Does the meat on your plate play a role in our planet’s health? Absolutely.
By Shannon Hayes
A few weeks ago I got into a lengthy discussion with one of my long time customers about the role of livestock farming in our future sustainability. I was reminded of this piece, which was originally printed in my cookbook, Long Way on a Little: An earth lover’s companion for enjoying meat, pinching pennies and living deliciously, and I promised that I would re-post it this week.
In 2006, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization released a study which concluded that livestock production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Celebrating this proclamation, the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) outfitted a Hummer with a driver wearing a chicken suit and a banner decrying meat as the top cause of global warming (NY Times, Aug 29th, 2007). Around that time, I was invited to speak about the virtues of grassfed livestock farming at a permaculture gathering in New York City, and my hosts and I were bombarded with protesting emails and phone calls. The anti-meat campaign was (and still is) alive and well.
The ecologically concerned animal rights activists have an important campaign. In raising issues about animal welfare within the food system, they have helped to improve the overall treatment of livestock. They’ve pushed those of us who choose to farm to learn to speak more clearly about how and why we do what we do. They’ve helped the public understand that “factory farming” is inherently a violation of the earth, the spirits of the animals, and the humans who are imprisoned by the system. Whether intentionally or not, they’ve created a space where small scale sustainable pasture-based farmers can come forward and make our voices heard. And it is important that we do that, because oversimplified arguments about the role of meat in the future of our planet still abounds.
The damning 2006 FAO study is a prime example of such misinformation. This report accuses the livestock industry of generating 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. When I first perused the study, I assumed it was wagging a finger at the big ol’ mean factory farms; certainly they weren’t implicating us earth-loving small scale farmers. After all, it is widely known that small scale farming benefits local communities socially and economically, that they safeguard the local food supply, that they protect land resources for the future. But our green halos were about to be tarnished.
The culpability for “livestock’s long shadow” was laid squarely at the feet of small farmers, who were accused of generating nearly three quarters of that 18 percent. Further, the authors suggest that for the solution, we look to fossil-fuel-dependent, un-natural, inhumane and ecologically devastating “intensive” (a.k.a. “factory”) farming systems for our meat supply: “The principle means of limiting livestock’s impact on the environment must be to reduce land requirements for livestock. This involves intensification of the most productive arable and grassland used to produce feed or pasture.” In this case, intensification refers to industrialized food production methods. This is a fascinating conclusion, considering small farmers have been raising livestock for the last 10,000 years, and the current spike in greenhouse gas emissions really started getting underway following the industrial revolution.
How could these diligent analysts come to such counterintuitive conclusions? British researcher Simon Fairlie, author of Meat: A Benign Extravagance, has assiduously dissected and re-examined the study’s findings to illuminate its problems and biases.
For starters, small-scale livestock farmers world-wide took the statistical blame for problems that were tangentially related to them. In the FAO study, 34% of the total emissions ascribed to livestock farming were attributed to the release of carbon dioxide from the devastating deforestation of the Amazon. And that is being counted as an “extensive” (aka “small scale”) farming practice. But roads are being cleaved into the Amazon not by farmers, but by international logging interests seeking exotic woods for the export market. Once the roads are opened and the loggers have cleared the trees, Scott Wallace reports for National Geographic in his story Farming the Amazon, an unsavory mix of characters move in and wreak further damage. While farmers and ranchers are part of the mix, so are miners, squatters, speculators, land thieves and hired gunmen. Destruction of the Amazon rainforest is a complicated picture, thus, as Fairlie points out, climate analysts typically don’t allocate emissions from deforestation and burning to “livestock,” as it is not the primary cause of the problem. Certainly, your local small-scale pasture-based livestock farmers have nothing to do with destruction of rainforests; on the contrary, by providing locally raised, grassfed meat, they help obviate the demand for imported beef.
Next, the 2006 FAO study considers nitrous oxide from livestock farming, which it estimates to be 5.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions. In his analysis of the findings, Fairlie argues that even if we got rid of all the world’s livestock, this figure would not disappear. The human race would still require food, and growing it requires nitrogen, an essential nutrient whether the crop is homegrown tomatoes or industrially-grown broccoli. Without livestock, rather than getting nitrogen from manure or blood meal, we’d simply have to find it from other sources. Indeed, since we’d be removing a major source of protein from the human diet, we’d need to increase alternative protein crops in order to meet that global demand, which would, in turn, require further nitrogen. “In short,” Fairlie explains, “many of these nitrous oxide emissions are a consequence not of livestock, but of an agricultural ecology in which livestock plays an incidental role, transmitting rather than creating nitrogen” (p.169).
The final greenhouse gas to consider in the livestock and climate debate has garnered the most popular discussion: the gastric emissions, that is to say, the belches and farts from ruminant animals (cows, goats, sheep) that generate methane. Enteric fermentation, the conversion of forage in the rumen, is a natural part of the digestion process for ruminant animals. Because their diet is naturally high in roughage, grassfed animals will belch more than their factory-farmed counterparts (the process is unnaturally suppressed in factory farming due to a coating of slime that grain-feeding causes in the rumen). This belching has generated some negative publicity for ruminants, which is unfortunate (and incredible!), since they and their ancestors have been roaming the earth for eons, long before there was a methane problem. Moreover, there are undoubtedly other sources of methane that merit more serious discussion: oil, coal and gas consumption and landfills being among the most salient.
Nevertheless, the FAO study reports that livestock flatulence is largely responsible for 5.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. If we were to make eliminating methane emissions our new eco-goal, we would need to eliminate all ruminant livestock. Simon Fairlie points out that we would also need to remove horses from the global population, since they produce their fair share of methane, as well. That’s not a popular idea among folks who are counting on horses as part of the back up plan for transportation when fossil fuel supplies run out.
Similar to the discussion above about nitrous oxide, eliminating ruminants would require that we consume even more grains, legumes and vegetables to compensate for our nutrient deficit. As it stands now, Fairlie reports that plant crops are responsible for 17% of current man-made methane emissions, a number which would surely climb once we’d removed cows, sheep and goats from the surface of the planet. Even then, the methane numbers still won’t be wiped out, because the wild ruminants, such as deer and bison, would remain and perhaps increase in population.
The discussion of methane and livestock is a case of reductionist thinking at its worst: “There is methane in the atmosphere; methane causes global warming, therefore methane is bad. Livestock produce methane, therefore livestock farming is bad.” In fact, methane is essential to life and it comes from lots of things. Any of us who burp or discreetly pass gas and then divert blame to the family dog as he digests some table scraps is aware of this. Trees and insects also release methane. Wetlands, those bastions of ecological wealth, emit even more methane than livestock. At the same time, they purify our water supply, help to mitigate both floods and droughts, rejuvenate their surrounding ecosystems, provide critical habitat and provide important support for life on earth. Responsible grass-based livestock farming offers similar benefits. Finger wagging about cattle belches and sheep farts simply will not resolve our planet crisis. Indeed, by misdirecting critical debate, it could even make matters worse.
Apparently, there are other researchers at the FAO who concur. Not everyone who works at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is of the same mind as the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow. Unfortunately, their research didn’t get the same amount of press. Notably, however, in 2008, another FAO study was released titled Belching Ruminants, a Minor Player in Atmospheric Methane. A subsequent study refuting the questionable 2006 report was also released in 2010, Livestock in the Balance, which re-examines the important contributions of small-scale livestock farming.
Perhaps one of the most interesting twists in the livestock-methane debate is the role ruminants can play in reversing climate change. In 2009, Scientific American released a story about a biogeochemist, Katey Walter, who has been studying methane emissions from Alaska’s thawing permafrost. Methane is emitted wherever organic matter ferments, which is exactly what happens when arctic permafrost, packed with dead plant and animal matter, begins to thaw as a result of climate change. In other cases, permafrost has frozen above deep pockets of gas called methane hydrates, which can be released into the atmosphere when it melts. Walter is concerned about the cyclical threat she is studying. Climate change, caused by increased greenhouse gas emissions, is causing the permafrost to melt. The melting of the permafrost causes dramatic increases in the release of methane into the atmosphere, further exacerbating the climate change.
Not surprisingly to us grass farmers, one solution mentioned in the story is to increase the number of herbavores in the Arctic landscape. But wait! Don’t they burp and fart? “Snow is like a down jacket that keeps the ground warm,” explains Walter in the Scientific American story. “As the activity of animals compresses the snow or removes it through their foraging, the cold winter temperatures can penetrate deeper into the ground and keep the permafrost frozen.” Katey Walter is not the only person considering this option. In Siberia, a 625 square mile tract of land has been fenced off and stocked with moose and Yakutian horses with this idea in mind. This brings us to a very important point in our discussion: the role of grazing livestock in healing the earth.
Farm Animals as Eco-Heroes
Around the same time that Livestock’s Long Shadow cast aspersions on all livestock farmers, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, supported by the earlier research of one particularly devoted journalist, Jo Robinson (creator of the online panacea of grassfed research, eatwild.com), balanced out the harsh accusations, highlighting how small-scale, locally-based pasture farming truly was the exception to the negativity surrounding meat production in an industrialized food system.
Whereas factory farming production methods rely on monoculture cropping for feed, graziers have discovered that diversity is their key to success. Properly managed grazing restores wildlife habitat and increases diversification of plant species. It has been shown to restore native plant populations, stimulate vegetative cover of stream banks, expand wetlands and extend the seasonal productivity of the pastures. Further, locally produced grassfed and pastured meats require a mere fraction of the fossil fuels needed to produce and distribute factory-farmed meat. In contrast, the average piece of conventionally produced food travels 1300 miles before it reaches a plate, a figure that does not include additional fossil fuels required to grow the grain that is shipped to the livestock, much less the fossil fuels required to operate a factory farm at an efficient economy of scale.
Improving soil fertility, replenishing our planet’s rapidly dwindling topsoil and providing nutritious food with the minimum of polluting inputs and fossil fuels are justification enough for grass-based farming. But there is something else that happens each time pasture is grazed: carbon sequestration. This is a process whereby grazing animals partner with the planet to help pull excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fix, or bind it into the soil. When the animals munch on the pasture grasses, the roots of the plants are stimulated to rapidly grow more leaves. Once they do their job, the old roots are shed into the soil, nourishing the soil microbes. In turn, this process restores elemental nutrients into the soil. This cycle repeats throughout the grazing season. Each time these shed roots feed the microbes, organic matter, which is 58 percent carbon, is generated. The total amount of carbon in our planet’s ecosystem is actually finite. Thus, each time the amount of carbon bound into the earth’s soil increases, the balance of carbon in the atmosphere is reduced. That’s a pretty decent bonus package for eating meat that tastes better and is better for you.
But isn’t meat an inefficient use of farmland?
For many, carbon sequestration, habitat and soil fertility are all sound justifications for enjoying a juicy grassfed burger. But there are still a lot of folks who contend that raising livestock is an overly intensive use of land and resources. More people could be fed, they postulate, with grains and vegetables than they could be fed with meat.
Not in West Fulton, New York, where my family farm lies. Of our 160 acres, less than 40 of them are on flat land. The rest of the land has an estimated 30 percent grade, rendering crop production not only difficult, but ecologically irresponsible owing to the increased likelihood of soil erosion. Add to that the extremely short growing season (temperatures can dip below freezing eleven months out of the year), and it is easy to understand why farmers in our neck of the woods have sustained themselves on a meat-based diet for hundreds of years. Grass doesn’t require cultivation, and the animals do all the harvesting for us.
Assumptions about the most efficient use of farmland must consider the topography, the climate, and the soils of the farmland in question. Some land is ideally suited to crop production, but for other land, livestock grazing is clearly the best option for food production.
The argument that using farmland for meat animals is inefficient is based on something that we aggies call the conversion factor, that is, the ratio of grain required to generate a pound of gain on an animal. When you feed grain to fish, for instance, the conversion factor is about 1.25 to 1; that means that for every 1.25 pounds of grain product you feed to a fish, the fish will gain one pound of growth. The conversion for chicken is 2 pounds of feed per pound of gain, or 2:1. Pork is 4:1. When you get to the red meats, the ratio skyrockets. Figures on this vary, but lamb is estimated to require roughly 8 pounds of feed per pound of gain, and beef 9 pounds of feed.
Sounds inefficient, all right – but there’s a gap in this analysis. Ruminants are specifically designed to eat grass, not grain. Consequently, the grain to gain ratio for a pastured ruminant is 0:1. Ruminants, the red meat animals, thrive on what our fields naturally produce – they harvest perennial grasses which reseed themselves every year, and their manure returns nutrients to the soil. In a pinch, they also eat things like straw and corn stalks – which means they have the magical capacity to convert wastes from vegetable crop production back into food.
Okay, maybe I’ve got you willing to concur that the herbivores aren’t so hard on our ecosystem. Indeed, when living on grass alone, improving soils, aiding in carbon sequestration and converting crop waste into food, they are probably even beneficial. But what about those non-ruminants, pigs and chickens?
Omnivores and Sustainability
Human beings aren’t the only omnivores. When it comes to farm animals, pigs and chickens, like people, lack the digestive capacity to live solely on grass (though both eat quite a lot of it). That is why you will typically see beef and lamb labeled as grassfed, while pork, poultry and eggs are labeled as pastured.
Anyone who has raised children and dogs simultaneously can attest to the value of having an un-fussy omnivore living in the household ecosystem. While the ultra-fastidious may stand aghast, dogs are handy beasts when it comes to cleaning up beneath highchairs and pre-washing the dinner dishes. They happily eat what we eat. They reduce our overall waste (or at least reclaim it), de-grease the kids’ fingers and faces, verify that our couches and beds are suitably comfy for human use, and offer us never-ending love and devotion.
Now imagine replacing your dog with a meat-producing omnivore. Okay, maybe you won’t let the pig or laying hens up on the couch. But they’re still good to have around. They (like dogs) eat the scraps that your family discards, and then convert it into future meat (unlike dogs, at least in our culture!). Amazing! That is why, in the good ol’ days, families often raised a pig out in the back yard, and flocks of chickens were a regular feature even in urban neighborhoods.
In today’s modern farming system, pigs and chickens require grain. If they are pastured, they will also eat grass, which significantly diminishes their grain requirements and makes them a far more sustainable alternative to factory farmed pork and poultry. Given the opportunity, however, they will also root through whatever you discard in your compost, clean up all your kitchen and table scraps, and in the case of a voracious sow, maybe even eye pocketbook dogs or small children with a thought about dinner.
In all honesty, I believe that pastured animal products are not entirely sustainable in the current pasture-based farming system. Yes, I am admitting that even on my beloved family farm, I see a sustainability shortfall. Buying in feed for these critters is not a practice we will be able to continue indefinitely as grain prices rise and petroleum becomes more scarce. Each year, it gets more and more costly for us to produce pork and chicken for our customers. Ironically, they are the most expensive meats for us to grow, but owing to government policies that subsidize grain-based factory farming, the average American consumer expects these meats to be the cheapest. Sooner or later, there will have to be a reconciliation of costs, and pork and poultry are going to become cost prohibitive for everyone.
But that doesn’t mean folks won’t continue to enjoy pork and chicken. It just means that rather than delegate the raising of pork and poultry to farmers, more non-farm families will have to pick up some of the task. Households all around the country are discovering the ease and delight involved in this transition as backyard chickens enjoy a comeback. Kitchen scraps are fed to laying hens in the country, the suburbs and the city. In exchange, they offer daily eggs, and nitrogen-rich droppings for the garden. At the end of their lives, they offer up themselves for the soup pot. They are generous and beautiful creatures.
So are the pigs. While scraps from one family alone may not be enough to sustain a feeder pig, multiple families can team up for some backyard hog-rearing. If these families wanted to expand production, they could cooperate with nearby schools or restaurants for food scraps. A few years ago, my suggestion of this idea seemed preposterous. As folks watch their food prices climb and their savings dwindle, suddenly these ideas seem more reasonable.
What bears mention here, is that raising these animals on food scraps means they are not vegetarian. In order to get their protein fix on the farm, pigs and chickens eat bugs in the grass and are fed grain that typically contains soy or fish meal. They are not given meat or other animal products. Recent fears about Bovine Spongiform Encepholapathy in cattle (also known as BSE or Mad Cow Disease) have resulted in government mandates that all livestock, whether herbivore or omnivore, become vegetarian. While farmers must currently adhere to that (highly problematic) regulation in order to grow food for retail consumers, the pigs and chickens have not read up on the laws. They will take whatever scraps are offered, grow fat on them, and produce delicious, safe meat for the family that keeps them.
Thus, it is true that not everything about today’s grassfed livestock operations is absolutely perfect for future production. What makes us sustainable is our ability and willingness to analyze these issues, and our commitment to modify our practices to meet the demands of the present day, and to amend them further as the future requires. As our landfills reach capacity and our ability to transport food across the country (or the world) diminishes, and as our need to rebuild fertile soils increases, even in urban settings, pigs and chickens are going to become ever more important to our sustainability. There will always be a few pigs and chickens running around pasture-based farms. But hopefully we’ll start seeing them in school yards, backyards and city parks, as well.
But will there be enough grassfed meat to feed the world?
That is an excellent question that many researchers and analysts, myself included, have devoted their energies to resolving. Here’s my answer:
I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter.
Sound callous? I don’t mean it that way. I just think that it is not the question we need to be asking. Instead, we should be asking how can we empower each community to feed itself; and how many more people could we be feeding in each of our communities?
If we change the patterns of meat production by enabling small diversified farms and homesteads to grow food on a widespread sustainable scale, we enable more communities to feed themselves. When communities are locally food secure, they are better able to sustain themselves in the event of fossil fuel shortages or natural disasters.
If we can change the current patterns of meat consumption in the United States, we can feed a whole lot more people with sustainable community-based resources, helping to achieve that all-important community food security.
I spend a lot of time working in the cutting room at Sap Bush Hollow Farm, preparing meats for our thrifty, socially-responsible, environmentally aware customers. But even in that setting, I am deeply troubled by the tremendous waste I observe. Mountains of bones, rich in nutrients, are sent to the compost pile because customers will not take them. Fat, the concentrated source of those wondrous omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acids and fat-soluble vitamins, goes un-claimed as well, as do the organ meats, the feet, the heads, the tails. The offal (viscera) and trim are wasted as well, as government regulations forbid us from recycling these nutrients through our omnivorous farm animals, who would be delighted to eat them.
Once I recognized the waste in the slaughterhouse, I began to see it everywhere around me: in customers who confessed to throwing out their leftovers, in the amount of food I find growing mold in my own refrigerator, or in the accumulation of off-prime cuts overlooked in our retail inventory. A sustainable meat-based diet must reach beyond burgers and sirloins to include a rich broth as a base for some fresh vegetables, rendered fat that replaces costly olive oil for cooking, a head boiled down to make head cheese for cold lunches, and scraps of meat that can be paired with vegetables to generate another new feast.
Those who ponder about whether there is “enough food” are missing the bigger picture. Corporate America can generate lots and lots of calories, as the American obesity epidemic has shown. Anyone can walk the streets of our country and understand that it is possible to over-eat and nutritionally starve. But if we address the quality of our food, I believe we’ll quickly discover that we need considerably less quantity of food. If we need less, there will be more to go around. Further, rather than fixating on generating more calories to feed the world, I worry about how much we waste of the animals that are giving their lives up for our nourishment. If we focus on that issue – how to make each animal fully count – the theoretical concerns become practical.
By changing the way we work with our food, and empowering more people to grow it, we can gain a whole lot more nourishment than most realize is possible. We can lower our food costs and still pay a fair wage to the farmer. We can simultaneously feed more people and push the factory farming system toward the obsolescence it deserves. Best of all, we can learn to use the treasures we have been overlooking to generate new abundance.
For Further Reading:
S. Fairlie, Meat: A Benign Extravagance, Chelsea Green Publishers, 2010.
H. Steinfeld et al, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” FAO, 2006.