the great methane problem

Now as many of you will know but, I suspect many like I will not be aware of the full extent of the amount of methane that cows produce, not just a small amount but a massive quantity. This is a problem, I have in the last few years drastically reduced our electricity consumption, cut the amount of mileage we do in the car, started growing more veg in the garden and all this is a drop in the ocean compared with my methane contribution through my consumption of cow derived products.

The BBC have a simple food emissions calculator on their website and it tells me that a 200ml glass of milk once a day is equivalent over the year to driving 585 miles in a normal petrol vehicle.

So quick sums tell me that

200ml x 7 days is 1400ml

but we as a household get through 18 pints that's 10228ml or 10.2litres

So when you divided 10.2 litres down by 200ml you get 51

So now my 585 miles is actually 585 x 51 which is 29,835

Nearly 30,000 miles. I wouldn't dream of driving that these days

That's only Milk!!

So then we look at cheese which says 30 grams once a day (enough for two crackers) is a yearly equivalent of 899 miles in our petrol car

trouble is we get through a 600 grams pack a week, 20 times that figure

So we have 20 x 899 which is 17980

nearly another 18000 miles

There are no figures given for butter and other dairy products but these two alone are enough to prompt me into action. The problem as far as I can tell is that the cows produce awesome amounts of methane through burping and farting (mainly burping). A quick Internet search gave me a figure of 70 to 120kg of methane a year and as methane is 23 times worse for global warming than carbon dioxide that's a big deal!

So what can I do, well this all started with a documentary I saw on Netflix called "Cowspriracy"
Well worth watching if you haven't seen it, a lot of the summing up at the end focus on the world going vegan to sort out the problem and I can see a lot of sense in their argument but being Vegan (or even vegetarian) is not for me or my family. So I have looked around for some ideas, anything containing Almonds is out as my wife is allergic to them. After some looking around I looked up the methane emissions of Goats, A goat produces about 5kg of methane per year, even using the low end 70kg figure that is 14 times less than the cow and I know that you need a lot of goats to equal a cows milk production. My plan is a two fold one. First I reduce my own dairy intake, I'm on day three of having my tea black and I haven't had any cheese. Secondly we try substituting Goat butter for baking and possibly spreading and goats cheese for adding to baking etc.

I believe that I can slash my own personal enviromental impact drastically by these relatively simple changes. I will update when I know how it goes.