When you think about the forest—and my esteemed colleague talked about biochar and the utilization of biomass—you burn wood, and somehow that is a cycle that everybody recognizes. The half-life of methane is 10 years. The half-life of carbon dioxide is 1,000 years. Carbon dioxide goes into plants. Cows eat those plants and they burp out methane. In 10 years, that methane starts converting back into carbon dioxide.
How did cows make more greenhouse gases? They don't. The only way cattle can make more greenhouse gas is if there are more cows, but the peak of the cattle herd was in 1971. If you take cattle away, or demonize the cattle industry, you've taken away one of the key ingredients that we use in agriculture to harvest cellulose and hemicellulose, and you put at risk one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world, which is the grasslands and the foothills of the province of Alberta, where you need a keystone species to keep the rosebushes and the poplars at bay.
A lot of people don't think about cattle, but it's a biogenetic cycle, the same as biochar, the same as biomass.