Despite environmentalists’ worries,
cattle don’t guzzle water or cause hunger—and can help fight climate change
People who advocate eating less beef often argue that producing
it hurts the environment. Cattle, we are told, have an outsize ecological
footprint: They guzzle water, trample plants and soils, and consume precious
grains that should be nourishing hungry humans. Lately, critics have blamed
bovine burps, flatulence and even breath for climate change.
As a longtime vegetarian and environmental lawyer, I
once bought into these claims. But now, after more than a decade of living and
working in the business—my husband, Bill, founded Niman Ranch but left the
company in 2007, and we now have a grass-fed beef company—I’ve come to the
opposite view. It isn’t just that the alarm over the environmental effects
of beef are overstated. It’s that raising beef cattle, especially on grass,
is an environmental gain for the planet.
Let’s start with climate change. According to the Environmental
Protection Agency, all of U.S. agriculture accounts for just 8% of our
greenhouse emissions, with by far the largest share owing to soil
management—that is, crop farming. A Union of Concerned Scientists report
concluded that about 2% of U.S. greenhouse gases can be linked to cattle and
that good management would diminish it further. The primary concern is
methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
But methane from cattle, now under vigorous study by agricultural
colleges around the world, can be mitigated in several ways. Australian
research shows that certain nutritional supplements can cut methane from
cattle by half. Things as intuitive as good pasture management and as
obscure as robust dung beetle populations have all been shown to reduce
methane.
At the same time, cattle are key to the world’s most promising
strategy to counter global warming: restoring carbon to the soil. One-tenth
of all human-caused carbon emissions since 1850 have come from soil, according
to ecologist Richard Houghton of the Woods Hole Research Center. This is due
to tillage, which releases carbon and strips the earth of protective vegetation,
and to farming practices that fail to return nutrients and organic matter
to the earth. Plant-covered land that is never plowed is ideal for recapturing
carbon through photosynthesis and for holding it in stable forms.
Most
of the world’s beef cattle are raised on grass. Their pruning mouths stimulate vegetative growth as
their trampling hoofs and digestive tracts foster seed germination and
nutrient recycling. These beneficial disturbances, like those once
caused by wild grazing herds, prevent the encroachment of woody shrubs and
are necessary for the functioning of grassland ecosystems.
Research by the Soil Association in the U.K. shows that
if cattle are raised primarily on grass and if good farming practices are
followed, enough carbon could be sequestered to offset the methane emissions
of all U.K. beef cattle and half its dairy herd. Similarly, in the U.S., the
Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that as much as 2% of all greenhouse
gases (slightly less than what’s attributed to cattle) could be eliminated
by sequestering carbon in the soils of grazing operations.
Grass is also one of the best ways to generate and safeguard
soil and to protect water. Grass blades shield soil from erosive wind and
water, while its roots form a mat that holds soil and water in place. Soil
experts have found that erosion rates from conventionally tilled agricultural
fields average one to two orders of magnitude greater than erosion under
native vegetation, such as what’s typically found on well-managed grazing lands.
Nor are cattle voracious consumers of water. Some environmental
critics of cattle assert that 2,500 gallons of water are required for every
pound of beef. But this figure (or the even higher ones often cited by advocates
of veganism) are based on the most water-intensive situations. Research at
the University of California, Davis, shows that producing a typical
pound of U.S. beef takes about 441 gallons of water per pound—only slightly
more water than for a pound of rice—and beef is far more nutritious.
Eating beef also stands accused of aggravating world
hunger. This is ironic since a
billion of the world’s poorest people depend on livestock. Most of the world’s cattle live on land that cannot be
used for crop cultivation, and in the U.S., 85% of the land grazed by cattle
cannot be farmed, according to the U.S. Beef Board.
The bovine’s most striking attribute is that it can live on
a simple diet of grass, which it forages for itself. And for protecting
land, water, soil and climate, there is nothing better than dense grass. As
we consider the long-term prospects for feeding the human race, cattle will
rightly remain an essential element.
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Source:http://agenda21news.com/2014/12/actually-raising-beef-good-planet/#more-4272
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