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posted by janrinok on Friday December 29 2017, @03:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-your-beef? dept.

Rethinking how the US grows beef

As of now, cattle eat not only local pasture, but also grains, hay, and grass that is grown elsewhere and stored. A recent analysis by an international team of researchers looked into what would change if the US switched to sustainable ranching, in which cattle eat only from local grasslands and agricultural byproducts.

It turns out that the current amount of pastureland in the US could only support 45 percent of our current beef production and consumption. This admittedly narrow definition of sustainability relies on feeding cows more agricultural byproducts, which, as of now, account for only about 10 percent of their diet; the scientists note that, "despite the recent doubling of distillers' grain utilization," these byproducts are still plentiful.

If we were to cut the pastureland that ranchers currently use in half, that would diminish beef availability to... 43 percent of current values, rather than 45. So freeing up about 135 hectares—almost a quarter of our national surface area, and twice the size of France—would decrease beef availability by only two percentage points.

Most of this is not especially productive grassland, and it could be rewilded or conserved. But some of it is high-quality cropland that could be used to grow other food sources, like pork, poultry, grains, legumes, vegetables, and even dairy. All of these utilize less water and fertilizer than beef while emitting fewer greenhouse gases. In addition, they provide us with more calories, fiber, micronutrients, and even protein than the beef they'd supplant. The only thing we'd be missing is vitamin B12, for which the authors of this analysis offer a quick fix: take a pill.

A model for 'sustainable' US beef production (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41559-017-0390-5) (DX)


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  • (Score: 2) by arcz on Friday December 29 2017, @06:23AM (2 children)

    by arcz (4501) on Friday December 29 2017, @06:23AM (#615467) Journal

    Don't regulate and allow the market to take care of it. If food is really needed, people will buy the cheaper food. We have enough food, hence there is no market drive to reduce land usage.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 29 2017, @02:30PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 29 2017, @02:30PM (#615524)

    Allowing the market to "take care of it" will ensure that every possible externalization of costs will be exploited to the fullest. This includes things like toxic waste dumping on pasturelands (mostly due to use of toxic chemicals for pest removal from cattle), destruction and degradation of wildlands in the public trust, buildup of antibiotic resistance in the microbial pest population to make the meat grow faster and cheaper, feeding the human obesity epidemic with growth hormones passed through the meat, and on and on.

    Regulation is. There is no truly free market, if there were people would be grazing cattle on your front lawn because: no rules, free grass, cheaper meat. Cow poop on your front porch? Too bad, unavoidable byproduct.

    So, the question is: what regulations do we want - and how do we adjust the ones we have?

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 29 2017, @02:32PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 29 2017, @02:32PM (#615526)

    Or, to put another spin on it, we don't really have enough land - or so says the 6th mass extinction event. If that's a thing that you care about, then habitat restoration is one important piece to slow the extinctions.

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