One litre of milk emits more carbon than burning one litre of petrol.
I’m sorry, what?
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, producing one litre of milk emits 2.5 kg of CO2 equivalent, while burning one litre of petrol emits 2.3 kg.
If that comparison doesn’t make you question the logic behind carbon accounting, congratulations, you’ve been conditioned by bad data.
Take the BBC’s Food Carbon Calculator. It claims that drinking 400 litres of milk is equivalent to driving 40 miles in a petrol car. And just seven McDonald’s Quarter Pounders could apparently get you from London to Malaga by plane.
It’s absurd. These numbers are wrong. And they distort public perception of agriculture.
Why? Because carbon accounting assumes my cows are powered by fossil fuels. In reality, the carbon in milk comes from crops , silage and grains , that draw carbon from the air. My cows don’t dig carbon out of the ground; they cycle it through life itself.
But the models don’t account for that.
They also ignore balance and boundaries. When we measure a litre of petrol, we only count its combustion. When we measure a litre of milk, we include everything: global land-use change, fertiliser production in Egypt, deforestation in Brazil, even if none of it applies. All that gets loaded onto the farmer’s books.
Agriculture is the only industry forced to carry the world’s emissions baggage.
And then there’s the use of global averages. They inflate numbers to make farming look worse. UK milk, for instance, has about half the emissions of the global average — but that nuance never makes the headlines.
Finally, no one credits farmers for the carbon we capture. The hedgerows, pastures, and trees on my land , all actively storing carbon, are invisible in the data.
The result? A narrative designed to vilify the very people who feed and steward the planet.
It’s time to challenge the false arithmetic of carbon accounting and restore scientific integrity to how we measure nature’s cycles.
Farmers aren’t the problem. They’re part of the solution.
~Farmtheory
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@CallansCows@DLF_IRL@EdwardKehoe7 Ours is about the same any worries about it going down? Thinking about mowing end of week and going with spring barley
I heard some gobshite Irish government TD talking about how wrong it was for Trump to suggest a tarrif on cars unless they are made in America.
This is the same Irish government who have been charging extortionate VRT and VAT on Imported cars in Ireland for years.
Big heavy cattle are highly suitable for high rainfall areas said none ever.
Feel sorry for the poor buggers that are going to have to handle the beasts.
This is pure elitist rewilding willy waving. It's ridiculous not to be using adapted native cows
https://t.co/2XFB39cMVT
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