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.
Beef isn’t bad for the environment, these pro-beef foodies claim. But what gets lost in pro-bovine…
