Counting Cows

Creative math can’t deny U.S. beef is a climate catastrophe

As the clock runs down on avoiding catastrophic climate change, the last thing we should be doing is encouraging America’s burger habit.

Beef gets a bad rap for good reason. There is no sustainable method of producing beef at current levels of consumption. Industrial agriculture is an environmental nightmare, from feed crop to slaughterhouse. And a Harvard study determined that current pastureland could only support 27% of the beef supply if we switched to a grass-fed system — the number would be even smaller if we were assessing a regenerative system. There’s no mathematical way out of this problem but to eat less beef.

And there’s nothing regenerative about single-crop mono culture grown for cattle feed. More than half the grain in the U.S. goes to feeding livestock. Meat production is responsible for 80% of antibiotic use and 37% of pesticides.

Furthermore, a recent article in Wired points out that though little evidence supports the idea that grazing cattle could help slow climate change, the livestock industry is trying to present climate-friendly beef as a way to impede the market success of plant-based alternatives.

Image: Cow standing in mud, resting head on brown metal fence. Photo: Pexels.com.

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