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Morgan Mackin
October 8, 2010
Grass-fed Beef: The Best Environmental Choice
Lindsay Rajt, author of There’s No Reason to Eat Animals, claims that raising
animals for food produces 51 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions each year.
Rajt suggests that food shortages are a result of consuming meat and that we can
cycle more food without using the animals as food. A majority of the gas emissions
are coming from the feedlots and all of the chemicals that are being injected into the
animals and this is causing an environmental disaster. By consuming, purchasing,
and producing grass-fed meat, the environment will not be contaminated with
harmful chemicals that pour out of large-scale feedlots.
Knowing that a grain-based diet for cattle could be producing E. Coli bacteria
in your meat, would you still eat it? Author Jo Robinson wrote, Why Grass-fed is Best!
And Mother Earth News wrote an article expanding Robinson’s idea as well as
giving their two cents on grass-fed beef. Robinson makes the point that, “…crowding
cattle onto feedlots…causes serious problems with air and water quality,” (6). Cattle
today are placed into these jam-packed feedlots with no space to walk and they can
barely lie down and all of their feces just sit under them and emit carbon dioxide
into the air. The cattle’s legs become so weak from standing all of the time and the
steroids that they are given that they slowly start to die. Why not let the cows live a
healthy life in fields where they are free to walk and lie down as they please while
letting the soil take care of their manure in the natural way? Continually supporting
the feedlots is just asking for our planet to slowly start to die. E. Coli will sit in the
soil for months and months until it floods into the feedlots and runs into the
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waterway thus leading to a contamination of water. By transferring cows out of
feedlots and into open space, we can reduce the spread of E. Coli, not just in beef, but
also in vegetables and our water system.
How do we want our water to taste in 10 years from now? Air and water
contamination are caused by a large amount of the hormones, antibiotics, and heavy
metal that exists in feedlots. These feedlots are holding close to ten thousand cows
by the time the animals are down to the last months of their lives. These cattle are
not allowed to leave the feedlot, therefore never seeing grass (Gwin 190-191). The
people that run and own the feedlots are allowing all of this contamination happen.
We do not need to feed cattle large amounts of hormones, but instead it is a choice
so that we can make as much money as possible, but shouldn’t the concern of the
planet stop all this? While the production of traditional meat today is quick, it is
costing us the environment and by eliminating the feedlots and acres of corn that
are used just to feed the cattle, we can make room for roaming cattle. This satisfies
the people that love meat as well as the environmentalists that are fighting for a
greener planet. “Alternative, “niche” meats like grass-fed and organic are, to date,
typically produced at much smaller scales than the commercial beef industry,
avoiding many of the latter’s problems,” (192). Gwin explains here that grass-fed,
although a very small portion of the meat industry now, you avoid and even help to
reduce the numerous issues that deal with the environment. If all of the meat
industries today switched from keeping their cattle in feedlots to pasture, we could
work towards a quick production rate for grass-fed beef.
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Over the years the amount of carbon dioxide that has been released into our
planet has skyrocketed. Richard Manning, author of The Amazing Benefits of Grassfed Meat, suggests the idea that all of the land farmers use for crops could be made
into carbon sinks. These carbon sinks would “pull carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere and slow global warming as well as conserve water,” (Manning 53).
When cornfields get a hold of carbon dioxide, they do in fact suck it up, but
eventually they release it right back into the air, which is not helping the air. The
carbon sinks would eliminate the corn, but suck up the carbon dioxide therefore
reducing the carbon dioxide contributing to the greenhouse gases. When you grow
corn and soy, the tilling is adding oxygen to them and this creates a domino effect
and the organic matter starts to decay and eventually is released as carbon dioxide
and with further research, they found it is also releasing methane and nitrous oxide
(53). The production of corn to feed the cattle is obviously creating greenhouse
gases and switching to a grass-fed diet would be a smarter choice. I feel that it is
completely unnecessary to produce all of this corn and grain to feed the cattle when
we have plenty natural and already produced grass. All cows produce methane
when they digest, but according to Manning, “studies of rotational grazing have
shown decreases of as much as 45 percent in methane production, when compared
with conventional pastures,” (55). When nutrition is put first in raising animals, the
amount of methane that they produce is reduced greatly. In order to step in the right
direction of reducing greenhouse gases, we need to re-evaluate the crops we are
producing and make sure it is the most environmentally friendly way.
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One farmer who used to use the farming technique of raising cattle and then
sending them off to feedlots is living proof that it is better to switch to raise cattle on
a pasture; all natural. Margot Roosevelt wrote an article titled The Grass-Fed
Revolution where she tells the story of a farmer who used to raise cows on his farm
where he would fill the entire pasture with fertilizers and weed killers and then
send his cows off to feedlots and make a profit off of this. Taggart suddenly realized
that he did not want to be going about his farming that way anymore so he
completely restored his pastures with tall grass that was all natural, no more
pesticides contaminating the air and water. Now his cows are raised in a way that is
environmentally better and instead of shipping them off to the feedlots, he sends
them to a slaughterhouse not too far from his own farm. By sending his cattle
straight to the slaughterhouse, he is avoiding all of the elements that contribute to
greenhouse gases at the feedlots. “In the past five years, more than 1,000 U.S.
ranchers have switched herds to an all-grass diet,” (Roosevelt 1). All of the farmers
that have switched from a grain-fed diet to a grass-fed diet are slowly improving our
environment by having their pastures full of natural grass that they don’t have to
alter in order to speed up the process of meat production. Taggart is one of many
farmers that are improving their farming because they realized how much harm
they were doing to the environment and one farmer at a time, grass-fed can help
change the environment.