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When Alan Savory gave a TED talk in 2013, he captivated the world. Savory’s speech cut right
to the point: climate change, overpopulation, and desertification threatened to swallow the
human world if left unchecked. But what delighted Savory’s audience, as well as a number of the 4.3
million viewers on YouTube, was not this dire forecast, but rather Savory’s solution to the
problem: eat more meat and graze more cattle. That’s right, Savory outlined a win-win scenario
wherein if we just grazed more cattle in a very specific way, we could potentially
turn back the tides of desertification, sequester carbon, and stop climate change.
Which to me, in 2013 sounded great. Except, as I later learned, Allan Savory was wrong.
This is the story of grassfed beef and rotational grazing. How it came to be this win-win solution
to climate change, and how the hype around its implementation is, well, just plain wrong.
Grass-fed beef will save the world?
Savory is not alone on his quest to proselytize the good word of beef.
Michael Pollen, in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, gushes over Joel Salatin's intensive
grazing techniques at Polyface farms, and even two years ago, I suggested in a video about going
vegan, that rotational grazing systems had the potential to mitigate climate change. Of course,
not all grass-fed beef is rotationally grazed beef, and indeed rotational grazing practices
can vary from farm to farm. One rancher might only rotate their cows every 2 months,
while another might rotate them every day. In general, grass-fed beef can be seen as an
umbrella term for a variety of grazing systems, under which rotational or regenerative grazing
operations are considered the gold standard and are lauded as possible climate saviours.
The core belief behind all of these regenerative systems is that by constantly moving high numbers
of cattle from one plot to the next, the cows will indiscriminately eat up plants--shocking
them into growing deep roots. And when the plants eventually die, these roots will lock
carbon into the ground. Regenerative grazing proponents also claim that livestock help
sequester carbon with their manure, as well as by breaking up the soil crust with their hooves
and burying carbon in the dirt where it is less prone to re-release. The result of all of this
carbon sequestration, regenerative ranchers claim, is that these systems suck more greenhouse gases
out of the air than cows emit through belching and manure. Essentially, regenerative grazing
acts as a carbon sink that heals the soil and sucks greenhouse gases out of the air. And there
have been a few studies that support this carbon sequestration hypothesis. In the Upper Midwest,
one study found that high-rotation grazing did indeed store more carbon then the cows created.
But here’s the thing: these papers are outliers in a vast body of academic work on the subject.
As we’ll see soon, these claims are mostly unfounded, have better alternatives, and when they
do work, often represent best-case scenarios with perfectly managed systems in the perfect setting.
Why beef can’t save the world:
Despite Savory’s beautiful pictures and convincing rhetoric of regrowth and grazing, his claims have
been heavily criticized for a lack of scientific evidence. Keep in mind, this is the same man,
who in 1969, argued for the massacred 40,000 elephants in Zimbabwe because he thought they were
ruining their own habitat. Even Joel Salatin knows that his farm is not that sustainable: “Actually,
everyone else calls us a sustainable farm. I don’t call us a sustainable farm, because at
the end of the day I really don’t think we should be raising the number of broilers that we raise,
for that very reason.” In a comprehensive analysis of the scientific research on rotational grazing,
The Food Climate Research Network found that grazing systems only sequester around 20-60%
of the emissions from livestock. In addition, grasslands can often reach a carbon storage
equilibrium within a few decades. Which means that the soil’s ability to sequester carbon slows over
time and then eventually stops. Essentially, soils are not just some bottomless pit in which carbon
can be endlessly stored. So, when the soil reaches that equilibrium point the cattle still grazing
on the land will most definitely be creating a net addition to greenhouse gas emissions in the
atmosphere. Research and conventional wisdom also shows that grass-fed beef requires more and older
cows than feedlot finished beef. This is because grazed cows get a lot more exercise and fatten
up much slower than their kin in feedlots. The end weights of grazed cows are generally lower,
and the time it takes to get them to that weight is longer. All this means that cows have more
time to emit greenhouse gases when grazed. And finally, regenerative grazing techniques
require a lot of land. Right now, grazing-only ruminants contribute just 1g of protein per person
per day in the global protein supply. And yet, despite contributing a negligible amount to the
global protein mix, livestock grazing uses 26% of liveable land. Oh and beef production is the
number-one driver of tropical deforestation in South America. So regenerative grazing,
while good in theory, on the ground fails to live up to its hype. If scaled up, it would require
massive tracts of land and could potentially create more emissions than it prevents. Indeed,
in terms of the climate, it could be dangerous to pursue regenerative grazing, especially when there
are perfectly sound alternatives that are known to sequester carbon and create far fewer emissions.
What should we do?
So if grass-fed beef and rotational grazing methods won’t mitigate climate change,
then what should we do? Let’s consider what would happen if we didn’t need grazing lands for
livestock. We could instead implement reforestation, aforestation, and rewilding plans
that over time could potentially lock up way more carbon than grazing systems. And vegetable-based
farming systems like the no-till, compost-heavy operation at Singing Frogs farm in California,
demonstrate that it’s possible to sequester carbon without using cattle. But there are still over 200
million people who rely on grazing as a source of financial and nutritional stability. For them,
a transition to rotational grazing systems must be a start, but a full transition away from a
meat-based economy has to happen to dramatically reduce emissions, which means ranchers and cattle
farmers across the world need ample support from governments to facilitate that transition.
But, this would also be a transition for consumers. Cutting out meat is one of the
most effective and achievable personal solutions to climate change. Project Drawdown models that if
50% of the world adopted plant-rich diets we’d be able to avoid 65.02 gigatons of
carbon dioxide-equivalent gases by 2050, which is about the same impact that removing
every single form of transportation from the earth for nine years would have. But Americans
in particular eat a lot of meat, and it’s challenging to stop buying animal products
in a world where a full meat-based meal is often cheaper and easier to access than produce or meat
alternatives. Which means that government must also subsidize and promoting the
practices of operations like Singing Frogs Farm or vegetable farms in neighborhoods experiencing
food apartheid. Because, at the end of the day, fostering food systems that create access to
nutritious and pleasurable plant-based food means fostering food systems that protect the climate.
This video took a while to research because there’s so much out there on grazed beef.
But honestly, that’s one of my favorite parts of the creation process. I love diving into
educational content, which is why I’m constantly recommending Brilliant. It’s a
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