Please use correct, scientific citations and numbers. Otherwise your whole argument falls apart, becomes propaganda and nobody is going to take you seriously.

It is also important to realize that meat is a part of a healthy diet, in moderation. Going vegan is also very destructive to the planet. All that mechanization on huge fields of carrots and broccoli fertilized with chemicals, managed with herbicides and pesticides, harvested by big machinery… That’s all very destructive to animal and plant life. Pastured livestock can utilize otherwise uncrop-able lands, turning sunlight into high quality protein and lipids.

Local, sustainably managed food systems inherently have a smaller environmental footprint. Isn’t that undeniable by now?

You can fudge the numbers to say anything.
I fear for us when we leave it to ‘the experts’
to think for us.

For one, the science is deeply rooted in reductionist. It’s simply not fair journalism to compare large grass-fed operations with Joel Salatin’s farm. I’d like to see the “climate scientists” study the overall carbon emissions from Salatin’s farm then report on the carbon impact of this sort of grass-fed beef production. After all, a study would HAVE to be done on the whole farm because of the nature of Salatin’s farming methods. Factory farmed grass fed beef produces more CO2 emissions?…quite likely, but when is mass producing food using ANY agricultural method ever going to work. Isn’t that one of the biggest lessons from Michael’s book?

We will never be able to “scale up” farms like Salatin’s. I thought that was the whole point. Let’s just get responsible for sourcing our food from small, caring farms (and grow what we can ourselves). That means building relationships ie getting to know the farm and farmer. It’s not always easy but we need to leave behind the convenience and false price tag associated with food produced via factory farms and get personal!

Yes, we need to be conscious of how much beef we eat but investing our time in finding and purchasing it from farms such as Salatin’s at the REAL price of producing sustainable food will naturally limit what we can afford. In some ways it feels like a return to the simpler, more connected ways of our past generations.

If you properly rotate your cattle so they don’t overgraze land, they won’t do any damage to that land; there’s no plowing, tilling, etc. for a “natural” pasture; the manure goes back into the land and fertilizes the pasture, and doesn’t create toxic fecal pools; fuel isn’t needed to haul in inputs (like corn for instance; was this even considered in the report?); if you’re using old pasture or previously-farmed land, there’s no need to clear any wooded areas; cattle don’t need big combines and etc. to ‘harvest’ them; etc., etc.

I’d like to one day see a report or a study that looks at someone like Joel Salatin, whose cattle (from what I understand) are raised humanely and sustainably and supplied locally, and compares his beef to industrially-produced (whether industrial organic, grass-finished, or etc.) beef.

I have seen the “grass-fed cattle emit more greenhouse gases than corn-fed cattle” line in other places (in New Scientist and Living on Earth). In the New Scientist article, the reason given for higher methane emissions from grass fed cattle was the fiber content of the feed, which lead to more activity by the methane producing bacteria. But neither source considered the entire lifecycle of the animal, such as the nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer applied to corn fields, or the fuel used to manage the corn fields, or the fuel used to transport the corn to the farm.

Grassfed cattle are really good at converting sunlight into food, while increasing soil carbon and fertilizing the range with their own dung and urine. Can food crops do that? No. They require massive tillage, fertility that comes from somewhere else, and can’t increase soil carbon unless they are perennial systems that don’t require much tillage. Plus food crops require lots of irrigation, whereas rain-fed rangeland only requires the clouds to let loose.

Although this is trivial, carmelizing onions is a huge waste of fuel since it takes so long. Also, where were the lentils and rice grown and what fuel and fertilizer was used in their production and transport?

The corn ethanol example is a good one. We just replaced one input with another without addressing the excessive demand or inefficient technologies. The same goes for beef. If large scale production CAFO beef isn’t working we can’t just change the input of grass from corn (although that does help the health of the cow to start) but we must address the scale of production and the scale of the demand.

For most of the country, meat is the center of the meal, when it could be an ingredient. It is the scale which needs to be addressed and in many ways this can be done by limits to the production process. If all cattle had to be raised in the Salatin way then all beef would be expensive and therefore less central. At some point demand just has to be told “sorry, we can only make so much using the right techniques”

The only problem with the information raised by posts like these is that they give some people the incentive to pay less than the true cost of food and to choose the alternative that is harmful to the animals they are relying on because the other alternative (that is at least letting the cow exhibit its cow-ness) is not perfect. This is not the right approach.