Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by McWilliams James E

Author:McWilliams, James E. [McWilliams, James E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NON000000
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2009-08-25T22:00:00+00:00

Land

In addition to contributing significantly to global warming, livestock are taking a toll on the world’s shrinking supply of arable land. Pasture set aside for livestock composes two thirds of the world’s agricultural land. In light of increasing global meat demand, the most obvious problem this causes is direct land degradation. According to the UN Environment Programme, land degradation includes soil erosion (of which cattle cause 85 percent in the United States), chemical and physical deterioration of the soil, and the “long term loss of natural vegetation.” The key results of this destruction are declines in both biodiversity and land productivity. Cattle are by far primarily responsible for each problem. 30

Defenders of the livestock industry frequently argue that cattle graze on land that is unfit for alternative agricultural purposes. When I wrote a piece for my local newspaper on the damage that beef cattle do to the landscape, a rancher wrote to scold me: “Try growing wheat on the same ground that a cow can produce beef on!” This argument, a standard one, is disingenuous. Not only does it ignore the point that land left untouched can become a thriving ecosystem, but it confuses cause and effect. Extensive grazing is exactly what makes land less useful for crops or reforestation in the first place. “Take away the cattle,” writes Erik Marcus, the author of Meat Market: Animals, Ethics, and Money, “and in a surprisingly short amount of time, most ranching areas become revitalized.” Instead, too many ranchers degrade land with intensive grazing and then, as if the problem were there from the start, defend their actions by claiming that there’s no other viable use for such worn-out land. 31

Revitalizing degraded land is, as Marcus argues, often a real option. Instead, business proceeds as usual and depressed yields due to livestock degradation plague developing continents such as Africa, where production has dropped by as much as 40 percent as a result of soil erosion. It is certainly true that livestock manure can be a valuable source of soil fertility when the animals are carefully integrated into cropping systems. But the global demand for meat is preventing the achievement of such a balance. To wit, an alarming 73 percent of African land in dry areas—areas that get minimal rainfall but where the soil is able to hold much of the moisture—is deemed degraded. This figure is surpassed only in North America, where 74 percent of the land in dry regions is degraded, which is to say rendered unfit for growing crops that could normally survive dry-land conditions (such as dryland wheat). The latter figure is not surprising, given that since 1800, land turned over to grazing has expanded by a factor of six. Today in the United States, 44 percent of all land has cattle or sheep on it. Again, the sad part about this wholesale encroachment onto dry land is that it’s land that could otherwise be used for something that’s becoming increasingly radical: growing plants for people to eat. 32

The

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