Julian Sellers is a retired software engineer and a near-lifelong environmentalist and birder. He is a 40-year resident of St. Paul, an active member of the St. Paul Audubon Society, and a member of the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union and the Land Stewardship Project.
The question we should ask is: Why aren’t we all addressing climate change by regularly enjoying a meal with 100 percent grass-fed beef?
A Jan. 4 Community Voices commentary posed this question: “Why aren’t we all addressing climate change at each meal by skipping the meat?”
The campaign to fight climate change by avoiding eating meat is well-intentioned but not well-informed. In 2017, agriculture contributed 8.4 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and meat production was responsible for some part of that. But peer-reviewed studies show that even eliminating all of our cattle would have a relatively minor effect on climate change. In contrast, incorporating cattle into a regenerative agriculture system could sequester enough carbon to turn agriculture into a carbon sink, while also eliminating much other environmental damage caused by industrial agriculture.
The problem
About 97 percent of the beef produced in the United States comes from cattle that spend half their lives in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), also known as feedlots, each of which might hold tens of thousands of animals. (Imagine the effect of that many animals on the groundwater, surface water, and air.) In a CAFO, the young steers are kept in a pen, standing or lying in manure, and eating mostly corn fortified with proteins. They are given growth hormones and antibiotics to add weight and keep them from dying from the unnatural diet and unsanitary conditions. (This promotes growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, caused at least 23,000 human deaths annually in the U.S. as of 2013.) The meat from these obese cattle is high in saturated fat with an unhealthful ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids).
Our industrial agriculture system of row crops and feedlots, subsidized by taxpayers to the tune of $14 billion in 2017, has given us:
- groundwater and surface water polluted by pesticides and fertilizers;
- massive soil erosion;
- loss of soil carbon, organic matter, and soil fertility;
- destruction of grasslands, possibly our most endangered and least protected ecosystems;
- loss of insects, birds, and animals;
- a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.
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