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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: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 29 2017, @03:59PM (6 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday December 29 2017, @03:59PM (#615542) Journal

    I don't understand why we need to save pasturage. What is the purpose?

    Honestly, so many of these proposals read like they were composed by people who have never, ever been to the places they're talking about and who are pushing some grand vision based on a theoretical fantasy that has no basis in reality.

    First, the pasturage we're talking about is vast, open grassland. It's not the awesome beauty of the Sierra Nevadas or the Black Hills. It's the endless emptiness that you press down the accelerator to get through between the Black Hills of the world and the rolling green beauty and pocket lakes of Minnesota. You find yourself incredibly grateful to see a herd of cattle and their mobile feeder because it gives you something, dear God, anything to look at other than the soul-sucking nothing.

    Second, pasturage is no barrier to wildlife. In fact, it's a boon. If these ivory tower vegan human-haters had ever even so much as driven through the country they're insisting must be voided of human activity, they'd a) be talking about getting rid of maybe 10 people per 100 miles driven, so it's pretty voided of human activity already, and b) the deer, antelope, and other animals thrive in the pasturage the cows are in. They're thick as fleas. And the bobcats and other predators that trail them have no problem following them there.

    Third, there are no environmental impacts to herds of cattle vs herds of anything else. Any pudding-head Eastern Academic penning these kinds of proposals who believes that herds of millions of cattle walk any lighter on the land than the herds of millions of buffalo that preceded them have obviously never passed through the wake of the modest herds of the latter in the Badlands or Yellowstone.

    So what is the upshot of reducing pasturage? Because we hate cattle? Because we hate humans? We hate meat consumption? Is it that we want to further economically oppress the ranchers in those areas because the fifteen year-old pickups they drive totally prove they're to blame for all that ails the country? Or is this as stupid and partisan as blue-country versus red country?

    I am an environmentalist. I have been a member of the Sierra Club for 20 years. But this kind of thing, which keeps bobbing around the bowl of the public discourse like an unflushable turd, needs to go away.

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  • (Score: 2) by leftover on Friday December 29 2017, @05:44PM (1 child)

    by leftover (2448) on Friday December 29 2017, @05:44PM (#615574)

    and me fresh out of mod points +++++ Insightful

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    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:28AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:28AM (#615708) Homepage

      No worries; I had spares.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @07:36PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 29 2017, @07:36PM (#615622)

    You honestly think that a native species with an ecology adapated to it and vice versa has the same impact as a non-native species? And you are totally unaware of what the midwest and Montana was like before it was turned into endless farmland, that it was a huge grassland with complex ecosystems and we managed to turn it into a dust bowl so severe that Steinbeck wrote an amazing book about it?

    And you're arguing that artificial pastureland doesn't have an impact. What's next, that salmon farming isn't ecologically devastating? That dolphins benefit to using nets to catch tuna?

    Do you think the Anthropocene era is a valid thing?

    • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:46AM

      by Reziac (2489) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:46AM (#615713) Homepage

      Cattle and bison seem to be merely "breeds" (as we'd call such cosmetic differences in dogs) of the same species, rather than truly separate species; they freely interbreed, and most of today's wild bison carry some genes from domestic cattle. They're not really that different. Bison tend to "clearcut" a bit more, probably because they need to eat twice as much per head as a cow, and are therefore less picky.

      --
      And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:35AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Sunday December 31 2017, @04:35AM (#616066) Journal

      Here again we have somebody arguing from theory rather than empirical fact, with a gloss of never-been-there-ism under an overlay of imperfectly remembered junior high history.

      I am exactly aware of what Montana and the Midwest are like. It is not endless farmland. Iowa or Ohio or Illinois could maybe be described that way, but not the plains states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, or North Dakota. Those states are more aptly called endless grassland, because that's what they were and what they still are. Montana has a western third that is made up of the Rocky Mountains, a middle third that is high tablelands and isolated mountain groups like the Judiths, and an eastern third that shades from the tablelands into the prairies of its eastern neighbors.

      I can further tell you that the difference between the grassland where bison graze and where cattle graze is nothing. How can you tell? Walk from the National Bison Range near St. Ignatius in Montana across the fenceline outside the reserve and tell me those grasslands are totally different. Do the same from the grassland in Yellowstone where those bison range and outside the park in Garner. Do the same in the Badlands national park where there are bison, and then walk outside the park where they don't. You will see zero difference in the flora. Why? Because they're grasslands, and the seed from those species spread by substantial wind and the same birds that have always been there.

      So, there's no "artificial pasturage" that you suppose, as though there are hordes of evil ranchers and their minions carefully eradicating all native grasses and species and curating Monsanto-designed franken fodder to feed their awful cattle. It's grassland. The same grassland it's always been. Only now, there are more cattle than bison grazing it. That, though, is beginning to roll back the other direction judging by the relative abundance of bison as a menu option across the western half of the country.

      FYI, the dustbowl never hit Montana. That was centered around the panhandle of Oklahoma and the adjacent states. It was caused by drought and compounded by plowing techniques at the time. They plow differently now. In other words it had nothing to do with cattle or pasturage.

      As for salmon farming or tuna fishing, I make no representation either way on those issues by here asserting that "reducing pasturage" is hogwash.

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      Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Reziac on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:40AM

    by Reziac (2489) on Saturday December 30 2017, @02:40AM (#615711) Homepage

    "there are no environmental impacts to herds of cattle vs herds of anything else."

    If anything, to simulate the most natural condition of these grasslands, the number of cattle needs to be roughly doubled, or maybe tripled: There are somewhere around 80 million head of range cattle in the U.S. today. They replaced, on the same grasslands, an estimated 120 million head of bison. One bison eats about as much as two domestic bovines (and domestic cattle are about 5% more efficient). Do the math.

    Grasslands evolved to be grazed; if they aren't, they soon deteriorate into weeds and eventually erode down to badlands or desert. This happens far faster than today's cattle could be replaced with tomorrow's grazers. This is not croppable land regardless, primarily due to insufficient water. (Crops are much more profitable than livestock, so everyone already crops as much land as possible.)

    Doubling our production of beef cattle would also double the availability of natural fertilizer; right now, tho nearly all stockyard manure is processed into commercial fertilizer, it only covers about half what we actually need for crops. The rest comes from an ugly process involving natural gas. Without this fertilizer, our crop production would drop to about 1/5th of current levels.

    I've never heard the pro-vegewhack contingent explain how, absent meat, they plan to fertilize (let alone water) food crops, which would need to be considerably increased to feed the same number of people. Perhaps they plan instead to get rid of the people? If so, they should lead by example!

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.