Fixing the Broken Record of Anti-Meat “Facts”

Beef, in particular, has become public enemy #1, and despite regenerative agriculture’s lived experience that “it’s not the cow, it’s the how,” naysayers persist.

Jul 08, 2022

Meat and other animal products have been part of our diet for at least 2 million years, yet despite this, they’re increasingly, and wrongfully, vilified for our health and environmental crises (and per some vegan disciples, our moral and ethical dilemmas).

Beef, in particular, has become public enemy #1, and despite regenerative agriculture’s lived experience that “it’s not the cow, it’s the how,” naysayers persist.

For example, Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald of the Climavores podcast, a show touted to be about eating for a changing planet, just released an episode titled, “It’s not the ‘how,’ it’s the cow.”

Packaged eloquently amongst “undeniable facts,” the duo opines that regenerative grazing is an empty promise and that we should declare independence from meat and instead eat more pork and plant- and cell-based meat alternatives.

To arrive at these conclusions, they pose the following misconceptions as fact:

Misconception #1: Deforestation is caused by the beef industry
Misconception #2: Grazing animals occupy valuable land
Misconception #3: Methane from livestock is the main cause of climate change
Misconception #4: Regenerative grazing doesn’t work and only makes the carbon problem worse

If you listen to this podcast (or 99.9% of most meat eschewing media), you’ll hear these same arguments regurgitated with differing degrees of vitriol or virtue signaling aimed to portray meat (and meat advocates) as the bane of our past, present, and future.

As I mentioned in last week’s Regeneration, people are more concerned than ever about the impact of their food choices on the planet - this is a good thing. It’s worth asking questions.

But it’s also worth asking questions of the “answers” we frequently see in the headlines.

I’m glad more folks like those behind Climavores are bringing awareness to the intersection of our diet and climate. However, I want to call out these misconceptions in an effort to encourage a more balanced conversation about the important role of beef and other animals in our food system.

Misconception #1: Deforestation is caused by the beef industry

There is no doubt that destroying rainforests is problematic, but to blame beef-eating Americans distorts the reality of global beef markets and emissions.

Beef consumption anywhere does NOT lead to a global expansion of production, pressuring deforestation of the rainforests to establish pasture.

How did we come to blame beef for deforestation then?

Back in 2006, the Livestock’s Long Shadow report, published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), erroneously claimed that livestock was responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than transport.

This headline attracted a lot of attention; the retraction of the report after being exposed as false, however, did not.

When Frank Mitloehner analyzed the data of the report, he found many methodological errors. In the case of cattle, they conducted a full lifecycle analysis of the industry, meaning they included the feed production, transportation of the feed, processing, transportation to the stores, etc. - everything from pasture to plate.

The researchers did NOT conduct the same cradle-to-grave assessment on the transportation sector - only tailpipe emissions were calculated. The manufacturing of vehicles, the mining and manufacturing of the metal and other raw materials to make these vehicles, the energy requirements to run the factories, the transportation and refining of oils, etc. were not considered.

This report is the genesis of damning beef for deforestation, too.

40% of their 18% total emissions from livestock figure were deemed deforestation, clearing, and burning, yet they only took measurements in a few specific areas in the world - Brazil, Asia, and Africa - and generalized them across the whole global industry. In other words, they assumed the cattle rancher in Montana was deforesting land at the same rate as the places they measured in Brazil.

This is not only unfair to the rancher in Montana, but it’s downright false. The United States as a whole is reforesting and very little beef imported into the States is from the deforested parts of the world.

Furthermore, most of the land that is being cleared for agriculture is to grow soybeans.

“But those soybeans feed cattle!” folks like the Climavores proclaim.

Really? According to an analysis published by the University of Oxford’s Climate Research Network, soy consumption is broken down as follows:

37% is fed to poultry (the largest consumer of global production)
20% is fed to pigs
6% goes to aquaculture
2% is fed to beef and dairy cattle and
The rest is used in human food products and dog food.

These figures strike me as particularly ironic after listening to the “It’s not the how, it’s the cow” podcast wherein they damn beef for deforestation yet proceed to encourage listeners to swap their beef for pork or chicken.

Eating or producing less beef in the United States won’t stop deforestation in other countries. Why? Because we’ve already slashed our consumption and production and deforestation continues.

Bottom line: If you’re buying local, well-raised beef (especially in the United States), you are not driving deforestation.

Misconception #2: Grazing animals occupy valuable land

“The big problem is land use,” Haspel and Grunwald state after they depict America as a cattle-trodden wild west, representing “rugged individualism and American exceptionalism.”

Do cattle take up too much land?

Whether you’re listening to vegan-centric podcasts or catching the curtails of Meatless Monday’s latest campaigns, you’ll hear that livestock take up anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of our agricultural land.

These sensational numbers imply that if we removed these land-intensive animals, we’d free up more space for tomatoes, lettuce, or legumes.

Two problems arise with this land-use argument.

First, no amount of tomatoes will give you the nutrients that beef can provide. For accurate comparisons, we have to compare foods of the same nutrient values. Animal foods are far more nutrient-dense with bioavailable (useable) nutrition than plant foods.

Second, and most profound: most of the world’s agricultural land CAN NOT grow crops.

The FAO estimates that less than one-third of the earth’s agricultural land is suitable for growing crops - 28% is arable, 3% permanent crops.

Guess what the remainder 69% of our agricultural land is best suited for?

Pasture and rangeland. Non-arable land that’s either too rocky, too hilly, too windy, too cool, too dry, or without enough topsoil to grow crops. It can be grazed by animals who take sunlight, rainfall, and forage humans can’t eat and upcycle it into useable protein.

Do we need to reflect on the Dust Bowl of the early 20th century to relearn what happens when we try to megacrop swaths of land that were created by ancient, roaming grazing herds? The more we megacrop, the more we degrade the soil. As soil health fails, so too will the land we have available to farm.

It’s not the cow, it’s the plow.

Bottom line: Removing cattle from our food system doesn’t mean that we’ll have more land for crops and will cause more harm than good.

Misconception #3: Methane from livestock is the main cause of climate change

Cow farts. It’s the most common, bogus, and most inaccurate - cows burp - claim against beef in the media. There are many contributors to methane production but cattle are the villains in today’s story. However, methane from any natural, biological process is reductionistic.

Why?

Methane produced biogenically is a part of the earth’s natural system. The methane emitted from cattle is part of the biogenic carbon cycle. They transform existing carbon, in the form of grass and other forage, into methane as part of their digestive process. It’s belched out and after about ten years is broken down into water and carbon dioxide molecules, which are cycled back to grow more grass.

Fossil fuels on the other hand are not a part of the biogenic carbon cycle. We extract ancient carbon that has been locked underground for millennia, releasing new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which lasts thousands of years compared to methane’s ten years.

Many scientists have concluded that cattle are unfairly blamed for their methane emissions as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. In the IAEA Annual Report in 2008, researchers state:

Since 1999 atmospheric methane concentrations have leveled off while the world population of ruminants has increased at an accelerated rate. Prior to 1999, world ruminant populations were increasing at the rate of 9.15 million head/year but since 1999 this rate has increased to 16.96 million head/year. Prior to 1999 there was a strong relationship between change in atmospheric methane concentrations and the world ruminant populations. However, since 1999 this strong relation has disappeared. This change in relationship between the atmosphere and ruminant numbers suggests that the role of ruminants in greenhouse gases may be less significant than originally thought, with other sources and sinks playing a larger role in global methane accounting.

This doesn’t even acknowledge the fact that before the mid-1800s, there were about 30-60 million bison, over 10 million elk, 30-60 million white-tailed deer, 10-13 million mule deer, and 35-100 million pronghorn and caribou grazing North America’s grasslands. We’re now carrying a fraction of the animals and it’s estimated that in presettlement America, methane emissions were about 86% of current emissions from both farmed and wild ruminants.

In addition to cattle emissions being overblown, it’s also increasingly evident that methane emissions from leaky infrastructure in the oil and gas industry are underestimated by 48-76%. So not only are fossil fuels the leading emitter of carbon dioxide, but this would also make them the leading emitter of methane.

It’s not the cow, it’s the car.

Food waste, landfills, and rice production are all major emitters of methane, too. And the next time you hear someone discuss cow farts as a reason to go vegan, encourage them to read this article about their own gaseous emissions.

Bottom line: Blaming cows for methane is a red herring for the fossil fuel industry.

Misconception #4: Regenerative grazing doesn’t work and only makes the carbon problem worse

Or so Haspel and Grunwald conclude based on a bias against the word ‘regenerative’ and an outdated Politico story about TomKat Ranch, a regenerative ranch in California that is transparent about their data here.

It’s fascinating to me that some folks can instinctively utter “Wow” at the beauty of a regenerative ranch and in the same breath recommend lab-based meats as a more sustainable option than beef.

Though the carbon sequestration capabilities of regenerative grazing have been measured and proven, carbon storage is only one small benefit. A regenerative food system can increase biodiversity, build better soils with greater water holding capacity, promotes resilient, regional foodsheds, create healthier environments, economies, and communities, restore our relationship with our land and each other, and numerous other tangible and intangible benefits.

No, it’s not as profitable as patented foods such as lab meat, but the ecological needs of our food system necessitate a return to farming in a more natural way.

Regenerative, along with many words, has been vulnerable to greenwashing, but that’s a weak excuse to ignore it.

Regenerative agriculture is a generalized phrase to represent nuanced practices that vary from ecosystem to ecosystem.

Bottom line: To shun a movement because it’s too nuanced for a world increasingly intolerant of nuance is short-sighted.

Again, I’m glad more folks are discussing our diet’s impact on the planet, but before we start damning foods that we’ve been eating for hundreds of years, it might be wise to pause and reflect.

Are cows really destroying our planet? Or is it a scapegoat for something else?

The Regeneration

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