Is Grass Fed Beef Better for the Earth than Factory Farmed Beef?
Anyone who shops food stores that sell high quality, and organic food will notice “grass fed beef” in the meat case. The assumption many have is that grass fed beef is better for the earth or for you than beef produced in factory farms. Let’s look at the health of the earth and see if that’s true.
Beef is produced two ways. There are large feedlots where thousands of cows are fed in troughs. They are slaughtered after they reach a target weight and turned into steaks and hamburgers. Then there are grass-fed cows that eat out on the land, in pastures or other environments. Many of these cows go to the factory farm to get fattened up for sale and slaughter.
In the rural West, lots of ranchers are advertising that they produce grass fed beef. They may graze their cattle on private land, or they may graze it on public lands such as US Forest Service or BLM lands, or both. In wet places like the eastern US or Midwest or the coastal areas of the West, cattle can find good forage. In the interior of the West, which is mostly dry, even desert, cattle struggle to find food on public lands and they do a great deal of damage to the land while being grazed. But for ranchers who graze their cattle on public lands, the “grass fed” label makes what they are doing sound conscientious even though it is highly controversial.
Beef eaters may think that grass fed beef is better for the earth than factory farm beef where cattle are clustered together and fed a mixture of substances that may include grass, alfalfa, ground up dead animals, corn stalks, corn, antibiotics, hormones etc. The waste these factory farms produce pollutes ground water, rivers and streams, and is a huge problem for disposal since the cows produce it constantly in large quantities. Lagoons holding waste have broken and flooded into rivers and into the ocean where the nitrogen creates dead zones at sea.
Factory farm cattle, including dairy cows, eat alfalfa and hay (among other materials) grown on 654 million acres of land in the US. In the western US, most of our water supply goes to irrigating cattle feed farms, or for watering cows in dairies and feedlots. Seventy percent of the water in the Colorado River, for example, goes to producing livestock feed. Meanwhile the Colorado River is shrinking as climate change reduces the amount of precipitation and warming increases evaporation. The 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River are on the verge of a water supply crisis.
Is grass fed beef better? Probably not. Since pasture fed cows are more active and exposed to the sun more than those in factory barns, they use more water than factory cows. How much more is difficult to calculate but there is no advantage in terms of water use for grass fed cattle over factory farm cattle.
However, if we consider cows raised on public lands in the arid west, then we see cows using water that would otherwise be consumed by wildlife and plants. Cattle denude stream side vegetation which exposes streams to the sun and increases evaporation. They widen streams by trampling the banks which causes even more evaporation and ruins fish habitat. By trampling the ground and removing vegetation across the landscape, cattle cause more water to runoff public lands rather than soaking into the ground where it can feed streams and groundwater. Often this damage is happening in the headwaters of streams that feed our rivers.
Grass fed beef from public lands is a major factor in declining water supplies in the West.
It turns out grass fed beef need a great deal of land also. We all know that in arid areas, large acreages are needed to feed a single cow. But even in more productive area like the wet areas near the West Coast, the northern Rockies or the Midwest, cows feeding on pastureland requires more land than intensive feed agriculture used by factory cows. To feed one American their annual beef consumption by grass fed beef would require about 12 acres per person per year. This is a large amount of productive land, and it would be impossible for us to convert the entire cattle production system to grass feeding because there is nowhere near enough land in the US to be devoted to cow grazing. Thus, the necessity of factory farms for cows for beef and dairy.
The average American eats about 210 pounds of meat a year. If we all cut that in half, it would do a great deal to take pressure off our water supply and it would greatly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, which are the largest single source of climate warming gases from humans.
When you go into the store and see the grass-fed beef in the meat case, why not just skip it and eat something else instead. Remember the motto on the bumper stickers: Eat Less Beef!
