To Beef or Not To Beef

When I married a carnivore, we made a compromise.  We won't have meat when I'm  home, but he can consume all he wants when home alone or eating out.  I only ask that he please stick to beef rather than poultry or pork.  This surprises people.  Beef is the current protein non grata, both for health and environmental reasons.  But my personal concern is animal welfare.  Factory farmed chickens, turkeys and pigs will spend their entire lives in misery.  The beef cow at least spends the first nine or so months of his life grazing on grass under the open sky before being shipped off to the feedlot and the slaughterhouse.  And grass fed, organically raised beef cattle can have a pretty good life right up to the last day.

Cows on Williston Road

On the route from Itchy Dog Farm to town I pass miles of open pastureland before hitting the highway interchange, strip mall and traffic hell.  Right now the pastures are dotted with mama cows and their calves.  Earlier this spring the babies were nursing but now you see them grazing yards from their mothers and paying them no mind.  It's a beautiful sight, and I've often wondered if those pastures would be housing developments if they had no value for grazing.  Half of the agricultural land in Florida is used for beef production, but we're a "cow-calf" state -- our primary product is calves which are shipped to other states for finishing.

Earth Day last month was tough on beef.  I saw any number of posters riffing on Tim Benton's famous quote: “The biggest intervention people could make towards reducing their carbon footprints would not be to abandon cars, but to eat significantly less red meat.” Experts say beef production requires excessive amounts of water, emits large amounts of greenhouse gas, and uses land that could feed 10 million people if planted in staples.

But like most people I want to believe what I want to believe. I'm not grilling burgers on Memorial Day, I just want to enjoy the sight of these huge animals munching peacefully by the road.  There must be facts out there to support me.  I open a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations open in one tab (1) and a National Geographic article (2) in another.  And away we go.

Land degradation.  More than a quarter of the planet's ice-free land is used for grazing livestock, and a third of agricultural land is used for feed.  Grazing degrades the environment and decreases biodiversity.  This is bad.  But in the United States we're not razing rain forests to raise cattle. Most land used for beef cattle in the U.S. is unsuitable for farming, and converting grazing land to agriculture creates a different set of ills from erosion to fertilizer runoff.   Not to mention, sustainable farming of grass fed (pastured) beef actually improves the grassland.

Water depletion.  This one I know already.  In the county next to ours, a cattle ranch owned by Canadian billionaires wants to draw 1.2 million gallons a day from an already threatened aquifer, jeopardizing nearby Silver Springs and Salt Springs.  The planned 9,500 head of cattle will also produce 158 million pounds of manure and 11 million gallons of urine a year, polluting both ground and surface water.  Ugh.  But this is a factory farm, or as is known in the biz, a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation).  Pastured systems have significantly less impact on water resources.

Pollution.  Apart from animal waste, the largest source of pollution is the nitrogen fertilizer used to grow feed for CAFO cattle.  But in the U.S., beef cattle consume only about 10% of available grain, way less than the 36% used for ethanol production.  And if the grain wasn't being used for feed, it would surely be used for something else, so even if all beef cows were raptured tomorrow it's unlikely fertilizer use would go down.  And again, pastured beef is not fed grain by definition.

Climate change.  Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, although it does not live in the atmosphere as long.  Cows belch methane, and apparently quite a lot of it.  The FAO estimated that beef production is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.  Here CAFOs have the edge, because pastured cows emit more methane than grain-fed.  But well managed pastureland sequesters carbon, and the overall effect of pastured beef on the atmosphere may be positive.

Health.  Remember "Sleeper"?  In Woody Allen's classic 1973 film the protagonist wakes up 200 years in the future to find that steak and hot fudge are health foods.  Nutritional advice is constantly changing, but overall it seems like a little bit of anything on occasion is good for you while a lot of it all the time is bad.  While the Paleos and Ornishers duke it out, we could spend a moment worrying about antibiotic and hormone use in food animals.  Antibiotics given to CAFO cattle to keep them from getting sick on feed that ruminants are not designed to digest is probably contributing to increasing drug-resistant infections in humans.  Unfortunately, abstaining from CAFO beef yourself won't protect you; once superbugs develop, they're out there looking for you.

By now, I've almost forgotten the question. It's clear the equation is different locally and globally.  It's different if I'm comparing the effects of the beef industry to the poultry and pork industries or to crop-based ways of producing the same number of calories.  It's different for pastured and CAFO beef.  I almost wish I could ask a cow: are you happy being out there in the sunshine, even knowing what's likely to come?  But the cow doesn't know, and come to think of it, neither do we.

(1) Livestock's Long Shadow. http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

(2) Carnivore's Dilemma. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/meat/