CAPSTONE RESEARCH (actually more of a script now,

originally this document was the research, but I ran out of

time to re type everything into a script, so I just edited this
document to make it more like a script)
Intro

My essential question is ‘how is farming animals contributing to climate

change, and are there any sustainable alternatives.’ I mostly chose this

because I believe that fixing the climate crisis should be humanity’s

number one priority right now, and not burning down the Amazon

rainforest to mass produce monkey NFTs. I think most people, including

me, know that farming animals has some sort of impact on the climate,

but I wanted to find out how big or small of an impact, if it’s even big

enough to make a difference with climate change, and if it is, how we

can lessen the effect a little. Before I get into the climate side of things, I

wanted to go over the history of how humans began to farm animals,

and why it was so important to our society.

History of farming animals

Humans started farming cattle, goat, sheep, and pigs between 10

thousand and 13 thousand years ago. It is estimated that humans first

began farming the animals somewhere in a region called the Fertile

Crescent, which covers area in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Discovering this

was a important step for humanity, because it allowed people to stay put

in one place and form cities, instead of constantly wandering for food.

The Neolithic revolution is the name given to the start of agriculture in

this region. The Neolithic revolution does not span hundreds of years, it

is actually just the specific moment that humans started farming.

Apparently farming was only discovered when it was because the ice
age

had just died down, and plants couldn’t grow to sustain animals until

around the time of the Neolithic revolution. That’s why humans didn’t

come up with this seemingly obvious idea sooner. The discovery of

farming, allowing humans to stay in one place for longer, also allowed

for the creation of organized religions, and art that’s still around today.

Scientists say that the Neolithic revolution was when humans stopped

seeing themselves as a part of the world, and more as the masters of the

world.
Why was farming animals so important?

Well, when humans started farming animals it allowed them to have all

the food they needed without moving around. Big cities didn’t exist
before humans started farming animals, because we had to move around

so often to find more food. There is no doubt that farming animals was

one of the biggest reasons humans expanded technologically so much.

Without farming animals (or plants) humans would have to constantly

worry about moving around for food, and we wouldn’t have any of the

technology we have today. But now that we have a society that functions

properly, and have access to many alternative food sources, some people

might inquire if meat is even necessary anymore.

How much time goes into raising animals?

Now that that’s done, I would like to explain just how much effort, time,

and money it takes to raise an animal for meat. I promise the climate

part is coming eventually, this is just for context. I will be using sheep as

an example because I use cows as an example a lot later, and I like to

switch things up. It takes about 6 months to raise a sheep to being fully

grown, and can be butchered, but they’re still referred to as lambs until

they’re a year old. Many farmers prefer to leave sheep until they’re over

a year old. This is just raising sheep from lambs, in order to get the
lambs, you first have to purchase adult sheep and breed them.

Pregnancy in sheep lasts about four and a half months. So raising a

sheep will take about 10.5 months, at least.

PART 2: How much effort goes into raising animals?

In addition to the ten months it takes to raise a sheep, during that entire

process you must do several things.

1:Shearing, sheep must be sheared at LEAST once a year, but possibly
more depending on how hot the weather is.

2:Rotate fields, sheep usually eat up all the grass in an area, meaning
you need to switch to a field with more grass so they don’t starve. You
need to rotate fields about once a week or more, depending on how big
the field is.

3:Watch for escaped sheep, if you don’t have a tall enough fence sheep
will often escape. Since they’re herd animals, if one leaves, usually the
rest will follow. One way to prevent this is installing an electric fence,
but that is a lot of money and effort, and must be installed in all the
fields that the sheep may be transported to. If installing multiple is too
much money, you can get a transportable fence, but that must be moved
and set up every time your sheep switch fields, which is a lot of effort.
4:Trim their hooves, sheep hooves must be trimmed every 6-10 weeks to
prevent infection/discomfort.

5: Watch for diseases/injuries sheep need to have a health check every 6-

8 weeks, because if they get sick and don’t get treated they could die, or
spread sickness to other sheep.
6: Give them water, some farms have a pipe system connected to a
nearby stream/pond/lake making it very easy to give them water. (Just
turn on the tap once a day pretty much.) Other farms do not have a built
in pipe system or water source nearby, meaning you need to manually
transport water to the sheep.

Profits from raising the sheep

Let’s say you raised 100 sheep over the last ten and a half months, and it

has taken a lot of your free time, how much money will you make? It
will

cost 5400 per month to keep your lambs fed with hay, if you don’t give

the sheep hay from your own farm costing 32 thousand dollars for just 6

months. This is just the lambs, not including the adult sheep that you

bought first. You also have to pay any vet/medical bills if your sheep got

sick. You also have to pay taxes. Now if you were to sell each of your
100

lambs at the end of the ten months, you would get 135 dollars per sheep,

times 100 would be 13500. Yes that’s right, you would have lost almost

20 thousand dollars by trying to raise sheep. Note: math isn’t exactly

correct because there is some sheep might eat a lot more than others,

this is just an average calculation. One way people profit more from

sheep, is by growing the hay yourself instead of paying for it.

How much food goes into raising sheep?

Sheep eat a substantial 4.5 POUNDS of food per day, that is typically

3% of their total body weight. Humans will eat 3-5 pounds per day,

averaging 4, which is also 3 percent of their body weight. An above

average 150 pound lamb should get you 57 pounds of meat. 57 pounds

of meat per sheep sounds pretty good, until you realize those sheep have

been eating 4.5 pounds of food per day for the last 6 months.

Each month one of these lambs have been eating 135 pounds of food,

times six, for the six months you’ve been feeding them, is 810 pounds of

food you have given each of your sheep, for them only to produce a

measly 57 pounds. It is very obviously a huge waste of food. The caloric

values of meat per pound is much higher than hay though, but it still

isn’t enough to offset the sheer amount of food they consume.

Now we know that animals take a lot of effort, and cost a lot to raise,
and

on top of that they are a huge waste of food.

How bad is farming for the environment?

Now onto the real question, we need to find out how bad meat is for the

Environment? It turns out that despite using 77 percent of all

agricultural land, meat only makes up 17% of the global caloric intake

for humans. Livestock are causing 14.5 percent of all greenhouse

emissions.

Farming has actually gotten a lot

more efficient over the last couple decades, through selective breeding

(and other methods) cows today produce a LOT more meat than they

used to.Because animals now produce more meat, we would also need

less of them to keep the world fed. The less cows we need, the less

emissions they produce. But there’s a problem, even though animals

produce more meat now, the population is also growing at such a rapid

rate that we need more and more cows to keep everyone fed. Beef

production is also the number one cause of deforestation in the world, so

people are getting rid of the one thing taking co2 out of the atmosphere,
and replacing it with greenhouse gas producing machines.We’re starting

to run out of time to find a solution to this issue, so we need to act now

to save the planet.

Cows and methane

Cows specifically are the number one agricultural source of greenhouse

gasses on the whole planet. Cows actually produce more methane than

co2, which is actually even worse for the environment. Apparently burnt

methane is a very clean fuel source, but un burnt methane, like what

cows produce, is bad for the planet. Methane will stick around for a lot

less time than co2, but methane is much better at trapping heat in the

atmosphere. Methane has about 80 times the ability to warm the planet

over co2. A quarter of all the current effects of climate change,

(temperature increase globally) is caused by JUST methane. This picture

on the screen is a representation of the agricultural methane emissions in

2009, notice how it almost all comes from animals, and barely any from

crops? The easiest way to decrease methane production is to eliminate

the need for so many animals.

What now?

At this point in the project we know that farming animals is defenitely

bad for the environment, that part has been proven already. The only
part left is the alternatives to farming animals, and because cows emit
methane just by existing, the only environmentally friendly alternatives
involve getting rid of a large portion of cows and other animals. So the
question sort of changed from are there any alternatives, to should we
switch to these alternatives, or is meat just too important to our society?
Do we have to get rid of meat?
The answer is no, not entirely, but we definitely do need to cut down on
how many cows there are, maybe by switching to a less environmentally
disastrous animal like chickens. A lower amount of cows in the world
would sadly mean that people would need to eat beef less frequently,
maybe just on special occasions. Though the best way to stop climate
change is to just get rid of meat entirely. It sounds like a big ask (and it
is), but now in 2022 we have a ton of alternative options to meat, so it
would be easier now more than ever to make the switch and slow
climate change. The intergovernmental panel on climate change says
that making human’s diets contain less meat is ‘essential’ to keep global
warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit. (decided by the 2015 Paris
agreement).

Vegan/vegetarian diet
Having everyone, or at least most people switch to a vegan or vegetarian
diet would cut down on how many animals there are by a lot, which
would knock out one of the biggest climate change contributors. Some
people like to say that vegetables and fruit are contributing to climate
change more than meat is, their thought process is that plants consume
more water than animals, and therefore cause more damage to the
environment. This is false, producing a pound of beef off a cow requires
a staggering 1800 gallons of water, whereas a pound of soybean takes
only takes 216 gallons. Even if plants took more water than animals,
water consumption doesn’t contribute to climate change, it mostly
comes from the methane gas that the animals emit. People who make the
claim about the water generally use soybeans as an example which is
why I mentioned it earlier in comparison. Fun fact about soybeans
though, 70% or more of the soybeans grown in the U.S are used in
animal feed, so if the whole climate impact of soybeans thing was true,
cows would STILL be a bigger contributor to climate change than
humans. There are many more conspiracies about veganism or
vegetarianism, but I don’t have time to debunk or prove them all so I’ll
move on.

Benefits of veganism/vegetarianism
There are plenty of benefits to veganism and vegetarianism outside the
whole climate change thing. The biggest one being weight loss, if you
need any proof just look at me, I’m 130 pounds and I snack on junk food
all day and haven’t excercised in months. It lowers blood sugar and
improves your kidneys, which isn’t really a problem now, but having
low blood sugar now will help prevent against things like diabetes in the
future. Another benefit is that it can possibly prevent cancer, the world
health organization say that a third of all cancer can be prevented by
things you choose, like your diet. Eating more vegetables can decrease
your chances of getting certain cancers. There’s also a bunch of others
like lowering heart disease risk, reducing arthritis pain, and a bunch
more diseases I can list off, but won’t because of time.

Lab grown meat

Don’t want to give up meat? Well luckily there is an alternative, lab
grown meat! Or rather, there will be an alternative, lab grown meat isn’t
quite here yet, but it will be within a few years. Lab grown meat is
special, because it isn’t fake meat, it biologically IS meat. They make it
by taking cells from an animal (sourced without killing the animal), and
putting them in a ‘growth medium’ which will cause them to duplicate
themselves repeatedly. This essentially makes real meat out of thin air,
with much less climate impact, and without the need to kill a cow.
There’s been some controversy over whether lab grown meat is vegan or
not, on one hand you didn’t need to kill an animal to get it, and on the
other it is biologically real meat. An Oxford university study found that
lab grown meat impacts the environment 96 percent less than real meat.
It also used 98 percent less land than real animals, and only half the
energy use.

Meat imitations (probably made of vegetables, ew 🤮)

Plant based meat is a good alternative to real meat for the environment,
although some people may argue that it tastes awful. Even though those
people are right, it is still a great (but admittedly bad tasting) alternative
to meat.

Best alternative
When I started this project I assumed there would just be one obvious
solution to the issue without getting rid of meat, but there really isn’t. I
thought that the only reason farms were emitting so much pollution was
because billionaires were using inefficient technology or methods to
save on money, but I was wrong. The cows cause pollution just by
existing. The only solution is to cut down on our meat consumption as a
society. Easily the most effective way is to make everyone in the world
switch to veganism or vegetarianism, but clearly that isn’t fair to anyone,
so we have to find a balance between when to eat meat and when to eat
other things to lower our climate impact. When I set out to solve my
essential question I envisioned testing out whatever alternative I found,
or further researching about it. Since the best solution is to cut down on
meat consumption, obviously to test it out I would just need to stop
eating meat for a week and report my experiences. Problem is I already
don’t eat meat, and I felt like it would be too easy just to do that. Instead
I wanted to try and create the perfect diet for causing the least pollution,
so I researched into different foods that cause the least damage to the
environment. I also included the meats with the least climate impact so
that people who still want meat can have it with as little damage to the
environment as possible. That’s not all for this project though, there are
still a few more details to iron out.

Use the space for something else.

So in this hypothetical future we’ve already gotten rid of most of the
farm animals because it’s our only option, and now we’re left with a
bunch of empty fields. What are we going to put there? Well, why can’t
we take the space needed for the animals, and use it to farm, say
tomatoes? Tomatoes produce many more pounds of food per square foot
than animals, and produce less greenhouse gasses, so why don’t we just
plant those everywhere? Well it’s not exactly that simple, because most
fields that animals inhabit are not fit for growing other types of food.
One pound of meat also has many more calories than a pound of
tomatoes, so it’s a more valuable resource. If we can’t grow more food
in the space the animals, what can we do? Well to find this out, I had to
look at what grew in those fields before farmers came along: trees. As I
said before, beef production is the world’s number one cause of
deforestation, so most of the fields that have cows in them would be
perfect for having trees on. Having trees in the space would help a lot
with global warming by sucking out tons of co2 from the atmosphere.
Farmland takes up 5 billion hectares of land in the world, which is, as far
as I could tell, about half the size of Africa. If we filled the size of half
of Africa with trees, we could suck out a lot of co2 from the atmosphere.
Sucking out the co2 will not solve the methane problem though, but
luckily methane will dissipate incredibly quickly if cows stop producing
it for a few years.

Animal byproducts
What about animal byproducts like milk, eggs, or wool, don’t we still
need those to function? Well considering there are a great many vegans
in the world, we don’t need any of those products to function, but even if
we kept some cows for milk, getting rid of the ones being farmed for
meat, we could still make a great impact on the climate. In the united
states, cows used to produce milk number only about a third on average
of the amount of beef cows. So if we kept dairy cows but got rid of beef
cows, we’d be getting rid of a large portion of the issue. Also milk
production (not cheese) has a much lower climate impact than meat, I
couldn’t find exactly why this is, but I assume it’s because one cow can
produce lots of milk efficiently, and are constantly producing more.

Cultural significance of meat.

Many cultures around the world eat meat as part of their cultures,
probably the best example here is Thanksgiving, where people will eat
turkey with their families, traditionally to celebrate the end of the
harvest season. I use Canadian thanksgiving as an example, because I
feel like it is most recognizable for Canadians, but there are hundreds of
other places that have consuming meat as a significant part of their local
cultures.
Conclusion/does meat still have a place in our society?
So, is farming animals still important for our society? Before I started
this project I thought that obviously the answer was no, we have so
many alternatives nowadays that we don’t need to keep destroying the
environment for food. Raising animals is also a lot of effort, and a waste
of food, and is unprofitable. In my opinion I was mostly right, but now I
realize that even though we don’t need meat to survive, it is still a good
thing to have on occasion, and is very important to some cultures around
the world. I think we should lessen our dependence on meat as a society,
by eating lab grown meat, or switching to a mostly vegan/vegetarian diet
but not get rid of it entirely. So in conclusion, we can still keep meat and
save the environment, we just have to start eating it a little less.

There is much more I wanted to do with this project when I first started it, but due
to a lack of time, I was unable to do much of the stuff I wanted to do. At least I
found an answer to my essential question, which is better than nothing I guess.
When I finally finished the script and power point, there wasn’t enough time left to
do the stuff I wanted, so I had to settle for replacing it with my rushed list of foods
that aren’t bad for the environment. Overall I think I learned a lot throughout this
project about the pros and cons of meat, but I couldn’t help but feel a little
disappointed in myself for not finishing all that I originally envisioned. I feel like
in a normal length year I definitely could have used the extra time effectively and
done a more completed project.

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