Plants make methane too, but farmers who say this are missing the point entirely
WEEKEND READ: Surge co-director Ed Winters recently debated the director of NFU Scotland on STV on the negative impacts of animal agriculture. Aside from Kennedy’s bare-faced lies about welfare, he made a curious claim that trees make methane too. Is this the ‘gotcha’ against rewilding he hoped it would be?
The lies made by Martin Kennedy - Director of the National Farmers’ Union of Scotland - about farming practices in the UK are worthy of their own article. Suffice to say, it beggars belief that a top representative of one of the nation’s leading farming bodies could deny that well-documented welfare issues take place, so it hardly seems surprising that he would throw out odd claims on another contentious issue - animal agriculture’s environmental impact, and specifically, methane produced by cows.
We know the industry is placing many of its hopes on outlandish new technologies to mitigate methane production - such as seaweed feed additives to stop cows belching and face masks to convert expelled methane into carbon dioxide - yet something we hadn’t heard before was the argument that should we choose to rewild grazing land, the trees and plants that would replace the cows would also produce methane.
This just feels counterintuitive, given that much of the UK was once covered in forests and natural flora, and it’s fairly common knowledge that plants drawdown and lock in carbon dioxide. Plants and trees give us ‘green’, a term now synonymous with a healthy environment. Yet Kennedy’s claims aren’t actually unfounded, scientifically. Studies have shown that trees in particular produce methane - a greenhouse gas (GHG) that while much shorter-lived in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, has a far greater warming potential.
How exactly they do this is not yet fully understood, but scientists hypothesize that trees act as sort of conduits for methane produced and usually stored underground. Also, when trees and plants die and rot, methane is released. The problem of trees as producers of GHGs is known and being looked into but is rarely talked about publicly, probably because so much is still unknown and making grand assertions now would push back the drive to replant and protect existing trees. However, there appears to be a great deal of fascinating research going on because of its importance to the discussion, such as a study by scientists in Australia who discovered a bark-dwelling bacteria that actually consumes much of the methane produced by their host tree.
Returning to Kennedy’s comments, that “biogenic methane is not just emitted by animals but by decaying plants as well”, this is a sneaky bit of misdirection. It’s impossible to say without the studies whether rewilded farmland would ultimately produce more methane than animals. What we do know is that methane from animals wouldn’t be an issue without animals there, and the longer-term benefit of rewilding to carbon dioxide levels - a much longer-lived GHG - cannot be ignored.
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Scotland was once covered in acres of forests dominated by ancient oaks and Scots pines. Now, the quintessential image of Scotland is of heather and grass.
Kennedy also pointed to his Zoom-call ‘bluescreen’ backdrop, a gree-and-pleasant vista of a typical patchwork farmland countryside. Yes, we’ve had scenery like this for hundreds of years, but what it really represents is a process of deforestation that simply proceeded what we’re now seeing in other parts of the world. Before the Amazon rainforest was cut down for soy and grazing, and before Indonesia’s palm forest plantations, the UK was deforested by profiteering landowners to create pasture land for sheep and cows. There’s nothing natural about it, we’ve just grown accustomed to huge swathes of empty grassland bordered by hedgerows, fences and stone walls.
Writing for Scotland Magazine, writer Marie Harrison drew attention to Scotland’s wild past and the importance of returning to it - in other words, rewilding - for both the environment and biodiversity:
“Scotland used to be a forest. The landscape was dominated by ancient oaks and Scots pines. The more sheltered glens had birch, hazel and cherry trees. Scottish cultural history shows how vital trees once were to the Scots,” wrote Harrison. “Red squirrels could have hopped, skipped and jumped between branches from Glasgow to Aberdeen and beyond without coming down to the ground. The forests were alive with a diverse and vibrant wealth of flora and fauna. Capercaillie (wood grouse) built nests under the shelter of woodland, and red deer rubbed the fur off antlers against rough trunks.”
The above refers to a time closer to the time of the Roman invasion and the clearing of forests for human settlements, but in the centuries that followed, animal agriculture played arguably a far greater role in the devastation caused to Scotland’s natural landscape:
“Sheep farming became big business as the Industrial Revolution picked up steam. It caused changes to the landscape of Scotland, and one of the biggest was the Highland Clearances. Wealthy landowners decided that it would be more profitable to farm sheep than allow traditional crofter families to manage their small farms – which also had lower profits,” added Harrison.
“What resulted was a terrible human tragedy. The Highland Clearances also spelled the end for the remaining areas of natural forest. Trees were cut down to make way for grasslands where sheep grazed amongst the ruins of abandoned crofts. Today, sheep farming is not as profitable as it was, but though sheep numbers have declined, the forests have not returned.”
Plants and trees do produce methane, but exactly how much and what this means to the carbon cycle and rewilding efforts remains unclear. We know that more trees and forests are good for the environment, or rather than cutting down existing forests and burning the wood is terrible, so if anything it just means that we have to rewild responsibly. Corporate greenwashing through tree replanting schemes is also something of which to be mindful, but rewilding must still happen to repurpose farmland and reverse the worst impacts of animal agriculture on the climate. If anything, we need more investment in research looking into the best trees and other plants to cultivate in a specific location, suited to the local environment to best manage methane production. The answer is not simply to continue farming animals because trees make methane too, not when animal agriculture is responsible for waterway pollution and so many other negative effects.
Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.
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