Livestock and Greenhouse Gases

According to Rust & Rust (2013, p. 255), “climate change and its effects on existence on earth are becoming more and more relevant as physical evidence of change in our climate is beginning to mount”.

Among numerous economic areas affecting the condition of the atmosphere, the agricultural sections the one rather influential factor.&nbsp. Agriculture is the sector aimed at the production of food products and raw materials for other industry branches and employing about 1 billion people all over the world. As far as this sector is crucial for economic well-being, it is present almost in all countries of the world. Thus, due to economic reasons, the environmental effect of agriculture is unavoidable for each of the countries with the agricultural sector. The map presented in Figure 1 illustrates that almost all the countries are engaged in agricultural activity to a certain extent.

Agriculture and greenhouse gases

With the population growing rapidly, scientists of the agricultural sector, demand for products of the agricultural sector and particularly of animal origin is increasing worldwide (Webb & Erasmus, 2013, p. 413). Considering growing demand, specialists do their best to deploy their scientific knowledge and developed technological means to intensify the proustite of food. However, economic growth is connected to volumes of CO2 emissions produced by different industrial and agricultural enterprises. In the recent fifty years, amounts of greenhouse gas emissions in the sectors of forestry, fishery, crops cultivation, and other agricultural segments have increased twice and are likely to keep increasing at a fast pace in future. As is shown in the Figure 2, agricultural sector in the United States accounts for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions (EPA, 2014). On the global scale, agricultural sector incorporating the world’s food system from fertilizers’ production to food packaging is reported to make up one-third of the overall greenhouse gas amount (Gilbert, 2012).According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the UNO, increase of emission amounts in carbon dioxide equivalent has risen critically since 2001, and this increase was triggered to considerable extent by growing production volumes in developing countries