ICYMI In case you missed it
August 2024
Ashley Colby raised the issue of regenerative agriculture and sustainable consumption:
‘I’d like there to be more widespread awareness of the fact that livestock can either hurt or help the climate/environment depending on management practices. It’s known in regenerative agriculture circles: it’s not the cow, it’s the how.’
She quoted a recent article from MIT News:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-finds-lands-grazing-can-worsen-help-climate-change-0315
‘livestock grazing can be bad or good for carbon storage depending, or course, on the location and “intensity.” The technical paper that this article refers to is in Nature Climate Change and is titled “Historical impacts of grazing on carbon stocks and climate mitigation opportunities.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-024-01957-9
The technical paper makes the point that the carbon drawdown potential – in an optimal grazing management scenario – can actually surpass that of what has been lost from poor grazing management, 63 ± 18 PgC (gigatons C) gain potential, versus 46 ± 13 PgC (gigatons C) estimated lost over the past 60 years.
The following discussion presents a range of responses accompanied by references to scientific papers.
Minna Kannerva
Minna disputed the validity of this paper and responded with a quote from comments on the article:
“The well-intentioned ‘it’s not the cow but the how’ becomes wishful thinking when confronted with solid evidence, which leads us to conclude that ‘it’s the cow and the how’”
‘Both downsizing and improvements to livestock systems are needed to stay within planetary boundaries’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-024-01030-w
Grazing animals can, in certain situations, be good for biodiversity – and they can improve soil health – but that doesn’t mean that, in order to benefit from such grazing, we could maintain the levels of production animals we have now. And that indeed does not mean that we would need to keep eating such grazing animals – if they were wild animals, most of us would not think of them as food for human consumption.
Regenerative farming / agroecology is often small scale and can incorporate animals (cows) in a sustainable way. But this again will mean in practice that the numbers of animals kept will have to come drastically down. There is no sustainable way of maintaining the current levels of beef production and consumption.
Ashley Colby
Ashley requested that livestock animals should not be seen as categorically bad for the climate/environment. In fact, in many cases, they can be raised in such a way that they are net better for the environment in terms of sequestered carbon and biodiversity in production systems than something like industrial row crop grain production, which would be the “plant based” alternative system.
Potentially it is preferable to refer to “eating regeneratively” rather than “plant based”. The plant based diet discussion undermines regenerative farmers in sequestering carbon and restoring landscapes, not to mention invisibilizes/demonizes pastoralists in the developing world who have (in many cases) been raising livestock sustainably for centuries.
David Chittenden
Fonterra is New Zealand’s largest dairy company (a cooperative with corporate style behaviour) and has significant influence on environmental policy.
national news website in New Zealand this morning – Fonterra accused of ‘greenwashing’ to impress big foreign buyers keen on ‘regenerative agriculture’ | RNZ News
Anne Sheridan
There’s no getting around the importance of reducing the amount of cows created for human consumption. See the following references:
From: (Capper 2012) Is the Grass Always Greener? Comparing the Environmental Impact of Conventional, Natural and Grass-Fed Beef Production Systems
“The carbon footprint of conventional beef production was lower than that of either natural (feedlot finished with no growth-enhancing technology) or grass-fed (forage-fed, no growth-enhancing technology) systems.” https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/2/2/127
From: Hayek and Garrett (2018) Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population “
If beef consumption is not reduced and is instead satisfied by greater imports of grass-fed beef, a switch to purely grass-fed systems would likely result in higher environmental costs, including higher overall methane emissions. Thus, only reductions in beef consumption can guarantee reductions in the environmental impact of US food systems.” https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aad401
From: (Schlesinger 2022) Biogeochemical constraints on climate change mitigation through regenerative farming “
most of the management practices associated with regenerative agriculture are not likely to lead to a large net sequestration of organic carbon in soils.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A1doOXq2ahk9Ep5BhDbI6ZpBTTe57DFW/view
Julia Steinberger
Science is clearly and unequivocally for a drastic reduction of livestock (and other animal ag) numbers is absolutely necessary. The discussion of how the remaining small fraction should be managed is quite secondary.
Gabe Brown
Ruminants in confinement lead to many negative issues and, grazing ruminants, if allowed to overgraze can lead to negative consequences. However grazing ruminants, when grazed adaptively, can have one of the greatest positive impacts on soils, ecosystem function of anything mankind can do. All while providing highly nutrient dense food.
Regenerative farming and agroecology cannot only be small scale, but large scale as well. We are currently under contract with clients on over 35 million acres of land throughout North America. The largest of our clients has over 2 million acres and is doing a great job of regenerating that large landscape.
Ashley Colby
My focus is not on the total number of livestock but that livestock CAN be extremely net good for the environment, when managed well. This is the basis for much of the development of the carbon market and nature based solutions to carbon drawdown.
Regenerative agriculture tries to bunch animals in small paddocks in a way that stimulates root growth of grasses that cannot only sequester carbon, but build soil. Because we’ve lost so many native megafauna throughout the world, managing ruminant farm animals can move large animals across the landscape in a way that mimics predation patterns (bunching the herd animals together, moving relatively quickly through the landscape, leaving the land time to rest). This process with bison is what brought us some of the world’s most fertile soil in the center of North America! Regenerative farmers are trying to mimic that ecosystem, but now (considering the loss of megafauna and enclosure of land), with domesticated animals. In fact, it was native American land management (prescribed burns, etc.) that actually kept bison populations high in a kind of oak savanna ecosystem so they were a ready food source for hunting. This kind of system was common throughout the world before industry. So we can thank native Americans and indigenous land managers the world over for our fertile soils (which are being depleted from industrial ag), and we can thank our regenerative livestock farmers for doing everything they can to build the soil back up!
Regenerative agriculture is not a monolithic system like industrial ag, instead it is a set of principles that can be adapted to local geography, rainfall, climate, topography, etc. Therefore it is extremely diverse and hard to collect and aggregate data. It is one of the best ecological solutions we have not only for carbon drawdown, but increasing biodiversity, water management, solving nutrient runoff, increasing topsoil, etc.
Debbie Kasper
We’re so accustomed to thinking in terms of globalized generalized statistics. They are important and helpful for some things, but they become a handicap when it comes to transition efforts which necessarily occur in, and have to work with, the particularities of place. By and large, these details are not factored into the numbers most of us see and on which many stake their claims.
Our best work will come from the capacity to more gracefully work with reality at both (and other) levels. This is a skill in need of nurturing and development.
Halina Brown
NYTimes essay from last Sunday about the pleasures of eating more beans and less meat. Are we going mainstream with this topic?
Jean Boucher
What do you think of the global numbers of livestock?
Ashley Colby
I think this question is extremely hard to answer, and I am skeptical of anyone who says anything definitive about “global” numbers. There are two reasons for this:
1. My current work is on voluntary carbon markets, and as a part of that work I’ve been investigating the claims of the carbon market, i.e. what the credits are based on. What I have found from interviewing soil scientists, regulators and project developers is that this science is in its infancy, and measuring soil carbon (let alone other GHGs) is incredibly hard. For a practical example, if a bird flies over a field and poops in one area and a soil scientist samples this area, it’ll have a wildly different carbon reading than even one foot to the side. Not to mention there is no settled science on carbon stock permanence, nor differences in carbon storage at different depths. There is also a whole budding (very small) field looking at methanotrophic bacteria which seem to be naturally present in regen animal ag operations, which metabolizes methane. But this field is incredibly nascent. So I simply think we cannot know exactly how much regenerative agricultural practices could sequester. What I do know, however, is 1. CAFOs should be basically eradicated, 2. Meat consumption per capita in the US is probably higher than carrying capacity, and 3. that the most fertile top soil in the world was built by millions of ruminants moving through oak savanna landscapes.
2. Regenerative agriculture is extremely heterogenous. Any claims on “how much it can sequester globally” when combined with the challenges in soil science above is, in my opinion, decades away, if possible at all.
You could look at the carrying capacity of certain regions with certain soil types, e.g. and try to extrapolate. With regenerative management restoring degraded lands, the top soil growing in quality and depth, the carrying capacity actually changes (increases) through time! Imagine trying to keep a cow on a dusty, patchy ground with barely any grass versus one with rich, deep topsoil, full of lush grass because that topsoil and those root systems hold more water. Obviously you can keep more animals on the latter, something that only gets created through regenerative land management. It is very hard to build topsoil without animals, because anywhere you pull plant matter from is coming from the soil in that place, the process is different with the animal/grass interaction.
People should eat to the extent possible from their local environments, seasonally, and should produce as much as possible in their own backyards,
Steffen Hirth
I’d like to cite that MIT article which initiated this whole discussion with a sentence that should not get lost: ‘relying solely on optimizing grazing is not sufficient to mitigate the warming caused by current ruminant systems’ (Ren et al. 2024: 385) à It is wrong to draw from the same article the conclusion that ‘it is not the cow, it is the how’ just because they say in the abstract that there is a ‘potential of employing grazing as a climate mitigation strategy’.
Since the potential of reducing animal agriculture as a whole has a stronger mitigation effect (e.g. Garnett and Godde 2017: Grazed and confused?) than improving ‘the how’, that reduction must have absolute priority in the existential crisis we find ourselves in. Note that Ren et al.’s study, to my best understanding, is only about soil carbon – what about methane then? Methane is one of the reasons why reduction mitigates better and it is well known that methane disappears from the atmosphere in decades, not hundreds of years as CO2, and would thus have a very quick effect of cooling down the climate. When you then take the health evidence from nutritional scientists (which shouldn’t even matter here, but okay, people love their individual health) showing that people in the Global North consume much too much animal produce, it should be a no brainer that humanity must now focus on a very quick drastic reduction of animal agriculture. Sadly, the reduction of any part of the economy is not anywhere near fathomable for an average politician who goes along with the capitalist economy as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
It is the ‘the cow and the how’, and we better do something about ‘the cow’ quickly! A debate on the total numbers of livestock is absolutely due in regen ag circles because the false idea that it is ‘not the cow’ at all, just the how, is a threat to serious and effective mitigation. The latter must include all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. That animal products require more resources and use more land while causing more emissions and providing less nutritional energy compared to eating plants directly is based on the second law of thermodynamics and nothing can change that until we invent a functional perpetuum mobile. Arguments about efficient use of agricultural waste products and natural suitability of the land (i.e. ‘only suitable for grazing’) are to some degree valid, but should not overshadow the quantity debate, and not even the animal rights debate(!), although I suggest that we push that one back to the era after we have reduced animal agriculture by 90% (which, for now, should be in everybody’s interest) and all remaining animal agriculture is gold standard organic-regenerative.