Courting turkeys, a beefy climate podcast, and plant of the week
A new "How to Save a Planet" episode explores how beef and other foods factor into climate change solutions
Time to fan our tails
From now until roughly late May, turkeys will be a-courtin'—sometimes right on the bike path, as I learned on Wednesday.
I was able to slip by them without incident. Even during their breeding season, turkeys aren’t the worst pedestrians I’ve encountered in Massachusetts [insert clip of boisterous laughter from Car Talk.]
Possum Notes Investigates: Why do some cities have so many turkeys?
Turkey nests have a surprising number of eggs—about 12-15. A turkey chick ambling about awkwardly is a prime target for predators, so turkeys and other gamebirds have evolved the strategy of large broods (compared to songbirds, which carefully defend just a few young at a time.) This also means that turkeys’ local numbers can fluctuate widely depending on the success or failure of individual broods.
Keep an eye out for mini-turkeys following their mother around starting in early June.
Climate change and beef
Agriculture and habitat loss through expanding agricultural acreage account for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. However, the consequence isn’t that we should stop eating to save the climate—in fact, we need to produce more food for the growing global population. Instead, it’s that we need to plan agricultural practices differently, because food sources vary greatly in their climate effects. The production of red meat, specifically beef, is far and away the most significant greenhouse gas emitter, multiple times more so than dairy, chicken, pork, turkey, fish, and all grains and vegetables:
from World Resources Institute, 2019, “Creating a Sustainable Food Future.”
Notice that not only does beef have multiple times more greenhouse gas emissions than other foods (bottom axis), it also requires much more land area to produce per calorie (top axis). The demand for more pastureland has had a devastating effect on deforestation in South America, particularly in Brazil. And as you’ve probably heard more times than you wanted to, cows release methane in their burps. Methane can heat the atmosphere much faster than an equal amount of carbon dioxide.
The inefficiency of beef means that even reducing beef consumption while still eating other meats and dairy could provide a significant climate benefit. (Side note: this is why I rarely eat beef and other meat now—something I’m always happy to talk about but not something I’d ever try to force on anyone else, because diets are intensely personal, cultural, and tied to one’s health.) But individual choices aren’t enough to move the needle on climate change; the big picture is the problem.
That’s why I was excited to listen to the climate podcast How to Save a Planet’s recent episode “The Beef With Beef.” It focuses on the structural causes of agriculture’s climate effects. Specifically, the show zeroes in on corn subsidies in the U.S. (the world’s top corn-grower) as a leading cause of the overproduction of beef. By incentivizing the production of more corn than we could ever eat ourselves for decades, the government has led companies to come up with other things to do with all that cheap corn, such as making high fructose corn syrup—and feeding beef cattle. If governments decreased incentives for corn and encouraged a more diverse ensemble of grains and vegetables, that could go a long way toward restructuring the food economy and setting it on a more sustainable path while meeting our needs for calories.
However, subsidies for crops are intensely political. Changing crop subsidies is not as simple as flipping a switch—which the podcasts addresses. One thing I would love to hear more about (the show is about 40 minutes long, so I know they can’t include everything) is how increasing the production of fruit and veggies would require a larger farm labor force than we currently have, since many of those crops are typically harvested by hand. (That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, if workers are paid a living wage—just another thread to work out in this complex issue.) There are also ways to make beef production more climate-friendly, such as feeding cattle red seaweed, which can cut the methane in their burps by over 80%.
This How to Save a Planet episode is a terrific introduction to a critically important climate story, and it deftly handles a somewhat wonky subject with clear analysis and a little humor.
Plant of the week: Goat willow
One of the first trees to bloom around here is the goat willow (Salix caprea), marketed as pussy willow at nurseries. Above, female flowers shake off a late frost; the yellowish pollen-bearing male flowers grow on separate trees. Generally, people have planted male goat willows because of their bright yellow blooms and so that the tree doesn’t spread on its own. But naturalized populations of goat willow appear in low, wet spots and along roadsides.
While not native to North America, goat willow can provide habitat for Viceroy butterfly larvae, and its early-blooming flowers are a boon to a number of specialized bee species. Many recent days here have featured howling winds—not exactly ideal for bees seeking out sparse flowers. But if we take the goat willows’ word for it, good bee weather is just around the corner.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.