The book “Should meat be on the menu?” explores the widely held misconception that sheep, cattle and other grazing animals are responsible for an enormous net production of new global warming gases.

The book provides a comprehensive explanation of the whole cycle of livestock methane from start to finish, demonstrating that livestock are a part of a closed atmospheric carbon cycle where the carbon they emit is equal to the carbon they take in.

Not only are cattle neutral with respect to the carbon cycle, they can be agents by which carbon dioxide can be drawn down from the atmosphere and sequestered in farmland soil in the form of soil carbon.

The book makes the point that farmers and graziers, together with their plants and animals, can be the heroes of the environmental movement.

Why I wrote this book 

At the time of writing, more than a decade ago now, I was the editor of a rural magazine. In those days the methane propaganda came at me thick and fast from every media source as well as government and well-meaning community groups.

David Mason-Jones

At first I just shrugged my shoulders and asked, ‘What can I do about it?’  The propaganda, however, was getting under my skin and I just wanted to know the full truth of the matter.

The best thing I could do was to study the numbers for myself and ask, ‘Is it as bad as what they say?’

I soon found himself grappling with a Law of Physics that states that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. This meant that the building blocks for the methane in a cow had to come from somewhere else. The building blocks themselves – atoms of carbon and hydrogen – could not be spontaneously created by a cow. So where did they come from?

Tracking back to the source of these building blocks, the carbon came from the atmosphere itself via photosynthesis in the grass the cattle ate and the hydrogen came from rain falling from the sky. Following through the whole process these elements returned to the atmosphere, initially as methane but, in the presence of abundant oxygen in the atmosphere, returned to their original state of carbon dioxide and water vapour.

My sense of frustration

While many of the ideas about better livestock grazing are gaining wider and wider acceptance, there is one issue that is still lagging sadly. This is the methane-from-cattle issue. I only have to turn on my TV, or open my internet news-feed to find a constant and misplaced barrage of angst about organic methane. This frustrates the living daylights out of me and I hope that a renewed promotion of this book will bring some better understanding to this issue both to cattle owners and to those on the other side of the debate.

Are you sick and tired of the vilification of our cattle over their methane emissions? If so, you may my book on this subject informative.

‘Should Meat be on the Menu?’ and subtitled ‘Carbon Issues in our Food, Paddock to Plate’, gained success when first published, selling over 4500 copies. There is a small quantity still available for sale ($24.50 – free delivery in Australia) at the author’s website. www.journalist.com.au. The direct link to purchase https://journalist.com.au/shop/books/should-meat-be-on-the-menu/