In this week’s Field Report: A push to improve federal food purchasing heats up, the first food-focused COP kicks off, dust storms accelerate, and new evidence suggests that fair-trade certifications are failing to protect farmworkers.
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March 2, 2009
Later that same year, we learned that the food system is responsible for more greenhouse gasses (about one-third) than any other sector, including transportation, and that livestock is responsible for 18% of that. Michael Pollan published another book telling us to eat real food, not too much at that, and mostly plants. More recently Mark Bittman published Food Matters, which is essentially an environmental guide to eating, adopting some of the same principals we learned from Pollan (with recipes). Along the way, Bittman found that eating lower on the food chain more often and cutting out processed food, helped him lose 35 pounds, lower his cholesterol and blood sugar, and vastly improve his health. Then, back in December, here on Civil Eats, Paula Crossfield talked about eating less meat to lower our carbon emissions.
Now I’m going to reveal something that will make conscious, occasional, and passionate meat eaters very sad. While we’ve been enjoying our once or twice a month allotment of grass-finished beef in the form of a small burger, or modest portions of savory stew, or spicy chili, the climate scientists have been doing their work. They’ve recently discovered that, from a global warming perspective, so called sustainable and humanely raised pasture reared beef is no better. In fact, it’s worse.
This story in Science News details the findings revealed during a recent panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia said that greenhouse gas emissions for grass-finished livestock are roughly 50% higher than for grain-finished livestock. Wait, really?
Apparently cows that are fed grass throughout their lives simply eat more. So when you raise cows on pasture, you’re adding more inputs into an already inefficient production system. Pelletier’s research also shows that intensive pasture management, fertilization and renovation cause emissions of their own. And of course, pasture requires more land area (and sometimes deforestation) than CAFOs. I think what we are seeing here is that grass-finished beef is now big business. Due, no doubt, to the demand caused by books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, we’re seeing grass-finished beef that more closely resembles factory farming than either Pollan or the grass farming hero of his book, Joel Salatin, ever intended. Turns out the Sierra Club, in a prescient piece from 2004, asked if grass-fed beef was merely a diversion from the reality that beef production, no matter much we might want it to be different, is the most inefficient way to raise food.
So what’s a conscious eater to do? With this new information chipping away at my meat-eating philosophy, I think I’ll have to take these new thoughts and ponder them carefully over a lunch of lentils and rice (with lots of caramelized onions). For further reading on the subject check out this piece in Living Green Magazine.
November 29, 2023
In this week’s Field Report: A push to improve federal food purchasing heats up, the first food-focused COP kicks off, dust storms accelerate, and new evidence suggests that fair-trade certifications are failing to protect farmworkers.
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Regardless of the effects, conflating that kind of farming with what Joe Salatin does is incredibly misleading and deceptive. Joe Salatin specifically does not do any of that - his farm is self-contained, and he doesn't ship his food. And you know that, so stop being dishonest.
I don't disagree that mass-produced meat is harmful to the environment (grass-finished or not). But if you're going to drag Joe Salatin's name into the fray, then make sure the research you quote actually addresses the type of farming he does.
The world existed just fine for (hundreds of) thousands of years with millions of bison roaming the plains of the US - yet we did not see increases in CO2 levels.
And, the truth of the matter is that vast areas of the U.S. cannot sustain farming (corn, soy, wheat, etc.) at the levels we have been. What they can sustain is grass. And, when "farmed" like Joe Salatin does, or in the (no longer present) natural balance of grass and bison, soil is rejuvenated over time...
But you know this, so why are you writing such a crummy article?
What would be more informative is the study you mentioned, along with the idea that much of the grass-fed beef you see in stores now is raised in factory-like settings, and in South America where rainforest is continuing to be plowed under.
What would be more informative would be to point out that it is possible in many places, to buy directly from small-scale beef farmers who do not use artificial fertilizers...
Do you care about educating us?
Or do you just want to have tabloid headlines?
None of this is news, however. What is interesting is this quote from the Science News story: “It’s related to the much higher volumes of feed throughput and associated methane and nitrous-oxide [GHG] emissions.” He added that most pastures were highly managed, and subject to “periodic renovations and also fertilization.” Finally, with grass-fed cattle “there is also a high [grass] trampling rate. So the actual land area that you need to maintain magnifies that [GHG] difference.”
Now I know that grass-fed beef takes almost twice as long to reach slaughter weight than grain fed, but grass SEQUESTERS CARBON! (Unless you use petro-fertilizer, which they apparently assumed in this study, and cancel out that advantage.) Corn sequesters carbon, but then consumes carbon at the rate of about 200 lbs/acre of petro-fertilizer. Throw in all the pesticide used and the energy used to handle the massive amounts of manure from the feedlots, and you have a pretty big carbon footprint. Then there's the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the nutrient runoff from all the manure and petro fertilizer adds to the footprint. Oh, and the gratuitous use of antibiotics and estrogen hormones on the feedlot cattle adds to the public health footprint, if not also the carbon one.
But a steer living on organically maintained grass for 8 or 10 months longer than its feedlot brother produces enough methane and N2O to have a bigger carbon footprint? Maybe. I would be interested to see all the variables they did, and did not consider. But in the meantime, I will continue to pay extra, once or twice a month, to eat organic beef raised on the very food it was intended to eat: grass.
Factory farming on grass is not the same as eating local organic beef.
Although this does raise an important issue. how do you go scale up the small scale?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.