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livingontheland - [Livingontheland] Eating Meat Isn't Bad for the Planet, It's Our System of Raising the Animals That's Wrong

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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Eating Meat Isn't Bad for the Planet, It's Our System of Raising the Animals That's Wrong
  • Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:30:50 -0600


"It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased greenhouse
gasses; it is the corn/ soybean/ chemical fertilizer/ feedlot/ transportation
system under which industrial animals are raised."

Eating Meat Isn't Bad for the Planet, It's Our System of Raising the Animals
That's Wrong
http://www.alternet.org/environment/141898/eating_meat_isn%27t_bad_for_the_planet%2C_it%27s_our_system_of_raising_the_animals_that%27s_wrong/
By Eliot Coleman, Grist.org. Posted August 13, 2009.

Sadly too many have been fooled -- the culprit is not meat eating but rather
the excesses of corporate/industrial agriculture.

I am dismayed that so many people have been so easily fooled on the meat
eating and climate change issue following the UN report ["Livestock's Long
Shadow"]. The culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of
corporate/industrial agriculture. The UN report shows either great ignorance
or possibly the influence of the fossil fuel lobby with the intent of
confusing the public. It is obviously to someone’s benefit to make meat
eating and livestock raising an easily attacked straw man (with the
enthusiastic help of vegetarian groups) in order to cover up the singular
contribution of the only new sources of carbon -- burning the stored carbon
in fossil fuels and to a small extent making cement (both of which release
carbon from long term storage) -- as the reason for increased greenhouse
gasses in the modern era. (Just for ridiculous comparison, human beings,
each exhaling about 1kg of CO2 per day, are responsible for 33% more CO2 per
year than fossil fuel transportation. Maybe we should get rid of us.)

If I butcher a steer for my food, and that steer has been raised on grass on
my farm, I am not responsible for any increased CO2. The pasture-raised
animal eating grass in my field is not producing CO2, merely recycling it
(short term carbon cycle) as grazing animals (and human beings) have since
they evolved. It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased
greenhouse gasses; it is the corn/ soybean/ chemical fertilizer/ feedlot/
transportation system under which industrial animals are raised. When I think
about the challenge of feeding northern New England, where I live, from our
own resources, I cannot imagine being able to do that successfully without
ruminant livestock able to convert the pasture grasses into food. It would
not be either easy or wise to grow arable crops on the stony and/or hilly
land that has served us for so long as productive pasture. By comparison
with my grass fed steer, the soybeans cultivated for a vegetarian’s dinner,
if done with motorized equipment, are responsible for increased CO2.

But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess flatulence
is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural
grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years ago
when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America not to
mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating
vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain
lions, etc. Did the methane from their digestion and the nitrous oxide from
their manure cause temperatures to rise then? Or could there be other
contributing factors today resulting from industrial agriculture, factors
that change natural processes, which are not being taken into account? It
has long been known that when grasslands are chemically fertilized their
productivity is increased but their plant diversity is diminished. A recent
study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1, pp. 45 - 49) documents how that
the diminished diversity from sowing only two or three grasses and legumes in
modern pastures results in diminished availability of numerous secondary
nutritional compounds, for example tannins from the minor pasture forbs,
which are known to greatly reduce methane emissions. Could not the artificial
fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure? Might not
the increased phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have
modified digestibility? I am sure that future research will document other
contributing factors of industrial agricultural practices on animal
emissions. The fact is clear. It is not the livestock; it is the way they
are raised. But what about clearing the Brazilian rain forest? Well, the
bulk of that is for soybeans and if we stopped feeding grain to cattle much
of the acreage presently growing grain in the Midwest could become pasture
again and we wouldn’t need Brazilian land. (US livestock presently consume 5
times as much grain as the US population does directly.) And long term
pasture, like the Great Plains once was, stores an enormous amount of carbon
in the soil.

My interest in this subject comes not just because I am a farmer and a meat
eater, but also because something seems not to make sense here as if the data
from the research has failed to take some other human mediated influence into
account. But even more significantly, if we humans were not burning fossil
fuels and thus not releasing long-term carbon from storage and if we were not
using some 90 megatons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, would we even be
discussing this issue?

If those people concerned about rising levels of greenhouse gasses, instead
of condemning meat eating, were condemning the enormous output of greenhouse
gasses due to fossil fuel and fertilizer use by a greedy and biologically
irresponsible agriculture, I would cheer that as a truthful statement even if
they weren’t perceptive enough to continue on and mention that the only "new"
carbon, the carbon that is responsible for rising CO2 levels in the
atmosphere, is not biogenic from livestock but rather anthropogenic from our
releasing the carbon in long term storage (coal, oil, natural gas.)
Targeting livestock as a smoke screen in the climate change controversy is a
very mistaken path to take since it results in hiding our inability to deal
with the real causes. When people are fooled into ignorantly condemning the
straw man of meat eating, who I suspect has been set up for them by the
fossil fuel industry, I am appalled by how easily human beings allow
themselves to be deluded by their corporate masters.





  • [Livingontheland] Eating Meat Isn't Bad for the Planet, It's Our System of Raising the Animals That's Wrong, Tradingpost, 08/13/2009

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