The silage that you get, then, is basically like a kind of grass sauerkraut, and smells exactly like you'd expect.
That combined with "draff" - distillery mash, the spent malt from brewing "pot ale" for making whisky, and a certain amount of shredded sugar beet tends to make up the majority of winter fodder.
Draff is great because it's still fermenting slowly and generating a lot of heat, so the cows are eating hot food in the winter. It's mostly the fibrey bits of the barley malt, which we can't eat but which cows and sheep - having cellulase in at least one of their stomachs - do incredibly well on. It's absolutely no use for anything else, humans can't eat it and it doesn't really compost down. It just rots, stinks, and emits masses of carbon dioxide and methane when it does. Far better for the environment to lock all that up in a cow.
Ideally your fields don't flood because you plant crops in the autumn that stay in the ground over winter to germinate in the spring, and if they get flooded that's it, you've lost the lot.
You tend not to see soya-based or other leguminous food here very much, because it's expensive, it has to be shipped halfway round the planet, and it's ineffective - you get shitty meat that no-one wants to buy.
You need the cows to graze pasture, chew up the grass, break down all that tough cellulose and poo it out as incredibly highly refined fertiliser.
We eat, just about everywhere in the world, because there's six inches of earth, it rains sometimes, and cows and pigs shit solid gold.
Don’t they just.. release it?
It doesn't, of course, the most of it gets turned into cow.
This works for trees, which you can turn into, say, a house, where it might last hundreds of years.
I'm curious about how you think the physics of it work for a cow.
Methane release varies by animal type: https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/kangaroos-the-soluti...
Understanding why is ongoing: https://www.uow.edu.au/media/2015/why-kangaroos-really-emit-...
A well managed grass meadow is a carbon sink. As the parent says, the cows graze and shite which causes more growth. if you rotate your cow out before they eat everything back to the earth, it makes the grass grow thicker.
because not all of the grass is eaten, a fair portion is left to eventually die off and form the next layer of soil, trapping the carbon there.
The reason why cows are considered global warming is because forests tend to be felled to form feeding lots. Or in more tropical areas, grasslands that then decay precipitously. (see dustbowl causes in the prairies and why the USA spent a huge amount on soil preservation)
Its not a one size fits all thing. In Aus, over grazing leads to desertification, which causes sun baking. This means the soil is baked into a water resisting layer that causes flash floods. But, because its flash flooding, the water isn't dwelling and soaking in, causing the place to get drier.
In Yorkshire, overgrazing lead to the tree-less desolate expanse which is the dales.
In the lowlands of Scotland, they went and planted a shit tonne of pine to try and compensate/bring back forestry, but that turned the soil acid and killed the streams.