Greener Pastures: On Beef

With convincing mimicked meat widely available and a generation of lab-grown meat startups soon bringing their products to market, consumers now have viable workarounds for the long-known environmental problems of eating beef. Even growing up in the 1990s surrounded by Capri-Suns, Velveeta, and Apple Jacks, this moment goes far beyond fruit flavoring or hypesweet shelf-stability: we have isolated meat itself as a product to be manufactured from plant products, flesh entirely independent of field or farm.

My instinct has been to celebrate this space — I know very well the cultural staying power of beef, growing up in smoky parking lots of Packers tailgates and Christmas Eve church services salivating at the tenderloin waiting for us at home. Beef is a vital component of the foodways I was raised in, and is the backbone of many cornerstone dishes in America’s diverse cuisines. Whether it’s a burger or brisket or lengua, it’s wishful thinking to expect Americans to wean themselves off beef in a meaningful way.

So given the immense harm we know beef production inflicts on the world, these low-footprint options are able to meet meat eaters where they are and give them a direct substitute at a comparable price point.

But underneath this optimism, I worry: beef production is broken because of monopolies concentrating processing into overly dense Animal Feeding Operations (AFOs) and their supersized variant, Concentrated AFOs (CAFOs), devastating their local ecosystems. It’s broken because government subsidizes these major producers and makes it easy to greenwash beef and its production methods and sources. Beef production is broken, in short, because America is broken — in exchange for a cheap and plentiful product, Americans have let corporations dictate government policy and inflict devastating ecological harm.

Maybe, recognizing this, trusting well-financed corporations like Beyond and Impossible as well as the same agribusiness monopolies like Tyson and Cargill, is a failure of imagination to address what is so wrong in our food systems. Maybe before stepping into another brave new world of synthetic beef, we should ask — what was beef like before CAFOs?

Bovine Basics and the Impact of CAFOs

Cows are ruminants, with multi-chambered stomachs home to bacteria that allow cows to eat grasses that are otherwise inedible to mammals. Their bulky, slow-twitch muscles are built to stand for hours feeding and chewing, spitting back the partially-digested grasses for additional chewing.

Traditionally, a cow would be raised at pasture, feeding on grasses and clover (forage) until reaching slaughter weight, taking 20-28 months to reach a typical weight of 1,150 pounds. In an AFO-type setting, cows start their lives grazing grass (usually under one year), but then spend much of their lives (up to 8 months) bulking up on a variety of manufactured foods: corn feed, used distilling grains, and grass pellets (1). The nutrient-dense engineered feedings lead to quick growth and a mild, sweet flavor of beef that Americans have come to prefer and the USDA certification system heavily favors.

The feedlot lifecycle is strikingly fast: as few as 16 months to reach 1,300 pounds. In this expedited setting, everything is concentrated: the life cycle, the living space, the feeding systems, the manure systems, and the methane the digestive microbes in the cows produce.

The most troubling concentration is the animal waste an AFO produces. The largest CAFOs annually generating nearly 2 million tons of it per farm. Estimates vary, but American farm animals annually produce 3-30 times more excrement than American humans, and one CAFO can produce more than the city of Philadelphia. At these volumes, the ground is incapable of absorbing the excrement, prompting the manure to denature into volatile ammonia and run off into waterways (2).

Large feedlots are only the most visual element of this industrial supply — every head of cattle in each feedlot also requires 6-10 pounds of feed per pound of cow, or 7,800 pounds of feed in the cow’s lifetime.

I’m also struck that climate change will disproportionately impact communities of color, be it through exposure to runoff and waste, air quality, or environmental collapse in the warmest parts of the globe.

Even with a widespread awareness of the problems of beef, we are not making much progress. US beef production has set a record every year for 5 years, and has doubled since 1960. Between 1990 and 2016, methane emissions from beef increased by 20%, even as overall production only increased 10%. Today, ¼ of all US methane emissions are from beef (3, 4).

What’s the alternative? By some measures, the highly industrialized production of beef in the US is the most efficient in human history. Is this as green as beef can get, with the environmental harm concentrated in a smaller number of AFOs?

Greener Pastures

There are three waste streams associated with cattle farming: methane emissions, manure pollution, and agricultural waste from feed production. Methane emissions from cattle production are an unavoidable result of bovine digestive tracts, but the other two (manure and feed agriculture), can be addressed by returning to how cattle were raised for generations before the industrialization of beef: rotating them through grass fields at a cadence that allows the same fields to replenish before the next feeding.

This regenerative method of cattle raising ensures excrement is only released into the soil no faster than it can be absorbed. When 10,000 cattle produce manure in a small lot, that manure is sure to run off into waterways or release ammonia into the air. 100 cattle scattered over an acre, however, their manure is absorbed back into the soil, bringing back nitrogen and carbon and increasing the and fertilizing the very grass on which cows feed. The extra organic matter also increases the soil’s ability to hold water, further reducing the risk of runoff (5, 6).

Grange management like this goes further than feeding the cattle and minimizing their waste runoff: forage plants reduces soil erosion and sequesters so much carbon that regenerative cattle farming can be a net carbon sink — meaning the environmental damage of methane and carbon dioxide emissions is lower than the environmental gain of the grazing land’s carbon sequestration (5, 6).

This was a bombshell learning for me: it’s possible to raise cattle in a way that’s a net carbon benefit. There’s still a case to make that even healthy cows on well-managed grassland is an unnecessary corruption of nature, but when thinking about the nutrient density and cultural weigh of beef, I still find this an incredibly exciting development.

The solution is to look for the grass-fed label and all is well, right? Unfortunately, not at all.The “grass-fed” label only indicates cattle that have been at some point fed grass. This can include both the early stage of a cow’s life in which they’re nearly always fed on grassland (even for the most aggregated CAFOs), or even more perverse, with grass pellets fed to those cows in the CAFO feeding troughs (7). Labels in the US are no more clear about where the beef was born and raised. In 2015, the Obama administration rolled back County of Origin Labeling which indicated where beef or pork were raised. As a result, your “grass-fed” and “product of the USA” beef could have spent its entire life in Argentina, only being butchered and processed in the US.

These failures don’t just prevent consumers from supporting the farmers they want to support, they actively put a hand on the scale in favor of the big guys, who are able to let consumers off the hook with greenwashed labels on their monopoly CAFO beef.

It’s an uphill climb against bad government policy, grocery store economics, and misleading marketing, but there are still ways for consumers to enjoy the kind of sustainable beef that breaks away from our broken industrial system. It’s harder and yes, a bit more expensive, but the long-term costs of a wasted planet are so much higher than a few extra dollars per pound. I’m pessimistic that Congress, the White House, or the FDA are going to step in in favor of the little farmer instead of Cargill or Tyson and their multi-million lobbying budgets. Even left-of-center politicians are unlikely to assist, with Cargill donating more to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden than any Republican candidates.

This pessimism makes it more attractive to quit eating beef altogether, replacing the few times I prepare beef with mimicked products like Impossible or Beyond. But this seems a kind of environmental amnesia — we simply cannot fix the problems of industrial eating with even more industrial eating. And so I keep come to the pasture, coming ever closer to cutting out cheap, CAFO beef altogether, and paying top dollar to producers of sustainable beef on biodynamic farms with a range of animal and plant products in keeping with the seasons and their climate. If nothing else, don’t the cows just seem a whole lot happier?