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Grass-Fed Beef Won’t Die For Our Sins
A man named Allan Savory gave a TED talk that changed the course of my life.
In this talk, he speaks in vivid terms about the environmental disaster of desertification (the process of arable land turning to desert because of drought, deforestation, etc.), and the counterintuitive miracle of using livestock, which are often blamed for the agricultural practices that lead to desertification, to reverse it.
I ate his talk up and bought his book, “Holistic Management.” At the time I was still a software engineer living in Washington, D.C., looking to make the leap from the tech industry to sustainable agriculture — bison, in particular. Savory, along with handful of other proponents of managed grazing like Allan Nation, Joel Salatin, and Allen Williams, fed my confirmation bias about the wonderful potential of grass-fed herbivores that would not only let me eat all the beef I could ever want, but would also save the planet in the process.
It’s Not the Cow, It’s the How
Between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocating good riddance to “farting cows,” to the EAT-Lancet commission report publishing a “Healthy Reference Diet” that allows for a mere hamburger a week, to the Amazon being set ablaze at record levels to clear land for livestock production, animal agriculture, and beef cattle in particular, has become a favorite target of environmental and climate activists.
Cattle in the United States has traditionally been managed in ways that are either environmentally inefficient (e.g. continuous grazing, which causes cattle to use more land that necessary) or deleterious (e.g. grain finishing, which relies on everything from non-renewable resources like mined water, to severe land-use change like deforestation). And it’s this traditional management that’s been the target of environmental activism, since it’s that management that puts beef into the bellies of nearly all Americans who eat it.
What non-farmer activists don’t see, however, is a nuanced and raging debate about cattle management going on within the beef industry itself — much of that debate centered…
