This column reviews a weird year, with insect
meat, toad roads, bobcat bridges and zoo pooh
Insect Meat
This is the season
when one can reflect back on the happenings and issues that have occurred over
the previous months. As one who reports
in issues affecting the West and especially livestock producers, I can
definitely say this has been one weird year.
It started on
January 4th, when I wrote about scientists in the Netherlands
who published a study on their discovery that insects produce significantly
less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. After critiquing the environmental costs of
the current methods of producing meat, the learned professors at Wageningen
University undertook studies of mealworms, house crickets, migratory locusts,
sun beetles, and Dubia cockroaches.
They were the first ones, ever, in the whole wide world to quantify the amounts of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) released per kilogram of insect meat. Their findings were that the amounts of gases released by insects to be much smaller than those released by cattle and pigs. One example given was that mealworms produce between ten and a hundred times less greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram than do pigs, leading the researchers to “advocate for replacing cattle with insects.”
I certainly couldn’t let this pass by so I decided to have a little fun and wrote the following:
Some university
types and all the DC Deep Thinkers want ag producers to be early adopters and
enter into the latest management and production techniques.
Let’s analyze what
this would bring us if we established an insect ranch.
For one thing, we’d
be way ahead on capital outlays and annual production costs:
° Instead of ropes
all you need is a flyswatter
° You can brand with
a toothpick
° Use thimbles for
water tanks and popsicle sticks for fences
° You can trade your
trailer for a matchbox, and
° Switch from
bedeezers to tweezers
Like any new
operation there will be challenges. For
instance, how do you preg test a Praying Mantis?
But there would be
fun things too. For instance, think of
all the fun you’ll have marketing maggot meat.
I see one big
drawback though: instead of calf fries
on the campfire you’ll be having grasshopper gonads on your cigarette lighter.
Wildlife Wackiness
While one group of
numbskulls were promoting mealworm meatloaf, other entities were making
extraordinary efforts at great expense to keep all kinds of critters alive.
You’ll recall the
Toad Road, where in New Jersey they installed a series of five
underground tunnels to help toads and other small animals get to the opposite
side. Wooden fencing surrounds each
tunnel entrance and lines the roadway, making the tunnels the only way for the
animals to cross the road.
Most recently, we have the California plan to protect bobcats
and other wildlife by building “the nation’s largest wildlife overpass”, a
165-foot-wide, 200-foot-long, landscaped bridge over the 101 Freeway. It may be over a freeway, but it won’t be
free. The California Mountains
Recreation and Conservation Authority has released a study by Caltrans
concluding the wildlife overpass was feasible with a projected cost of $33 million
to $38 million.
Now we’ll have a Bobcat Bridge to go along with the Toad
Road. One on each coast. They’ll make nice bookends for Obamaland.
Dinosaur Bones &
Zoo Poo
The Bureau of Land Management and the New Mexico Museum of
Natural History & Science recently completed a four-year project of
excavating two ancient creatures known as Pentaceratops from the badlands of
northwestern New Mexico. Problem was the
bones of the baby and adult dinosaur were located in the Bisti Wilderness,
where no motorized vehicles or mechanized equipment is allowed. “All the excavation we had to do by hand,”
the Museum’s chief curator said. “We had to haul the plaster, the water, the
tools, in by hand.”
An exception to this policy was allowed to remove the
skeletal remains, as the NM National Guard showed up with their Blackhawk
helicopters and lifted them out of the Wilderness to a place where vehicles
were allowed.
This made me think
of the time several years ago I was giving a presentation on Wilderness to a
group when a member of the audience stood up and said he was employed by the
local BLM and asked to speak. Turns out he was the chief over the
firefighters. He told us of an incident where a firefighter had broken a
leg in a Wilderness area. They asked for a chopper to extract the
injured. Since the injury was not "life threatening" their
request was denied and they had to carry him out by hand.
One can only conclude
that, to the feds anyway, dead dinosaur bones are more important than live
human ones.
Then we had this
heart-breaking story out of Denver. The
Denver Zoo set out ten years ago to become “the greenest zoo in the
country” and a zero-waste facility by 2025.
They were to accomplish this by developing a technique to transform
elephant dung and other waste at the zoo into fuel pellets that would generate
electricity through a gasification process. What a great idea! The EPA and the National Renewable Energy Lab
got involved. The zoo showed off the
potential of its pooh by powering a blender to make margaritas and, later, a
motorized rickshaw that went on a promotional tour to zoos across the West. The $4 million plant was nearing completion
but the zoo was experiencing a problem with those pellets. “What we were still
working on was pellet consistency,” a zoo official said. “How do you create a
consistent pellet out of an inconsistent waste stream?”
That’s too bad because the zoo has hired a new CEO who has
put together a new master plan and turning elephant dung into energy isn’t in
it.
Who knew that elephant dung was so
diverse? It will make margaritas and run rickshaws but that's it? They were done in by the PCP...the pellet consistency problem. Guess these dung dumbies just couldn't get their you know what together.
Yup, it was a very weird year.
Here’s wishing everyone a Merry Chistmas and a Very Prosperous New Year.
Till
next time, be a nuisance to the devil and don’t forget to check that cinch.
Frank DuBois was the NM Secretary of
Agriculture from 1988 to 2003, is the author of a blog: The Westerner (www.thewesterner.blogspot.com) and is the founder of The DuBois Rodeo
Scholarship
This column originally appeared in the New Mexico Stockman and the Livestock Market Digest.
This column originally appeared in the New Mexico Stockman and the Livestock Market Digest.
No comments:
Post a Comment