FAO report as it gives a breakdown of the CH4 contributions for emission intensity for milk from cows, buffalo, and goats/sheep. Goats/sheep on average make more methane per unit of milk than cows as the goats/sheep tend to produce less milk and rely on lower quality feeds. But just methane alone doesn't tell the whole story and the System Boundary used by FAO does a good job of compiling a CO2-equivalent total number that includes other factors such as fertilizer needed for feed, CO2 produced in transport, and NO2 produced with manure and its management.
As you highlighted, there is a vast difference between large-scale commercial cow dairies and small-farm goat operations (such as backyard goat milk needing no transportation or cartons for instance :) For the FAO report, most of the cows are Western world commercial operations that benefit from high quality feed which lowers their CO2-eq per unit milk. This benefit is largely lost when those cows have to subside on lower quality forage, such as being mostly grass-fed, which is seen in some of the region analysis in the FAO report and in the National Academy study. Most of the goats/sheep in the world are small-scale, even subsistence level, farms such as in Sub-Sahara Africa which have lower quality feeds and smaller yields resulting in higher CO2-eq per unit milk. The goat numbers also take a hit as the low-dairy producing sheep are averaged into their totals.
I actually thought the attached graph was most useful in making these comparisons which is from FAO 2013a, a comparison compilation of that Cattle, Buffalo, Goat/Sheep report with their reports on Swine and Chicken. While the average cattle milk has lower CO2-eq per unit than the average goat/sheep milk, there is a lot of overlap in the 50% production so some dairy goat operations are better than some dairy cow operations and vice versa. Could goats with high-quality feed consistently compete with cows, especially those mostly on grass? The range of values there seems to suggest so.
Maybe Sweet Land Farm on Oahu might be the ones to find out - apparently they're running a 500 head dairy goat herd (god help them and their sanity) and are growing 30% of their feed onsite with the goal to make it 100%. If the resulting products stay local, the total CO2-eq per kg of protein would likely be quite competitive and impressive.
Regardless, the graph also makes clear that cows and goats/sheep uniformly suck on CO2-eq costs compared to chicken meat and eggs (and suck even more compared to soybeans which are in the single digit CO2-eq). So I guess it's the HPP chicken lots, Lisa the Vegetarian Simpson, and Woody the Vegan Harrelson that win at the end of the Earth Day anyways. Cheers! (making your way in the world today, takes everything you've got...)