I was very skeptical whether this is scalable as up to two percent of the cows feed needs to be replaced with the sea weed and we simply do not produce sea weed at scale yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552
The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae per day. ~ 106 Million metric tons per year.
In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].
I would argue that the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions is to get rid of cattle. (Which is hard, I love beef and cheese).
Maybe “seaweed beef and dairy” will be a premium product but I doubt it will solve the problem on scale.
I was very skeptical whether this is scalable as up to two percent of the cows feed needs to be replaced with the sea weed and we simply do not produce sea weed at scale yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20713552
The TL;DR was: in order to supply 1.5 billion cows with the seaweed we might need up to 291.000 metric tons of algae per day. ~ 106 Million metric tons per year.
In 2014 the world wide Aquatic Plants (which include ALL Macro-Algae) production was around 27 Million tons [0].
I would argue that the most effective way to reduce cattle emissions is to get rid of cattle. (Which is hard, I love beef and cheese).
Maybe “seaweed beef and dairy” will be a premium product but I doubt it will solve the problem on scale.
[0]: http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5555e.pdf, page 24, table 7