Posted on 01/09/2024 10:02:19 PM PST by Red Badger
Chinese scientists have developed a cost-effective method of converting coal into protein, which they say could feed livestock much more efficiently than natural plants, while using a tiny fraction of the land.
According to Our World in Data, grazing land for livestock and farming land for animal feed production combine to take up an astonishing 40 million square kilometers (15.4 million square miles) of land. That's well over a quarter of the Earth's entire dry land area, and nearly 40% of the land defined as "habitable."
This is one of the reasons the meat-heavy Western diet is under fire as environmentally unsustainable; growing plants to feed animals makes wretchedly inefficient use of land, which could otherwise be left as forest or used for other purposes.
One solution is moving toward lab-grown meat – but another may be to start producing protein for livestock feed using other methods. This would be a particular boon to China. According to Biotech researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the country is currently forced to import around 80% of its protein raw materials in the form of soybeans and the like – and that's a serious food security issue for the nation.
[SNIP]
The CAS team's process works something like this: firstly, coal is transformed into methanol via gasification – a technique that can now be executed with near-zero carbon emissions. That methanol is then fed to a special strain of Pichia pastoris yeast, which ferments the methanol to produce a single-cell protein complete with a range of amino acids, vitamins, inorganic salts, fats and carbohydrates. The resulting organism is much richer in protein than plants are, and it can be used to partially replace fish, soybeans, meat and skimmed milk in a range of animal feeds.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
Yeah, at the start of the Carboniferous Period, 360 million years ago, when the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was EIGHT TIMES than today!
Regards,
Chinese scientists …Stopped reading right there.
There is no guarantee that coal fed cows would taste as good as corn fed cows.
NO.
Most of the rangeland throughout the West can't really be used for anything else. Not enough water.
I read somewhere that you could build a power plant that takes up one tenthousanth of the land and produce more electricity than solar farms.
Yes.........................
Santa's going green next year. Instead of coal, he's leaving reindeer turds.
Free-Range only.
I’m sure my steer ‘Chuck’ will be THRILLED to hear this.
Right now he’s off pasture (had him on pasture from Day 1 until nearly the end of November it was so warm) and is being treated like a god in the barn as I fatten him up for his ‘Day At The Spa’ come March.
We got a good 10” of snow yesterday so I’m shoveling myself a path down to the barn later this morning where I can feed him some hay, sweet oats and corn, a warm beer and give him a massage. ;) (I’m growing us some Kobe Beef!)
Those poor Chinese cattle. They’ll never know what they’re missing, being raised by Communists. :(
Now we can eat coal with our bugs.................
= = =
Meat will taste barbequed - saving time and labor.
Coal-to-protein livestock feed
Cue the song Big Bad John
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