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Showing posts from October, 2019

Eat meat to reduce carbon emissions

Properly managed regenerative grazing of beef cattle can result in more carbon stored in the soil than the cattle release into the environment, according to a Life Cycle Assessment Commissioned by General Mills and conducted by researchers at Quantis International. The study was conducted in 2017 at White Oaks Pastures in Bluffton Georgia.  White Oak Pastures regeneratively grazes cattle, sheep, and poultry on three thousand acres of land in southwest Georgia. They call their methods radical traditional farming.   The  White Oak study points out that conventionally raised beef justifiably has a bad reputation because of its large carbon footprint. However, the net carbon dioxide emissions at White Oak was a negative 3.5 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of fresh meat produced. This compares to thirty-three kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per kilogram of meat produced in conventional U.S. beef production. White Oak Pasture’s grazing system, which integr...

Feminist Green New Deal

100% renewable: The rural electric co-operatives don't want it

In June I  set up a table at the Todd County Fair to promote a conversion to 100% renewable electricity. I received some help from my friends and family staffing the booth for three days. Three friends, and MN350 activists, came from the Twin Cities to help also. The Todd County Farmers Union also had a table at the Fair. They were the table next door to ours. I chatted a little with one of the guys staffing the table. Then I asked him if he’d support Minnesota transitioning to 100% renewable electricity. “No. Definitely not,” he said. “Maybe fifty percent but not one-hundred percent.” I asked him why not. He explained that he was a member of the board of directors of one of the rural electric cooperatives - Stearns Electric, I believe. He said that his co-operative did not support a transition to 100% renewables because it was not possible to get 100% of our electricity from renewables. To support this claim he said that wind and solar electric had failed to produce a...