The Accusation Against Beef
William Jacob Hays, Sr., The Gathering of the Herd, 1866. Courtesy of American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection.
Photograph by William J. O’Connor.
The Accusation Against Beef
Could Beef Be Better for a Small Planet?
Cattle were far from the first grazing animals in the New World. On April 22, 1805, near what is now Williston, North Dakota, Meriwether Lewis wrote: “I asscended to the top of the cutt bluff this morning, from whence I had a most delightfull view of the country, the whole of which except the vally formed by the Missouri is void of timber or underbrush, exposing to the first glance of the spectator immence herds of Buffaloe, Elk, deer, & Antelopes feeding in one common and boundless pasture.” Bison, or buffalo as we more often and loosely call them, filled the Great Plains, thriving on the grasses and other prairie plants. Richard I. Dodge, an Army colonel with a Ulysses Grant beard and the author of The Plains of the Great West, described his most impressive buffalo encounter, along the Arkansas River in Kansas:By Edward Behr
In May 1871 I drove in a light waggon from Old Fort Zara to Fort Larned, on the Arkansas, thirty-four miles. At least twenty-five miles of this distance was through one immense herd, composed of countless smaller herds, of buffalo then on their journey north.
He offered more detail in a letter to William T. Hornaday for Hornaday’s 1889 book, The Extermination of the American Bison:
The great herd on the Arkansas through which I passed could not have averaged, at rest, over fifteen or twenty individuals to the acre, but was, from my own observation, not less than 25 miles wide, and from reports of hunters and others it was about five days in passing a given point, or not less than 50 miles deep. From the top of Pawnee Rock I could see from 6 to 10 miles in almost every direction. This whole vast space was covered with buffalo, looking at a distance like one compact mass, the visual angle not permitting the ground to be seen. I have seen such a sight a great number of times, but never on so large a scale. That was the last of the great herds.
Hornaday used that information to calculate the number of animals: a herd typically moved in a wedge shape, he said, and would fill only one-third of the 25-by-50-mile area; at 15 head to the acre, that made 4 million buffalo, “which I believe is more likely to be below the truth than above it.” Subsequent estimates of the total number of buffalo that once lived on the Plains have been based variously on Hornaday’s figure, other first-person encounters, number of hides from animals killed, assumed patterns of migration and location, assumed weather and forage during that period, and ideas about how many animals the land might support. The estimates run from 28 million for the western plains (the prime area) to 75 million for the whole United States, including the much smaller population of bison east of the prairies. In the end, they’re all guesses. There’s no way to know how many buffalo inhabited North America back when they were hunted only by native people without horses or guns. Probably, though, there were tens of millions, as well as caribou, deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and moose, all ruminants — grass-eaters, like the buffalo. And yet only the buffalo were hunted mercilessly. By the late 1880s, fewer than 1,000 remained. That left plenty of room for cattle, more grass-eaters.
The cattle population rose quickly from about 36 million on US farms and ranches in the official 1880 census of agriculture to 69 million at the time of the 1900 census and a high of 132 million in 1975. In 2020, the Department of Agriculture reported 93.6 million head. In essence, we replaced wild ruminants with domesticated ones, and until recently the main damage seemed to have come from plowing — the quantity of topsoil lost to erosion is almost impossible to imagine.
Then in 2006, a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, made the unexpected announcement that the world’s cattle were contributing 18 percent of human-caused greenhouse gases, almost half through the methane they belch (only a little gets through to the far end). My immediate reaction was that traditional and conventional agriculture are two very different things and their effects can’t be the same, but it was hard to dismiss an FAO report. In a follow-up, the FAO reduced 18 percent to 14.5 percent, and 14 or 14.5 continues to be commonly cited, an amount scarcely less appalling than the original one.
Greenhouse gases from natural sources have, since the last ice age, held in the sun’s radiant heat at a roughly balanced point that supports an enormous range of life on earth. The shift that began with the Industrial Revolution accelerated toward the end of the 20th century, so that half of all heat-trapping gases have been emitted since 1990. With drought and wildfires, extreme rains and flooding, loss of low-lying land and the threat to great port cities, it can be overwhelming to think about what’s coming. Beef or no beef, three-quarters of greenhouse gases come from burning fossil fuels. They also come from deforestation, crop farming, and the way we “develop” land. One particular source of carbon dioxide, said to be 8 percent of the total, is cement, because of the use of coal and the chemical process used to make it. (The solution will be either carbon capture or a different process powered by green electricity.) But if 14.5 percent of all the greenhouse gases we generate come from livestock, that’s frightening and we should act.
After I first read the 2006 FAO condemnation of beef, I put the subject mostly out of my mind, until I encountered Nicolette Hahn Niman’s 2014 book Defending Beef. She questioned the logic and science behind the accusations, offering her own analysis and citations. I reviewed the book in AoE 94, briefly and cautiously, but I did little more than describe her arguments, lacking the knowledge and confidence to express my own opinion. Earlier in her career, Niman was an environmental lawyer, and she’s married to a cattle rancher. She has a bias, but she provided many references in footnotes, and her writing was more restrained than passionate. She cited the North American parallel with buffalo and stressed that cattle are raised in different ways that have different consequences. She argued that cattle on grass can put more carbon back into the soil than crops can. She addressed the claims that cattle take land from crops that are badly needed to feed people, cause desertification, and use an inordinate amount of water. Eating beef has been linked to heart disease, the rise in obesity, diabetes, and certain cancers; Niman proposed that more likely culprits were sugar and processed foods. She devoted a short chapter to the high quality of work and life on a decent farm or ranch, particularly the close connection with nature that most Americans have lost. One of Niman’s points was easy to understand: “As with millions of wild ruminants before them, carbon released by cattle as methane comes from the air, is taken up by plants and soils, and returns to the atmosphere, where it is available again to power plant growth. This is not pollution, it’s the earth’s age-old natural carbon cycle.”
Less convincing in hindsight was her description of the work of Allan Savory in southern Africa, seeming to show that grazing cattle can increase the amount of vegetation growing even on semi-arid land. Savory had started with the prevailing view that overgrazing cattle were causing desertification, and initially he lightened the load of animals. But he changed his mind and decided that more cattle, not fewer, improved the land. It was, he said, a question of a dense, rapidly moving herd, as in the wild, grazing for short periods followed by time for the land to recover. His claims are controversial because they haven’t been borne out by scientific study. On semi-arid lands, it appears that cattle cause desertification.
Niman’s book did nothing noticeable to prevent the image of beef from deteriorating further. Now it’s something like common wisdom that cattle contribute to global warming in a big way and we shouldn’t eat beef. Dairy products are suspect. There may be something psychological that makes the cattle accusations so believable. From religious fasting to cleansing and weight-watching and health in general, we associate denying ourselves pleasure in food with doing good.
If there were any doubt about the potency of the beef criticism, last April the website Epicurious, the online remainder of the once-powerful magazine Gourmet, announced that it would publish no new beef recipes, although it wouldn’t take down the ones already on the site. (That was a curiously flaccid response to a climate emergency.) The statement by Maggie Hoffman, senior editor, and David Tamarkin, former digital director, didn’t acknowledge the existence of a movement to promote superior grazing, much less offer a critique of its claims to sequester carbon and help the environment. Other media reported some modest pushback, such as from Danielle Nierenberg of the nonprofit Food Tank, quoted in The Washington Post as saying that the Epicurious move “could mislead consumers into thinking that all beef is bad.” But no major news story cited a soil or pasture scientist who might have commented on whether cattle living outdoors on well-managed grassland might do more good than harm to the climate, compared with raising the same amount of food in the form of crops, which was Niman’s argument in a nutshell.
A week later, the chef Daniel Humm announced on Instagram that the menu at his luxury restaurant Eleven Madison Park, in Manhattan, a contender for best in the world, would become wholly vegan. “We have always operated with sensitivity to our impact on our surroundings,” he wrote, “but it had become clear that the current food system is not sustainable.” He offered no further information or explanation, saying simply: “I’m excited to share that we will serve a plant-based menu in which we do not use any animal products.” He said nothing about industrial agriculture or agricultural methods of any sort, as if all agriculture were one. The food fashion trend was confirmed over the summer when the menu at former President Obama’s celebrity-filled 60th birthday party was plant-based, with fake meats and fake eggs. So was the food in September at fashion’s biggest US event of the year, the Met Gala in New York City. A 50th anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet drew further attention; the original book had struck a blow against livestock, and a new introduction zeroed in on beef and climate.
Like anyone who completely loves food and comes from a protein-heavy culture of eating, I find a meal in an ambitious vegan restaurant fascinating and gratifying. I’m a huge fan of vegetables. I care about vegetable flavor and variety, age and freshness. Vegetables deserve the much more prominent, often leading position they’re getting now in ambitious restaurants and in general. I deeply respect anyone who refuses to eat meat for moral reasons and works to make sure that animals are well-treated, but the deliciousness of plants and the morality of killing animals for food are mainly separate subjects from climate.
Over the summer a fresh edition of Nicolette Hahn Niman’s Defending Beef appeared, and I realized that a seed of doubt had been growing in me. I’d begun to fear that cattle really were at fault. I’d been feeling a stab of pain, because I’d invested so much of myself in researching and writing AoE’s Cheese Anthology. To think that cheese was morally flawed took away all the pleasure. If cattle are significantly responsible for making the planet less and less habitable, a cause of impending massive human suffering and the extinction of countless species, that’s evil on a horrifying level.
Reading Niman’s new edition reminded me of things I’d forgotten. Especially that the North American prairies were created by the buffalo and other large grazing animals in combination with fire, sometimes lit deliberately by native peoples to eliminate trees and maintain the prairie. The mass of animals trampled the ground, knocking down the plants they didn’t eat, breaking up living and dead organic matter, so it could be further digested by microorganisms, dispersing seeds, pressing them into the earth to germinate, biting off plants to stimulate new growth, and leaving the surface mulched with the trampled vegetation as well as fertilized with manure.
In the immense space of the Plains, the buffalo moved together in herds to protect themselves against their few predators (wolves, grizzly bears). The grazing was brief and intense, before the herds moved on and left the plants for a long period of rest and regrowth. Certain species flourished. Their growing points lie close to the earth, protected at least somewhat from the trampling and from fire. Plants and animals lived in a kind of symbiosis; together they formed soils that were fertile and deep.
To be clear, the condemnation of beef extends far beyond North America. Cattle are particularly blamed for the clearing of rainforest in the Amazon Basin. The land is often used first for raising cattle and then for crops to feed cattle, including crops exported to North America. But that’s farming for an international commodity market, not an indictment of all cattle everywhere.
Another topic is water, from what the cattle drink through the amounts used in processing. With all the variables and complexities, it’s difficult to come up with a general figure for how much is used, and Livestock’s Long Shadow didn’t try. A total of 1,800 gallons per pound of beef is often cited, including by environmental organizations. The Beef Cattle Research Council in Canada goes a little higher, saying it “requires about 1,910 US gallons per pound (or 15,944 litres per kilogram) of water to get Canadian beef to the dinner table.” peta says, “It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce just 1 pound of meat,” offering wheat at 25 gallons as a counterpoint. But none of the numbers for beef are fully relevant when, rather than divert streams or rivers for irrigation, farmers and ranchers raise cattle on grass and the animals drink the water that falls on the land (stored in cisterns, flowing into natural watering holes, pumped from shallow dug wells). Well-managed grazing increases the soil’s organic matter. The soil holds more water; there’s less drought, less erosion, and less flooding; and aquifers are replenished.
The more I thought about beef and climate, the more it seemed to come down to a simple question: Should we continue to eat food based on permanent grass or should we switch entirely to eating temporary crops? That’s a little oversimple, because there are still some possibilities from the ocean, but it gets to what matters.
The crux of any climate discussion of beef is that people can’t eat grass but cattle can. The work is done in the rumen, the first and largest of the four compartments of a ruminant’s stomach. It’s where anaerobic bacteria ferment the hard-to-digest cellulose of the plants. Cattle regurgitate the partly digested food (the cud), chew it again to reduce it to smaller pieces, and send it back to the rumen for more fermentation. One result is that heat-trapping methane.
Cattle eat a lot. Critics say that it takes six, seven, or more pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. They want to feed that grain directly to people, which would be much more efficient, assuming people around the world are willing to forgo meat, or at least eat less of it, even as many, for the first time, become affluent enough to afford to eat generous amounts of meat. To be clear, the “grain” fed to cattle is not just grain; it’s especially corn, also barley and wheat, but also soy and, in the case of more industrial operations, certain byproducts. “Grass,” meanwhile, is shorthand for the whole mix of pasture plants, both grasses and broad-leafed plants.
The critics are right about how much grain it takes to make a pound of meat, if that’s all you feed cattle, but no farmer or rancher can afford to feed that much grain. (US ag schools and extension services tell farmers that raising cattle entirely on grass could be more profitable.) Most cattle are slaughtered at around 17 or 18 months, though some are slaughtered a few months sooner or later. They’re sent to a feedlot for only the last third of their lives, where feeding hay continues together with increasing amounts of grain. (Too much starch and sugar from a grain-rich diet causes health problems, such as acidosis, which raises issues of humane treatment. The conditions in feedlots have led to widespread preventive use of antibiotics, an important public health concern.) Altogether around three-quarters of what North American beef cattle eat is forage. The FAO says that the worldwide average is 46 percent and that the rest includes crop residues, fodder crops (grain and legume silage, fodder beets), oil seed cakes, and only 13 percent grain.
North American beef producers, for their part, figure that to make a pound of meat during the feedlot period requires only 2.5 pounds of grain, which is the same ratio as for chicken and less than the variously cited 3.5 to 5 pounds for pork. Just how much grain cattle are fed depends partly on the market price of corn. A 2017 FAO study found that, worldwide, 3 kilos of grain are fed to produce 1 kilo of beef.
Some cattle are 100 percent grass-fed, including on a small though growing number of North American farms and ranches, such as Niman’s northern California ranch. The grain criticism doesn’t apply to them at all. It’s possible for cattle, like buffalo, to thrive on grass alone. With 100 percent grass-feeding, the use of machinery and fuel is largely confined to making hay. Little or no fertilizer or other agricultural chemicals are applied, none on established permanent pasture. Grass-feeding sounds minimalist — less expense in fuel and equipment, less to do — but ensuring a high-quality diet requires insightful, close pasture management in response to the season, the weather, and the varied land on each ranch or farm. And you need enough land not just for pasture but for plenty of high-quality hay to feed during the months when pasture doesn’t grow. And for more efficient grazing, you need more fencing, for a start.
One hundred percent grass-fed sounds better for the climate, but there’s a mainstream agricultural argument, unresolved so far, that grain-finishing in feedlots is better for the climate because it’s faster. A grass finish takes months longer, which means more methane, and some climate specialists doubt that any environmental advantages to grazing offset that.
Current FAO analysis continues to point a finger at cattle. The FAO’s Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model calculates that only 5 percent of the emissions from raising the world’s livestock are due to energy consumption on and off the farm. The big problems are methane from the rumen at 44 percent of livestock emissions and carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide from feed production at 41 percent. A further 10 percent is a variable mix of methane and nitrous oxide from the way manure is handled.
By far the most damaging of the greenhouse gases that humans produce is carbon dioxide, because it’s by far the largest in quantity, but methane and nitrous oxide are much, much more potent. Methane is 28 times worse than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is 265 times worse. (Those numbers represent “global warming potential,” which assigns a value of 1 to carbon dioxide.) And yet as damaging as methane is, its average life in the atmosphere is just 12.4 years, compared with the decades to millennia of carbon dioxide, so reducing methane from cattle would have a fairly quick positive effect.
Methane is not only produced by anaerobic fermentation, such as occurs in the rumen, it also readily forms in the anaerobic conditions of the manure lagoons that many livestock operations use. Some farms address that problem by capturing the methane for use as fuel.
Nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, contains no carbon, so it isn’t part of the carbon cycle. It’s part of the nitrogen cycle, which has also been badly skewed by human additions. A large amount of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere results from the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer used to grow crops, including livestock feed. Nitrous oxide also forms in manure, if it’s held first in aerobic conditions, such as a dry pile, and then in anaerobic ones, such as when enough rain falls on the pile to form wet pockets.
Getting down to the numbers for grass compared with crops, US and UN greenhouse gas figures don’t look great for either one, but they’re notably worse for grass, which in North America means beef. The EPA’s latest Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks breaks down the 2019 sources of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, according to the part of agriculture they come from. One table allows you to fairly accurately assign the sources of carbon dioxide and methane to either grassland or cropland (ignoring the number for paddy rice-growing, which has its own concerns). Another table addresses nitrous oxide. Totaling the various numbers, which are in metric tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent, you get about 250 tonnes for crops compared with a much larger 345 tonnes for grass, about half of which is methane from the rumen.
But something is missing: the amount of carbon that grazing cattle sequester in the soil and that at least partly offsets cattle’s negative effects on the climate. How much depends on how the cattle are raised. US and UN figures don’t distinguish between the effects of different methods.
The roots of grassland plants are concentrated in the top foot or two of soil, although the roots of a few species, such as on the Great Plains, go 5, 10, or 15 feet deep. The mass of roots and the quantity of life in the soil are much greater than in fields of crops that live for only a season. In grassland, as in cropland to a lesser extent and woodland to a greater one, it’s the carbon cycle that makes the soil a carbon sink.
In the carbon cycle, carbon dioxide enters plants from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, and then moves into the animals that eat plants. As living things breathe out carbon dioxide, the same carbon returns to the atmosphere. And when those living things — animals and plants (leaves and roots) and the microbes in soil (they need carbon too) — die and decay, their organic matter, which is about half carbon, joins the soil. A lot of the carbon in that fresh organic matter, when it’s added to the surface, is lost through rapid decomposition within a year or two, but some of it becomes more stable, and the most stable carbon lasts in the soil anywhere from decades to thousands of years.
Most perennial species rely on hyphae, tiny threads of fungus, to extend the reach of each of their finest roots another inch or two, giving much more access to nutrients and moisture. You’ve seen indirect evidence of hyphae if you’ve picked up a moist handful of topsoil and noticed a sort of airy stickiness holding it together. That glue is glomalin, which coats and protects the hyphae as well as causing the soil particles to adhere, helping them to resist erosion. In undisturbed soil, the carbon in glomalin makes up as much as 20 percent of the organic carbon.
Amazingly, although glomalin is essential to understanding soil, plants, and carbon, it was discovered only in 1996 by Sara F. Wright of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. It wasn’t noticed sooner because of its nature: glomalin doesn’t dissolve easily in water, it resists microbial decay, and up to a point it’s stable in heat (for scientific study, it’s extracted at 121 degrees C, or 250 degrees F). In contrast to permanent grassland, short-term crops don’t produce the same mass of roots, and they don’t fill the soil with the same hyphae, the same glomalin, or the same quantity of other underground life.
Before Europeans arrived on the North American Plains, the topsoil, famously deep in the tallgrass prairie, held prodigious amounts of carbon. The buffalo herds and the plants had achieved an equilibrium, to the benefit of the soil. It wasn’t buffalo that bequeathed us a bare-ground Dust Bowl. That was the work of farmers plowing up the sod to plant crops.
We release the carbon in soil when we disturb it. The soil’s organic matter, exposed to air, is soon decomposed by bacteria and other organisms. We’ve been releasing carbon from soil since the dawn of cultivation.
For millennia, planting a field has meant plowing — leaving the soil completely bare for as long as it takes a new crop to get established. There used to be no better way. Turning the soil helpfully kills weeds and leaves a clean seedbed. In some places, it was common to leave a whole field fallow for a season, because the oxidized organic matter provides a small temporary gain in nutrients. But plowing, besides leading to erosion, releases CO2. It also causes a loss of organic matter through the same oxidation that gives that temporary boost in fertility; it eliminates perennial plants along with their roots; and it disturbs the life in the soil — bacteria and protozoa, earthworms and insects, and especially nematodes and symbiotic fungi. All those help to cycle nutrients, to make them available to plants or otherwise improve the soil.
Only for about 50 years have some farmers raised grain and soybeans without plowing. No-till techniques are now mainstream and their use is gradually increasing. The downside is that most no-till by far involves applying the herbicide glyphosate (the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup) to kill all the existing vegetation in a field, so it won’t compete with a new crop seeded into the debris. The dead material acts as a mulch and then decomposes and enriches the soil. The negative effects of glyphosate on soil and human health are debated, but after nearly five decades there’s no question that resistant weeds are a serious problem. Natural selection, as usual, has been at work.
More recently, organic techniques have been developed for no-till. A tractor pulls a roller-crimper to kill the existing crop, such as a cover crop of winter rye, reducing it to a mat that suppresses weeds, and then the new crop is planted through the mat with a seed drill, a piece of equipment that comes in both conventional and no-till designs. There’s also no-till vegetable growing, though it’s not clear how many vegetables lend themselves in a productive way.
The scale of grasslands, usually defined as having no more than 10 percent trees, is enormous. They’re variously estimated to cover 31 to 43 percent of the earth’s land; the World Resources Institute’s 40.5 percent is often cited. Much, though not all, of that grassland is grazed. Among the many kinds, there are North American shortgrass prairie, South American pampas and campos, European alpine pastures, Pannonian Steppe, Kazakh Steppe, Mongolian-Manchurian grassland, southern African veldt, the varied rangelands of Australia, and New Zealand tussock grasslands. In some cases, what keeps trees from growing, rather than grazing or fire, is drought or extreme cold. Grasslands can be highly fertile, but many are too steep, too dry, too wet, too infertile, or too stony for crops. In those places, the only way to produce food is to graze animals. Livestock are a very old, large part of human culture. Grasslands and animals have supported a nomadic life for people from Uzbeks to Maasai. Primordial livestock-raising still supports millions of the world’s poorest people.
Probing the internet for insight into prairie soils, I came across an article in The Western Producer, a Saskatchewan publication, about Dave Franzen, a big supporter of no-till in the Soil Science Department of North Dakota State University. I emailed him half a dozen questions, and he shot back: “Call me.” The soils in the central part of the state, he said, are about 10,000 years old, formed after the retreat of the glaciers. The role of the buffalo in forming the prairie was old news to him: “It was quite the incredible system,” he said. “It took a while to plow this thing up, because it was so thick. After they plowed the soil, all hell broke loose.” The problem was wind; the new settlers would write back East about the constant blowing. “We’ve lost feet of soil certainly,” Franzen said, through plowing and the erosion that followed. And yet there are farmers who still plow. “Even today we have dust storms.” Around 1900, North Dakota soils were 1 to 2½, sometimes 3 feet deep, he said, and contained 6 to 7½ percent organic matter.
A decade back, someone at the state historical society suggested he look at old soil surveys. He checked the records for Divide County, on the Canadian border, the next county north of where Meriwether Lewis described large wild herds. In 1900, Franzen found, the topsoil was 16 inches (40 centimeters) deep and very black from humus. Today, about 4 inches (10 centimeters) is left and the color is light gray. He found similar losses in other North Dakota counties. He emailed me a photo he’d taken a few days before showing a cross-section of a ditch that had filled long ago with a layer of wind-blown black topsoil. He’d taken a sample of it to the university lab to have its organic matter analyzed, and it came out at 5.9 percent, while the surrounding topsoils — just 6 inches were left — had 2 to at most 2½ percent organic matter.
Franzen’s specialty is detailed nutrient management tailored crop by crop to specific pieces of land on individual farms. He stressed that the old idea of applying fertilizer in order to reach a certain yield doesn’t work.
Twenty years ago, he attended a meeting of a group of early no-till farmers who weren’t following the state’s fertilizer guidance. “They had shaved the nitrogen until it didn’t resemble the recommendations,” he said. To understand what was going on, he made trials at over 100 sites to find out how much nitrogen was really in the soils. The farmers were right. The difference between the recommendations and what they were using was the nitrogen that had accumulated through no-till.
My underlying focus was carbon. “People get caught up in the carbon,” Franzen said. “What’s really going on is the biology that supports the carbon. The limitation is food and housing” — for the microorganisms: “You don’t destroy where they live.” Nitrous oxide is released by all soils, he said, especially when they’re saturated with rain, but the microorganisms in soils high in organic matter add nitrogen that doesn’t leach into streams or turn into nitrous oxide.
Farmers are slow to change, but a few have been using no-till for almost 50 years. (Unfortunately, the tactic was always to spray an herbicide.) The wet soils in the southeast corner of North Dakota are supposed to be challenging for no-till, but one farmer there has fields with more than 7 percent organic matter. Is he relying on cattle to help build the soil? No, Franzen said, it’s just no-till crops. “Awareness is picking up, I think.”
Can a farmer grow crops using no-till and not adding any fertilizer at all? I asked. In the years from 1890 to 1900, he responded, a farmer could get 40 bushels per acre of spring wheat with the right rains — without any fertilizer, insecticides, or other chemicals, using the equipment of the time, and planting the less-productive varieties of those days. Today the average yield of spring wheat in the northern Great Plains is just 45 bushels.
Kevin Sedivec is an NDSU expert in beef, including range nutrition and grazing systems. He has a low-key seriousness together with a Midwestern friendliness and accessibility. Cattle in North Dakota “graze up to maybe Thanksgiving and Christmas; on average, I suppose, six months.” Peak pasture production is mid-July. The location within North Dakota makes a big difference. In the eastern part of the state, a cow-calf pair needs four acres for six months. In the western part of the state, where there’s less precipitation, it may take 15 acres to raise a cow-calf pair. A few years ago, he said, a survey of North Dakota farms showed that “50 to 55 percent do some type of rotational grazing,” generally “moving the cattle every two weeks to every five to six weeks.” More intensive grazing with more frequent movement makes more efficient use of pasture, but it takes more time, labor, and different knowledge, and it means spending money on fencing and on access to water in each paddock: “Producers find a fine line.”
In the Eastern US, after the cattle have grazed a field, farmers “clip” — mow — whatever’s uneaten to discourage unwanted species the cattle avoid and to encourage new growth. On the Plains you don’t clip after the cattle graze, Sedivec explained. The only reason to do that would be to cut noxious weeds. “You just let it recover. The pasture is dominated by good grasses, and you want flowering plants for the birds and pollinators.”
How much longer does it take to finish cattle on grass compared with a feedlot? “About six to eight months longer.” You “need a premium price.” Can you get the same marbling with all grass-fed? “If you know what you’re doing. It’s a different marble, more white (yellow is corn),” he said. “You have to always have the animals gaining weight to get that marbling: if they stop, it doesn’t happen.”
How much 100 percent grass-fed beef is there in North Dakota? “There’s some, but we have six months of snow. You have to have good hay and alfalfa. It should be called ‘forage-based.’” He said, “The amount might be 2 percent. They have to market it themselves.”
I asked about fertilizing the range. “We do not recommend fertilizer,” he said. “Rangeland, what I call virgin prairie, never tilled — if you fertilize, you change the microbial population. They release the naturally cycled nutrients at the rate the plants can consume them. Native grasses can’t handle the N, or the P and K” — the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium of fertilizer. “Exotic grasses can, and you don’t want them.” He cited timothy and orchard grass, “which you would want in a cultivated pasture in the East.”
He called not grazing “the worst thing you could do,” speaking slowly with emphasis. The yield of forage “goes down to about a third of what it would do if it were grazed.” He offered a summary: “The debate is: we don’t know what kind of grazing management will enhance carbon capture. We want to make livestock grazing carbon neutral at worst. Can we make it carbon positive in terms of uptake? I think the truth is we’re already there. We just don’t have the science to verify it.”
One problem with the widely cited beef and climate data is that it can be completely irrelevant to what happens in particular places. Some of the world’s oldest grazing areas remain inaccessible by road, beyond the reach of electricity, even in areas in Europe. Grass is all there is, and it’s the point. The leading expert in the high mountain pastures of Italy’s Valle d’Aosta, the source of great Fontina di alpeggio, is Mauro Bassignana. I asked him for some detail about the use of that permanent grassland. He emailed back, “In our region, 98 percent of the agricultural area is permanent meadows and pastures (reaching up to 2700 meters above sea level!), which are an important carbon sink and could not be converted into arable land.” He explained,
Dairy cows graze in the morning, after milking, for about four to five hours, then return to the stable around noon, are milked again in the afternoon and again go out to pasture for three to four hours. They return to the stable for the night. In the pasture, where there may be electric fencing, or not, they are always guided by the herder, helped by the dogs. The grazing area they have available each time is the one that meets their need for a meal and changes every half day. It is a very strict form of rotational grazing. Only the most productive mountain pastures, at the lowest altitudes, are grazed twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of the summer.
Not that long ago, the phrase “regenerative agriculture” was hardly used beyond a fringe of innovative farmers; it’s now part of the promotional vocabulary of McDonald’s, Cargill, Unilever, Walmart, and General Mills. Regenerative agriculture isn’t a single, clearly defined thing, but everyone seems to agree that its primary goal is to rebuild the soil’s organic matter. The main tactic is to keep the soil continuously covered as much as possible with living plants; mulch is a second choice. Plowing, if any, is shallow and minimal. For some crops, a farmer might till strips just wide enough to plant rows. US agricultural schools and extension services have been experimenting with regenerative techniques, including organic no-till. Methods are evolving; some farmers are redesigning and modifying equipment, which is something a farmer might do anyway. Regenerative agriculture extends to silvopastoral systems, which combine trees and sometimes shrubs with pasture, an especially useful approach in tropical and subtropical places. For large corporations, regenerative agriculture isn’t necessarily organic, but for maximum effect it has to be. One reason is that conventional agriculture’s synthetic chemicals, including fertilizer, reduce the soil’s microbial and fungal activity.
Most of the really committed regenerative farmers believe that a fully balanced farm requires animals, for the same reasons that animals were needed to build the historic soils of the Great Plains. Some farmers raise more than one kind of animal, because they graze somewhat differently and have complementary effects. Or ruminants might be raised with poultry, which eat bothersome insects. Animals might be brought in to break up the remains of a previous crop, to save a machine passing through to chop it.
What regenerative farmers don’t practice is old-school continuous grazing, which places livestock in a large area, as a rule many acres, sometimes without fencing, so the animals can graze and regraze areas before the plants ever have much chance to grow. Overall the forage tends to be older and less nutritious, with less desired plants becoming more prominent. Where there isn’t enough land, steady overgrazing produces bare ground and severe damage.
Rotational grazing divides pasture into fenced areas, often of a large fixed size, and the animals are moved from one to another, often at set intervals, so the pasture has a period of time to regrow. More specific and effective, and favored by regenerative farmers, is adaptive multi-paddock grazing — AMP. (Other names are used, too, including planned grazing and holistic grazing, with different variants having their adherents.) AMP paddocks are smaller and more numerous, and the cattle are moved frequently in response to the growth of the plants at that moment, as determined by the season and recent weather. More leaves are left to photosynthesize, so the plants don’t have to draw energy from their roots; they rebound more quickly. And because the younger, more nutritious forage is more digestible, it produces less methane in cattle. AMP requires close, knowledgeable management — densely packed animals feeding intensively for short times on pasture at the right maturity, followed by giving the land a long rest, similar to the way the buffalo once grazed the Plains.
How low you graze — 10 inches, 6 inches, 2 inches — determines the health of the pasture and which species dominate. Graze too low consistently, and faster-growing plants beat out slower-growing ones, reducing the diversity of species. Diversity is the goal, for wildlife habitat, resilience in drought, a longer growing season, complementary nutrition, and resistance to weeds, which in the case of prairie means invading non-native plants.
Countless studies of grazing look at carbon and heat-trapping gases, aiming to quantify some aspect and explain what happens in the soil, but they’re narrow. So far they’ve supplied only pieces of the puzzle. The need for more information is a theme among scientists.
For instance, Philip L. Staddon in the UK and Maede Faghihinia in Czechia, researchers into arbuscular (intracellular) mycorrhizal fungi and other climate topics, wrote an article last year about studies of the effects of grazing intensity on carbon sequestration. They found 102 studies published since 1980 that focused just on the interaction between arbuscular mycorrhiza and livestock. “In the last couple of years, a wealth of studies have highlighted how little we actually know about the effects grazing management choices are having on grassland ecosystem functioning,” the two authors concluded. “It is not only intensity that has often been overlooked but also the make-up of the grazing livestock involved, namely single or multiple species. Indeed, it has recently been shown that grazing by a mix of cattle and sheep can stimulate net carbon sequestration in grassland when compared to either of the species alone.”
Nonetheless a number of studies suggest better grazing makes a significant difference. One published last year in the Journal of Environmental Management, for example, compared conventional grazing with AMP grazing at five southeastern US sites with diverse soils. The top meter of the AMP sites contained an average of 13 percent more carbon and 9 percent more nitrogen, and both elements were in forms that suggested they would persist in the soils over time. A different, much less common approach is to use a life-cycle assessment to look at the whole of what happens on one farm. A study of the carbon footprint of the beef cattle on a single regenerative farm, White Oak Pasture in Georgia, commissioned by the farm itself (and funded by General Mills), showed a net negative carbon output for the farm’s beef cattle, meaning that more carbon was sequestered in the soil in one year (2017) than was released to the atmosphere. But as the study noted, it’s an open question how much carbon can continue to be sequestered year after year and how long it will stay in the soil.
Cattle grazing at Cow Chip Ranch in western North Dakota. Photograph by Chad Njos.
Rebecca Phillips is a North Dakota researcher and consultant, founder of an educational grazing nonprofit and a supporter of regenerative techniques. She emailed me a Florida study published in Global Change Biology that showed three times greater root growth in grazed areas than in ungrazed ones. The top 5 centimeters (about 2 inches) of soil held 274 grams of root biomass per square meter in grazed plots compared with just 83 grams in the ungrazed. “When converted to pounds per acre, these are 2440 and 739, respectively,” Phillips said. “The ecophysiology behind this grazing response, to the best of my knowledge, is not widely known and may vary with plant species. In this study, they used a Bahiagrass-planted pasture.” That’s a non-native species commonly planted in Florida.
I asked Phillips whether AMP grazing makes sense in the dryness of the Plains. Is the cost of fencing and providing water to multiple paddocks too high in proportion to the amount of forage? “AMP, or cell grazing as they say around here,” she emailed back, “is applicable in the Plains. I work with ranchers from the ND-MT border to the Missouri Coteau and down to Pierre, SD. There are many success stories. I’ve seen paddock sizes vary from a few acres to 50 or 100 acres. Depends on the herd and the manager. Some like to move them every day. Others prefer every 5 days. Many organizations and agencies supply $ for water and fencing.”
She specifically addressed precipitation, saying, “I am just finishing up results on an on-ranch study near the MT border, where a rancher converted cropland to a grassland mix of native species 12 years ago and has cell-grazed ever since. Considering he only saw an average of 12.5 inches per year during this time, the soil organic carbon numbers are considerably greater than adjacent cropland.”
She sent another study, from 2018, conducted at the same subtropical Florida ranch where grazing had been found to produce much greater root mass. This newer study measured releases of carbon dioxide and methane as well as stored carbon. It concluded, “Contrary to our hypothesis, the grazed subtropical pasture had lower GWP [global warming potential] than the ungrazed system during three years of livestock exclusion.” The released methane and carbon dioxide were more than offset by the carbon added to the soil.
“Biodiversity means greater exploitation of the root profile, as each species has different root architecture and response to conditions,” Phillips told me. But the carbon effects of grazing rangeland plants have only begun to be looked at. She said, “These studies require large areas (>40 acres) and close management of herd activity. That is, if you want to know how the entire ecosystem responds. These are very expensive.” The scientific insight that to her is especially missing is what grazing animals can do as part of a grassland ecosystem to affect the transfer of carbon to roots and to the mycorrhizal fungi that surround them, so that some carbon becomes a stable, long-term part of the soil. The answer may vary with plant species as well as with grazing management.
Phillips put me in touch with a rancher named Jed Rider, whose ranch, coincidentally, is located just south of Williston, North Dakota, the same area where Meriwether Lewis had described large herds of buffalo and other grazing animals. Rider, who is 45 years old, is one of the small minority of ranchers who raise beef solely on grass, including finishing on grass. Rider Ranch extends over 6,500 acres, counting rented land. All of it is grazed. “I’ve put a lot of cropland back to grass,” Rider said to me over the phone. How much of the land is unbroken native prairie? “50 percent I would think.” It makes a difference to the cattle. “They come off of the native prairie, and they will stand and bellow. I am dead serious,” Rider said. They’re objecting to the grass from the former cropland.
Depending on the time of year, the ranch has 400 to 600 cattle, predominantly Angus. “My bulls right now are Red Angus,” he said. He runs the ranch by himself with only some help from his three young boys. He’s been doing regenerative ranching for almost 15 years, using methods that he called “holistic planned grazing.” He sells the beef to local butchers and families as “Dakota Graz’d” without any grass-fed or other certification. “It’s a trust between me and my customer,” he explained. “My ranch is open all the time if you want to come and see.” The goal is to sell all the beef locally, but the demand isn’t quite there yet. Some of the cattle still go to the “sale barn,” the conventional market. “It sure pains me to do that.”
In a northern climate, the challenge and the biggest cost of raising cattle is overwintering. Rebecca Phillips had told me, “In my location, there are some that rely only on hay and silage in winter and just as many that also feed grain.” Rider cuts hay, but as little as he can, 100 to 400 acres’ worth depending on the year. “We try to winter graze as much as possible. When it comes to that point, we supplement with hay,” he said. “It’s all hay. We don’t feed any grain.” He does bale-grazing: 3- to 4-foot-tall round bales are set out in a checkerboard pattern, so the effect on the pasture is relatively even. Only small areas get that treatment, but there’s no faster way to improve a piece of land. Rider doesn’t apply fertilizer. “I never have,” he said.
Bale grazing at Rider Ranch. Photograph by Jed Rider.
When he first planted grass in areas that had previously been fertilized for crops, “I thought I was gonna grow grass ’til hell wouldn’t have it. Man, did I grow grass the first two years.” The wheat crop had shallow roots and now the grass was getting to the untouched nutrients below. Then it all fell apart. Rider said, “There was no carbon in the ground, no biology to capture the nitrogen from the atmosphere.”
About getting marbled beef with grass, Rider said: “If you want to finish in a short time period, it’s really hard. We let a cow be a cow — most of what I butcher are females. I don’t push them; they graze native grass. To get them to the way I want them to look, they’re between three and four years old.” He added, “Maybe my genetics aren’t there yet.”
The grazing skills he uses are very different from conventional ones. “You’re going to fail; I did; everyone does. It is a whole new thing.” He advised, “You don’t go from two pastures to 150, you go from two to eight, or two to four. You educate yourself as you go. Number one: Observational skill is the most important skill you have.” You look closely at the plants and the cows.
“A conventional herd of cows is built for the feedlot,” he continued. “They selective graze, overgraze the recovering plant, which is very nutritious. They do exceptionally well — and then you take that away.” You divide the big space into lots of little pastures, so they can no longer select what they eat. “And the cattle diminish. Very quickly, you can be grazing brown grass. A whole new set of challenges awaits.”
How profitable is his regenerative approach compared with the conventional one? “I don’t know, I really don’t,” he responded. “I was just visiting with the group of grazers that I’ve met through the North Dakota Grazing Lands Coalition, friends of mine that have kind of the same mindset I have. None of us came up with an answer.”
He said, “I can tell you this, it’s a better way of life. Now I just strictly ranch” — no crops. “It’s different to make a living with just cows. I sure as hell ain’t getting rich, but I have no debt.” He qualified that somewhat: “I have no ‘iron’ debt,” referring to the usual agricultural loans to buy expensive machinery. “I don’t have that stress.”
He paused to talk about the continuing extreme drought in his area of the Plains. The last significant rainfall was in August and September of 2019, which gave him the grass that he needed the following year. “In 2020, we got 3½ inches of rain here. That probably helped, the little bit of moisture we did get,” he explained. “2021 was the same, except a storm dumped 5½ inches in half an hour.” Even with his organic matter, most of that water ran off. The land has been brown, and the soil in the hills is completely dry. But Rider rents some river bottom land where the soil has moisture, and although the quality of the hay from there isn’t high, that’s where next summer’s hay will come from. He didn’t sound discouraged at all.
He wasn’t done answering my question about profit. His herd started with the conventional cattle he bought when he was in his 20s. They were meant for grain concentrates, not designed to digest prairie forage. “I’m trying to fix my cows, and I’m trying to fix my land,” he said. “I’m doing both. And I’m not going broke doing it. To have the ability to do that — that it can actually work — I think that is pretty remarkable.”
For another scientific perspective, I turned to Edward Bork at the University of Alberta, who holds the Mattheis Chair in Rangeland Ecology and Management and is director of the Rangeland Research Institute. He studies carbon and greenhouse gases in grasslands (as well as in agroforestry, whose climate effects are related). In US states such as Iowa, native prairie has been all but entirely eliminated by cultivation. In the parts of Alberta with the best black fertile soils, Bork estimates that 5 to at most 10 percent of grasslands have never been plowed, while drier portions of southeastern Alberta retain 43 percent of the native prairie. Over Zoom, he pointed out that 85 to 90 percent of the biomass in native prairie is below ground. Native grasslands provide wildlife and plant diversity, unique habitats, water purification, and carbon storage, he said, benefits to the whole of society. (And yet, he said, there’s no way for ranchers to be paid for maintaining their grasslands.) In his research, Bork asked, “How much carbon do grasslands contain? And what is the effect of grazing on that carbon?”
Most of the native grasslands are privately owned, he said. “The only way to make a living from them is to sell either forage or livestock” — livestock raised on forage. But cash crops can be more lucrative, and ranchers sometimes give up and plow. “Then you increase the soil temperature and you add oxygen,” Bork explained. “The microbes respire”: a lot of the 30 to 50 percent of soil organic carbon is released to the atmosphere as CO2. Once you plow, “there’s typically no going back.” Restoring prairie is expensive, “problematic and very slow.”
In 2012, Bork started to quantify the carbon in Alberta grasslands. He looked at three levels: the living plants, the dead debris covering the soil, and the top 30 centimeters (almost 12 inches) of soil, where there’s the greatest concentration of roots. He said, “Even the driest rangelands were storing 50 to 60 metric tonnes of carbon, conservatively.” That’s per hectare, or about 22 to 26 US tons per acre. Elsewhere, in grasslands with higher annual precipitation, the amount was as high as 180 tonnes, or 80 US tons per acre. That’s a lot of carbon held in grassland soils and not out in the atmosphere trapping heat. And that was measuring only the top 30 centimeters of soil — some roots go much deeper. Perhaps tellingly, Bork found that overall the grazed land held 6 to 8 percent more carbon than the ungrazed land. One possible reason is that grazing can stimulate compensatory growth in plants, an effect of the grasslands’ evolving with herbivores for thousands of years.
Grazed land, Bork said, also showed higher rates of microbial activity, decomposition of litter (the dead plant matter on top of the soil), and had differences in plant species. “Some plants are more abundant in grazed areas that appear to be making a net improvement in soil carbon. It’s getting down into the soil. Root carbon is also often higher in grazed areas.”
He said, “The question, really, is what type of grazing?” He stressed that the grasslands are quite tolerant of “moderate grazing” — including “pulses of grazing” over short periods, followed by a lengthy rest and recovery. He cited the similarity of cattle to bison; both species eat big mouthfuls and have large rumens and similar effects on grasslands. “Should we graze them? Yes, they’re tolerant of grazing, and they provide high-quality, sustainable protein for society.” The difference between moderate grazing and overgrazing is “when, how often, and the intensity.” He referred to a data set from Saskatchewan for the top 60 centimeters (almost 24 inches) of soil, which showed that grazing intensity had more influence on increasing soil carbon than even higher precipitation did.
Bork called managed grazing “a complex art form.” He explained, “At the instant a plant starts growing, it has the highest protein, but there’s no biomass yet.” If you wait too long to graze, there’s plenty of biomass but “garbage quality. The sweet spot for grazing is biomass (‘gut fill’) and quality, which is usually four to six weeks into the growing season.”
One of his graduate students is looking at biomass productivity and finding 10 to 20 percent more biomass with AMP grazing. What soil scientists call the A horizon, the black soil on top, is thicker with AMP use and contains more carbon. Ranchers who have adopted AMP are stretching the grazing season, getting more regrowth so as to graze later in fall and then starting earlier in spring with the leftover fall material. In southern Alberta, some ranchers manage to graze ten to eleven months a year, through snow if it’s not too deep. “They’re pushing the envelope — probably the most profitable ranches in Alberta.”
The year 2020 was wet, with flooding, but 2021 brought widespread drought to the Northern Plains. Especially during drought, too high a stocking rate not only damages the plants, it depletes the litter layer. That acts like a blanket, Bork said, protecting the soil, keeping it cooler, reducing evaporation, and preventing precious water from running off before it can filter into the soil. The recommendation for drought-prone areas is to maintain healthy plants with deep roots and to maintain the litter.
Bork was part of a study published in 2021 in Rangeland Ecology & Management that compared each of 32 AMP ranches, at sites across Western Canada, with a neighboring ranch, which often used more conventional grazing. Water infiltration with AMP was much higher, Bork commented. Among all the information gathered, the main distinction between the AMP and non-AMP ranches was the length of the rest after grazing. It’s a lot less expensive in a study to measure grass than to weigh animals before and after, so Bork wasn’t able to say whether the AMP ranchers were producing more meat per hectare of pasture, but “they believe they’re making more money.” To jump to a quote from the published study: “Both groups, and in particular ranchers within the AMP group, demonstrated high variability in management practices among individual operators, highlighting the importance of using specific management metrics rather than generalized descriptors of ‘grazing system type’ to interpret their influence.”
Bork raised the subject of the methane produced by cattle as a result of grazing. “If it was sustainable for thousands of years under vast bison herds, which also produced methane, why not now?” He surprised me by saying something I hadn’t heard, “Healthy grassland soils are a net sink for methane.” Some of the microbes in soil release methane, but many consume it, and, on average in healthy soil, microbes consume more methane from the atmosphere than they release. “This is an unstudied subject,” Bork emphasized, but he offered his personal “back of the envelope calculation” that “in a healthy grassland in Western Canada, about one-quarter of the methane from free-range cattle is being taken up by the soil.”
He summarized his view of beef and climate: “It’s not whether you should consume meat, it’s what’s the source of that meat. You can help conserve grasslands through consumption.” Without demand for what the grasslands produce, they’re at continued risk of conversion to corn, soy, wheat, and canola. “Be careful and choose where that meat is coming from.”
Livestock’s Long Shadow didn’t call for reducing livestock populations. Instead the FAO report called for greater efficiency and better methods. Large-scale livestock production is almost certain to continue. Condemning all beef just gives a free ride to bad farming. We need to reward farmers for doing better.
You can’t separate beef from dairy. Until relatively recent times, most breeds of cattle were used for both milk and meat, and sometimes labor, and in some places they still are. Similar environmental issues apply to both, and a lot of beef comes from dairy cows. Cows are commonly milked for just four to six years, though sometimes much longer. Because their meat is substantially older than other beef, it’s more flavorful, and some of it, maybe from more careful farmers, goes to butcher shops and chefs, although most ends up as mass-market hamburger patties. Dairy cattle are less criticized than beef cattle, maybe because we still associate milk with wholesomeness and almost certainly because it takes less feed to produce milk than beef.
Breeding has radically increased the amount of milk a cow produces. Milk is currently measured agriculturally in North America by weight, and USDA figures from the start of the 20th century show that an average cow then produced about 3,000 pounds of milk a year. In the more precise world of 1950, the number was 5,314 pounds, and in 2020, it was 23,777 pounds. That’s 2,765 gallons (10,466 liters) in one year from one average cow.
When I’ve watched a Holstein walk with a full udder, I’ve wondered whether it’s cruel that a cow should produce so much milk. But the major US humane organizations don’t assert that, and neither organic nor humane certifications place limits on yield. When I sent those yield numbers to A Greener World, which is responsible for the well-regarded label Certified Animal Welfare Approved, Emily Moose, the executive director, responded, “Since it is possible to have high-producing cows with high welfare and low-producing cows with low welfare, yield is only one part of a complete welfare picture that also includes things like body condition, health, longevity, breed suitability, environment, diet and pasture quality.” A Greener World’s standards are meant to ensure that “welfare is not compromised by yield.” Holsteins, the world’s dominant, highest-yielding dairy breed, make up 94 percent of the US dairy herd, with most of the rest being Jerseys, which are smaller but equally high-yielding in proportion to their size.
Conventionally, a dairy cow’s diet is close to half grain and other nonforage feed. But dairy cows, like beef cattle, can do well eating only forage — zero grain — as they once did, although the pasture and hay must be plentiful and excellent. That can be a struggle for a farmer. You need a lot of good land, grazing skills, and an investment in fences and providing water. A more year-round climate helps.
Cows eating hay in the barn at Butterworks Farm in Vermont. Photograph by Edward Behr.
An hour’s drive from me, Butterworks Farm in the hills of Westfield, Vermont, was the first certified organic dairy farm in the United States. Since 2017, it has been 100 percent grass-fed, one of 26 farms certified as wholly grass-fed by Vermont Organic Farmers. (That’s out of 630 remaining Vermont dairy farms, including those milking goats and sheep.) The farm was started in 1976 by Jack and Anne Lazor with a handful of Jersey calves and is run today by their daughter, Christine, and her husband, Collin Mahoney. I wrote about the farm 30 years ago, particularly its cream, whose richness was due partly to feeding grain, which Jack loved to grow. He wrote a long how-to book, The Organic Grain Grower. Sadly, Jack died in 2020. A few months earlier he had told me by email, “With an increased understanding of climate issues and the contributions of tillage to greenhouse gases, I went cold turkey on grain growing.”
It was hard for Christine Lazor to find time to talk with me. Meanwhile she sent a plain-spoken text: “Grass fed is the hardest and most expensive way to make milk … Expensive regenerative ag products are not accessible or affordable for most people.” I stopped by the farm one afternoon on the chance that I’d find her, but no luck. The cows were calmly eating hay in the barn and seemed obviously happy. Heifers in a tall, airy hoop barn walked curiously out to meet me in an adjoining paddock, liking to have their heads rubbed. The location is a standout. From the acres of fields, some lined with stone walls and trees, you look out on a distant panorama of hills and low mountains. On a bright day in summer, you feel a sense of space and human possibility. The summer that far north had been uncharacteristically dry, however, and the pastures weren’t lush. That was presumably why the cows were inside.
When we finally spoke by phone, she spoke of the struggle to keep up with repairs and all the daily work. Pandemic or no pandemic it wasn’t easy to find employees or a place for them to live. “That’s why I haven’t called you back,” she said. “It’s so hard to even make dinner, ever.” She was working as we spoke — “C’mon girls!” At one point, she put her phone on speaker in a shirt pocket.
Butterworks milks 30 to 36 cows, limited mainly by the layout of the post-and-beam barn. Rather than the usual grain, hay is used even to lure the cows to the stanchions for milking. But for sugar (carbohydrates), they get 2 pounds of molasses on top of the hay, something permitted under grass-fed certification. “A lot of grass-fed cows look bony — our cows are a little bony.” The amount of sugar in the forage, Lazor said, reflects the time of year. When summer weather is too dry for sufficient pasture, the cows receive hay.
To supplement the forage, Butterworks doesn’t currently raise annual crops, such as millet, sorghum, or sudangrass. (The first two are grains, and on a 100 percent grass-fed farm they must be cut or eaten before the seed forms.) The year’s five months of grazing end in October. “The climate challenge stuff is hard for grass farmers,” Lazor commented. What happens to the milk production in winter? “As long as there’s good hay, the yield stays good.”
Heifers in a paddock at Butterworks Farm. Photograph by Edward Behr.
Jerseys, being smaller than Holsteins, give only around three-quarters as much milk, currently 17,855 pounds a year, according to the American Jersey Cattle Association. Grass-feeding reduces that. Lazor estimated that at 40 pounds per cow per day, her annual average was around 14,000 pounds per cow, which would be high for grass-fed.
Later that day, she texted the improvements that would make the most difference to the farm. They were better electric fences, a hoped-for second hoop barn in 2022, employee housing, and: “Everyone gets a day or two off each week and Work days that allow for meal prep, time with family and sleep.”
Butterworks doesn’t sell its milk as milk. The main product is yogurt, the real thing, cup-set: it forms a gel in the retail container. That’s a big contrast to the manipulated textures and insipid cultures of the mostly dessertlike yogurt of much larger organic competitors. Butterworks’ bestseller is its plain whole-milk yogurt, whose only ingredients are milk and yogurt cultures. It’s the best US yogurt I know. As Lazor said, “You can really taste the quality of the milk.”
After Butterworks went wholly grass-fed, the price of its yogurt was no longer competitive with everyday brands. But we all need a little luxury, and about $8 for a 2-pound container of organic 100-percent grass-fed yogurt isn’t exactly extravagant. The local supermarket price for a strip steak, as I write, is $15 a pound.
Lazor spoke of the “watered-down rules for organic dairy.” Butterworks supports the Real Organic Project, which is gaining support for a return to more rigorous USDA rules and enforcement, including putting an end to hydroponic “organic” produce and “organic” cafo (concentrated animal feeding operation) dairy farming. cafos can have up to several thousand cows, with no access to pasture. Their “organic” milk is cheaper to produce and has an unfair advantage in price. Real Organic offers certification, and its logo is something to look for.
A growing competitor to yogurt is alt-milk “yogurt.” Its customers may think they’re doing something good for the environment, but what’s the effect on carbon when consumers switch from partly or wholly grass-fed cow’s milk to alt-milk from soy, almonds, oats, rice, coconut? Those are all crops. And none of the alt-milk tastes real, in the sense that it doesn’t taste like whatever plant is the ostensible primary ingredient.
Much more rain falls in the East compared with the Great Plains, where fertilizer only throws off the balance of native plants and soils. In the East, too, careful grazing can build soils that don’t require fertilizer. But pastures are typically depleted.
Sarah Flack, a consultant to all-grass operations who lives off-grid in Vermont, said by email, “It is a common beginner mistake to think all soil fertility issues can be solved with good grazing… fertility inputs are often still needed. Inputs may be just a few and small amounts… for example K and Bo [boron] to support Legume growth so N fertilizer need could be eliminated or reduced. Or it may be larger amounts if the soils are depleted from previous management.” She spoke to the challenge of grass dairying. How much harder is it, I wondered, to produce milk on 100 percent grass, compared with feeding at least some grain? “Much harder. also costs more per cwt [100 pounds of milk] to do all grass without grain. I could write a book on this topic ;).” Ideally, how much of the above-ground plants should cattle eat, and how much should they trample? “It depends on plant species, stage of maturity and management goal but generally leaving ½ to ⅓.” To what extent can we eliminate grain and still have marbled beef? “Completely,” she answered, “with the correct livestock genetics and pasture quality.”
I haven’t said much about the taste of beef. Per capita meat consumption in the US is at a record level, and yet beef consumption has declined by around a third since the 1970s. Beef was number one until a decade ago, when it was replaced by chicken, the consumption of which is now about 20 percent higher than beef. Pork is number three; the amount consumed per person has remained roughly constant for a century or more. (Meanwhile, US consumption of lamb has dropped almost off the charts. It hardly needs to be said that among ruminants we never ate much goat.) It may not be just coincidence that beef-eating declined at the same time that the meat was slaughtered younger (even the color is paler) and ceased to be dry-aged. It’s not surprising that people eat less of something that doesn’t taste as good. Similarly, the decline in the consumption of fluid milk parallels the effort to get consumers to drink low- and no-fat kinds, although dairy flavor and texture come largely from fat.
For less-affluent people, better beef can be prohibitively expensive. Not to get into government subsidies and other intervention in agriculture (or the environmental damage that doesn’t show up in retail prices), but better beef is more expensive because it more closely reflects real costs. Marbling gives flavor and tenderness, whether from grain-finishing or top-quality grass-finishing, but grass-finishing is inevitably more expensive because it takes longer. Dry-aged beef raised by any method has a nutty, deeper flavor, but dry-aging too costs more, not least because of the loss of weight, compared with shipping in plastic and letting the aging take place in the distribution pipeline. As many people have suggested, it can be a reasonable trade-off to eat tastier, more satisfying meat that’s more respectful of life and nature but to eat it less often or in smaller amounts. That helps reduce the cost.
A different problem is that 100 percent grass-fed beef isn’t necessarily more delicious. The quality is variable enough that you almost have to know from experience that the taste from a particular producer is what you like. Certifications help, except that the labels have proliferated confusingly, and in some cases that’s surely the intent. There are multiple versions of humane, grass-fed, fair trade, and regenerative, and then there’s rainforest and bird-friendly. Only a few labels have real meaning. (For a sense of how messy the situation is, see this list of humane labels rated for meaning.) Genuinely humane methods tend to produce higher-quality meat, and the strictest label is Certified Animal Welfare Approved by AGW. Not far behind is Humane Farm Animal Care. For certified grass-fed beef and dairy, the best nationally in the US is the Certified Grassfed add-on to Certified Animal Welfare Approved. But regional certifications can be good, too, such as OPT’s “Certified Grass-Fed Organic Livestock Program,” which also covers dairy. Like Vermont Organic Farmers’ certified “100% Grass Fed,” it’s a supplement to USDA organic certification. Best of all is knowing the person and farm you’re buying from.
Probably there are too many cattle in the world, compared with the number of ruminants on the prehistoric earth, unknowable as that number may be. If there were fewer large animals, natural systems might be better balanced — clearly, they would be better off with fewer humans! But taking large numbers of cattle out of the carbon cycle to get rid of their methane might have unforeseen consequences, as environmental actions tend to do. We’d lose the help of cattle in sequestering carbon in grassland, and without grazing animals, large areas of grassland would slowly give way to trees. That would be a moderate improvement in terms of carbon, because trees have a somewhat superior ability to sequester carbon. But with chronic drought caused by climate change, some regions that could have supported trees in the past will no longer be able to do that, and in regions with worsening wildfires, grasslands are a better carbon sink than forest is, because grassland plants hold most of their carbon underground, while trees hold most of theirs aboveground, and fire releases it. Besides, after a fire grasslands grow back more quickly (it helps that a grass fire is less hot).
For those who oppose beef, the crunch comes when they have to recommend a food to replace it, because foods from terrestrial crops aren’t obviously better for the climate. So what else is there? Chickens and pigs don’t belch methane (well, pigs emit some), so their meat is better in that way, but they eat grain, and pound for pound in terms of grain they’re not an improvement over beef. (Besides, unlike cattle, most chickens and pigs spend their entire lives in close confinement, whether or not the chickens are called “cage-free.” Chickens once took about 14 weeks to reach market size, and now they’re ready at six or seven weeks — it’s not much of a life. Laying hens live longer but not better, apart from exceptional farms.) Many consumers have embraced artificial beef, especially in fast-food burgers, and artificial chicken and pork will soon have a similar impact. But fake meat isn’t magically extracted from the ether; it’s produced from soy and other crops. Lab-grown “cultured meat” may quickly become economically viable, too, but it requires a growth medium of some kind, which will presumably originate in crops. Fish would be a brilliant solution if we hadn’t destroyed the oceans’ vast abundance that was free for the taking. Farmed fish, even when they don’t create other environmental problems, are fed either other fish or crops, mostly crops, so they’re not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
A couple of ocean options are both zero-input and cause no environmental problems. Shellfish eat only what they filter from the water, and mussels in particular, being less expensive, could be part of an answer. Outside the animal realm, seaweed, for photosynthesis, takes carbon dioxide from the water and uses nitrogen and potassium (which in excess cause algal blooms and in extreme cases ocean dead zones). Seaweed is already raised on a large scale in Asia, and although eating it would mean a cultural shift for most people, it might perhaps be turned into fake meat. A limitation could be the number of coastal sites available to grow it.
Leaving no stone unturned, insects are highly efficient at turning food into meat, and most of the world is culturally open to eating them. You can find insect species that will eat almost whatever you can think of, including grass, so insects may be an alternative, if they can be produced on the needed scale.
If we were to stop eating beef and we eliminated livestock from grassland, we would be interfering forcefully with nature. And it was interfering with nature that brought us to the extreme where we’re urgently searching for powerful new technology to extract carbon from the atmosphere and put it somewhere safe. As a rule, it makes sense to stop interfering with nature — above all to stop burning fossil fuel. Our long history of destructive farming has sent most grassland carbon into the atmosphere, but grasslands could again sequester enough carbon to significantly help the climate. There’s no scientific disagreement about that, only about the degree of help. And for grasslands to sequester carbon maximally in the way they always did, it appears that they require ruminants, such as cattle.
Something about the beef criticism doesn’t quite acknowledge the essence of life itself. Creatures aren’t stones. Every living thing contains carbon and exchanges gases with its environment. As bad as methane is, no amount of it coming from cattle adds to the total carbon in the atmosphere. Cattle just circulate what’s already there. If we were to reduce the number of cattle, then the carbon that would otherwise pass through them would still be present in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, heating the planet.
I have no intention of eating fewer plants myself. But setting aside — and in no way diminishing — moral qualms about eating animals, from what we know so far it’s completely possible that the best thing for the planet would be for us all to eat fewer crops and more 100-percent grass-fed meat. Cattle on permanent grass could be as benign as terrestrial agriculture gets. ●
From issue 109The post The Accusation Against Beef appeared first on The Art of Eating Magazine.