No Happy Cows by John Robbins

Author:John Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser Conari

THE DARK SIDE

Grass-fed beef certainly has its advantages, but it is typically more expensive, and I'm not at all sure that's a bad thing. We shouldn't be eating nearly as much meat as we do.

And there is a dark side even to grass-fed beef. It takes a lot of grassland to raise a grass-fed steer. Western rangelands are vast, but not nearly vast enough to sustain America's 100 million head of cattle. There is no way that grass-fed beef can begin to feed the current meat appetites of people in the United States, much less play a role in addressing world hunger. Grass-fed meat production may be viable in a country like New Zealand with its geographic isolation, unique climate and topography, and exceedingly small human population. But in a world of 7 billion people, I am afraid that grass-fed beef is a food that only the wealthy elites will be able to consume in any significant quantities.

What would happen if we sought to raise great quantities of grass-fed beef? It's been tried in Brazil and the result has been an environmental nightmare of epic proportions. In 2009, Greenpeace released a report titled “Slaughtering the Amazon,” which presented detailed satellite photos showing that Amazon cattle are now the biggest single cause of global deforestation, which is in turn responsible for 20 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Even Brazil's government, whose policies have made the nation the world's largest beef exporter and home to the planet's largest commercial cattle herd, acknowledges that cattle ranches are responsible for 80 percent of Amazonian deforestation. Much of the remaining 20 percent is for land to grow soy, which is not used to make tofu. It is sold to China to feed livestock.

Amazonian cattle are free-range, grass-fed, and possibly organic, but they are still a plague on the planet and a driving force behind global warming.

Trendy consumers like to think that grass-fed beef is green and Earth-friendly and does not have the environmental problems associated with factory-farmed beef. But grass-fed and feedlot beef production both contribute heavily to global climate change. They do this through emissions of two potent global-warming gases: methane and nitrous oxide.

Next to carbon dioxide, the most destabilizing gas to the planet's climate is methane. Methane is actually twenty-four times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and its concentration in the atmosphere is rising even faster. The primary reason that concentrations of atmospheric methane are now triple what they were when they began rising a century ago is beef production. Cattle raised on pasture actually produce more methane than feedlot animals, on a per-cow basis. The slower weight gain of a grass-fed animal means that each cow produces methane emissions for a longer time.

Meanwhile, producing a pound of grass-fed beef accounts for every bit as much nitrous oxide emission as producing a pound of feedlot beef, and sometimes, due to the slower weight gain, even more. These emissions are not only fueling global warming. They are also acidifying soils, reducing biodiversity, and shrinking Earth's protective stratospheric ozone layer.

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