All you can eat!

Belching bovines are blamed for being the primary culprit when it comes to greenhouse gases, but Christine Page argues that this is down to what and how you feed your cows

- Christine Page

What we feed animals matters because it has profound consequences for them, us and the planet. And it’s not just what they eat, but how. To understand why, we need to consider how natural systems function, how the wild ancestors of our modern domesticated animals roamed, what they ate and why the fittest survived.

Over millennia, highly complex, interdependent ecosystems evolved with intricate food webs connecting all living things. The ecosystem in which ruminants — from which we bred modern cows and sheep — evolved was complex. Plants developed a vital dual symbiotic relationship with the microbiome of the soil as well as the ruminants that grazed them.

The basis of life for all food webs, both above and below ground, is sunlight and carbon. Everything living or once-living is made of carbon, and all that carbon was once carbon dioxide in the atmosphere converted via photosynthesis into the carbon-based molecules of life. Each carbon bond is a small unit of energy captured from the sun’s rays.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS: CAPTURING THE ENERGY OF SUNLIGHT

When we look at the equation for photosynthesis, we see plants use sunlight energy to transform carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen: 6CO2 + 6H2O + sunlight -> C6H12O6 + 6O2

That precious glucose molecule, and the energy it holds in its carbon bonds, flows through the sap of the plant as liquid carbon. The plant uses this carbon currency to feed symbiotic soil microbes by exuding glucose through its roots, which are called root exudates. In return for being fed, the soil microbial lifecycle provides the plant with the mineral micronutrients it needs to grow via the Poop Loop (Country Smallholding, April 2019, ‘The world beneath our wellingtons’).