The news broke on October 13, 2022, that Australia planned to sign up to then-President Joe Biden’s pledge to reduce methane emissions 30 per cent by 2030. To do this, they targeted cattle production.

As methane (CH4) is part of Earth’s atmosphere, it follows a cycle just like CO2 and O2. It has both geological origins and bacterial origins. As such, it is found in hypothermal vents emanating from volcanoes, cracks in mines, in caves, in natural hot springs and in swamps, marshes, and wetlands…

There is also a eukaryotic (bacterial) cycle at play, some of which make methane and others that live off it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and that system crosses animals, waterways, soils, and around gas leaks.

The players in the making of methane are called methanogens and the consumers of methane are called methanotrophs. To manage the production of this gas (that only lasts about 11 years in the atmosphere as opposed to 300-1,000 years for CO2) the trick is to manage and promote the bacteria that eat methane and not follow the demonisation of a major section of agriculture that feeds us, clothes us, tools us, and supplies pharmaceutical and medical products. Despite this, it is now fashionable to eat the huge energy input, industrial, factory-food made replicas of the simple animal-derived foods that underwrote the development and efficiency of our human species.

Yes, Joe, you have heard of cattle but probably not of sheep, goats, bison, oryx, musk ox, gazelles, wildebeest, duikers, and impalas…

What about you, Mr Albanese?

You may have heard of springboks (aka a rugby team), but do you know the duikers or can you name the extensive family of Cervidae? These are part the 140 species under the title of Bovidae that are cloven hoofed grazers with multiple stomachs to efficiently make the most use of the plants they live off across many environments. From the Arctic, to swamps, to deserts, into woodlands, and over grasslands … they graze at least-cost to the planet.

Herein lies the problem with the government’s plan to tax domestic cattle production: Labor clearly haven’t gone far enough! All ruminants belch methane and have been doing so for 20 million years!!! So that tax needs to be spread across mountain goats, African antelopes, wildebeest, Arctic musk, ox, goats, reindeer, bison, water buffalo, gazelles…

These cloven-hoofed grazers have been doing what they do of eating grasslands and open woodlands, fertilising the soils, and spreading the seed for some 15 million years before we turned up to eat them, milk them, wear them, turn them into tools, tractors, musical instruments, fabrics, shelters, and modern pharmaceuticals.

They have been referred to as ‘Nature’s Gardeners’ but now we have the vegan factory-food industry which relies on the huge energy cost of emissions-intense, concrete-based steel sheds. It’s a matrix of stainless steel benches, chillers, a range of chemistry equipment plus appropriate chemical hazard management systems for waste then plastic packaging for delivery of foods trying to imitate what those grazers came with – naturally. And let’s not start on the cost of the scientists involved in this human food fakery.

So, Joe and Albo, while you are targeting animals – cattle production – as the culprit behind rising atmospheric methane levels, the Net Zero movement is ignoring a much more relevant target.

Why not look at the destruction and limitation of the capacity of methanotrophs that live in the top 30 cm of soil in swamps and wetlands or the hydrothermal vents to consume this extra methane while sinking carbon in the process?

The issue rests with the methanogens, humans, bovines, and most animal species playing host as part of digestion. The production of gut methane indicates a prolonged or difficult digestion process. Fibrous and atypical volumes of foods, such as whole grains for cattle, will require extra effort across their multiple stomachs leading to fermentation and extra methane while whole grains, plant-based diets (especially beans) require extra effort in human digestion, measured at colon level by the extra production of the digestive bacterial ‘effort’ gas of methane.

Humans are very much a part the atmospheric methane gas equation each contributing an averaged 361ml/24h at a population of 8 billion against 1 billion cattle evolved to feed on pastures and not cereals (production estimates are of 20 per cent more methane off feedlot vs pasture diets).

The fact that plant-based diets increase human flatulence becomes significant due to population numbers and the food fad of moving from our natural omnivorous diet to that of a herbivore.

But the core issue to solving the problem is not to demonise livestock producers but to support the methanotrophs in numbers and distribution to consume extra methane.

Once again, the issue of methanogenic management centres on cereal agriculture.

Cereal cropping is based on annual monocultures that lack, after a couple of years of cropping, previous supporting pasture species to protect the soil biome by offering required and shared nutrients. NKP fertilisers are used to replace what was part of the soil profile of a natural grassland community. The problem is that the methanotrophs in the top 30 cm of soil are reduced or eliminated by too much nitrogen. While cereals fed to humans and bovines increase their own methanogenic emissions, cereal agriculture is severely limiting the natural methane cycle completed by the methane-consuming methanotrophs.

How? By the use of Nitrogenous fertilisers which destroy or limit soil-based methanotrophs.

At the same time excess soil nitrogen converts into atmospheric Nitrous Oxide (N2O) which is 300 times more warming than CO2 and lasts in the atmosphere about 114 years. Methane is some 80 times more warming than CO2 and lasts 11-12 years in the atmosphere.

Vegans, you are the problem not cattle.

Labor is singing from the same hymn sheet as the vegans and vegetarians who refuse to admit to their own, efficient, hunter gatherer physiology and you are joining with them in demonising livestock production is… Just bull!