Time for a One-Eighty on Cows and Climate

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I listen to many talks by highly qualified scientists and others deeply concerned about our future, as well they might be. Some are concerned about climate change, others about starvation. In their summary remarks – I wait for it: their suggestions for how we can mitigate disaster always include a well-meant suggestion that we eat less meat on the grounds that to do so will liberate more resources to grow human food. Few seem to question this supposed cause and effect.

Cattle are not competing with humans for grass, their real food. The fact that corn and soy are fed to animals reflects the artificial circumstances in which the animals are kept. Cows are being criticized for making inefficient use of what is not their natural food. This use of land and feed is part of the agribusiness/CAFO complex. A more courageous suggestion would be to banish CAFOs and instead feed animals locally on their natural food. This would eliminate both competition for grain and the CO2 burden associated with its commercial production.

Furthermore there is no shortage of land. An artificial competition has been set up leaving animals, especially cows, as offenders. There is no shortage of land or resources for local food production, although current usage is inhibited by restrictive zoning. Food production in an integrated small farm system is capable of being far more productive per acre than the agribusiness model since all of the different parts support each other, plus benefit from the hand of the owner. The cow’s manure goes to feed the soil instead of causing pollution.

The Water Myth

Simon Fairlie, in his wonderfully readable and important book Meat, the Benign Extravagance, devotes an especially witty chapter to the water requirements of cows. Fairlie spent an entire year trying to find the basic scientific studies that would support allegations such as that cows use enough water to float a battleship, or that a cow uses twenty-five thousand gallons of water for every pound of meat. For some misconceptions about cattle there seems to have been an original germ of fact on which tottering accusations are perched. For these water claims there is nothing. As a reality check, Fairlie gives us the life story of his steer, Bramley. For a year and a half on his acre of grass Bramley was happily satisfied with his tub of ten gallons of water a day. Most of this water Bramley used to anoint the grass. The rest left his body as vapor or was incorporated into his flesh.

The Carbon Myth

In 2009, a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) paper entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow” contained the statement that livestock accounted for 17 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) contributions to the atmosphere, greater than the contributions from transportation. This claim was soundly refuted by qualified experts within hours of publication. But too late. The claim appears only in the introduction to the publication and is not supported within the text of the paper itself. It was seized upon by reporters and trumpeted around the world. It has become an unchallenged meme quoted without question. This exaggerated fossil fuel use by livestock has no validity even within the agribusiness model of livestock management. For reasons best known to himself, the author of the introduction bundled everything from the manufacture of the tractors that produced the animal feed, the milling and transportation of the feed, and everything else related to livestock production into their fossil fuel account. In the case of transportation he counted only direct use of fossil fuel when driving. It bears repeating, the natural diet of cattle is grass.

The Methane Myth

And then there’s methane, a more potent global warming gas than CO2. Methane is a carbon compound produced during anaerobic fermentation, a process which occurs only in the absence of oxygen. The cow’s rumen is a fermentation vat in which bacteria break down cellulose from plants and use the liberated carbohydrates as an energy source to build complete protein. Any energy left over will be liberated as methane. Periodically the cow belches and releases the gas. Fermentation is the process by which grass is converted into the world’s most perfect food, milk. Far from congratulating the cow on her magic, reporters presuming that the methane gas left through the cow’s rear exit, made this the subject of endless humor. Vegetarians and others immediately blamed cows for contributing to climate change with their methane emissions. Cows and all living things that subsist solely on plants produce methane. This is the way nature has always worked. This cycle has never unbalanced the atmosphere.

Manure in the open air is not a source of methane. Again, methane is only produced in the absence of oxygen. When dropped on the pasture manure is the natural source of fertility for the land. Many authors have assumed that methane is also produced on pasture or when manure is composted, but such is not the case; both occur in the presence of oxygen and are not sources of methane.

Positive Contributions

So far, none of the negative misconceptions about cows have survived scrutiny. What about the positive contributions your cow can make? Whole books have been written about the special contributions of cows to humans, from the beginning of civilization. And it is now increasingly accepted that a key contribution of cows is that they thrive best grazing on grass. This turns out to be important not just to cows but also to the planet.

Grass, the world’s most widespread crop, is truly amazing. All plants remove carbon from the atmosphere and incorporate it into their structures, but most plants if bitten off regenerate slowly or not at all. Loss of growing leaves is a severe setback. Trees sequester a lot of carbon in their leaves and trunks, but when the tree dies that carbon will mostly be released back into the atmosphere, more quickly in case of fire.

The growth nodes of grass are at the soil surface. When grass is eaten it is a signal to the plant to send up new leaf growth, resulting in denser turf. The more it is eaten, the faster it grows and the more carbon it captures and stores underground in its roots. As grass is trampled by grazing animals it is pushed underground along with manure and urine where it decomposes and its carbon feeds soil microbes. This property of grass is entirely dependent on the presence of herbivores. Without the nibbling, trampling and fertilization of herbivores, grass fails to function as this massive carbon sink. Grass without grazers dies above ground and loses its carbon back into the air.

Rebuilding Grasslands

Allan Savory has greatly expanded our understanding of the work of which grass is capable. Savory was born in what is now Zimbabwe to a long established colonial family. His life has been devoted to rebuilding grasslands. Careful observation and a courageous willingness to move past older ideas (including his own) has enabled him to understand grass and its interdependence with grazers, predators and the soil.

Working both in Africa and the United States, Savory has demonstrated how desertification is initiated and reversed. He shows that grass must be encouraged by herbivores. To properly encourage grass, herbivores must graze in a dense pattern. Grass achieves its maximum turfbuilding response only under the grazing pressure of bunched animals, and then the animals must move on, leaving the grass to regrow. In the wild this is absolutely dependent on the presence of predators, otherwise the animals will stray apart in a random fashion and the turf-building effect is lost. It can’t be overemphasized: grass, cattle and predators evolved together and are mutually interdependent. Soil fertility is the result of their alliance. This is the perfect example of ecological unity.

Research Project

The capacity of grass to store carbon is well recognized, but its potential as a major factor in reducing atmospheric CO2 hasn’t been seriously considered. There haven’t been the experimental studies to accurately quantify its effect. Scientists haven’t even considered grass capable of involvement in carbon trading. This situation is about to change with the work of the Marin Carbon Project.

This is a research project initiated by a Marin County, California rancher named John Wick. Like Allan Savory, he discovered that removing livestock from his land and resting it had the reverse effect to what he was seeking. Both density of turf and soil fertility diminished faster than had been occurring with livestock on the range.

He wanted to try a new approach. He teamed up with one of the world’s foremost soil carbon sequestration experts, a bio-geophysicist with a lab at Berkeley named Whendee Silver. She agreed to do the study despite considerable initial skepticism. What he wanted was a controlled study that would yield unassailable statistics. With the cooperation and support of other interested ranchers in the area, Wick spread daiy manure composted with straw a half-inch deep over several large test plots. Adjacent plots served as controls. After a year, core samples were taken to measure soil carbon to compare with samples taken at the beginning of the trial. At the end of the year, carbon in the treated plots had increased by a ton per hectare, not counting the carbon in the compost. They have now measured an additional ton of carbon per hectare per year without adding any more compost. This is new carbon in the soil which had been removed from the air.

Carbon behaves like a sponge, so that the treated soil held three times as much water. John Wick and the other ranchers also noted that the land could carry more cattle, an observation often noted by Allen Savory, and that the land profits from the additional livestock.

What Wick and Dr. Silver found with their core samples is that this newly sequestered carbon moves downward to lower soil levels where it remains in stable storage unless it is plowed. Using computer modeling, Dr. Silver’s research group asserts that if half of California’s rangeland were treated with compost in this way, in any given year, as much atmospheric carbon as is emitted by California’s traffic could be removed from the air and permanently stored. Land restoration, improved air quality, and increased agricultural productivity have been claimed by Savory and many others. What the Marin Carbon project does is provide solid proof that by working with natural systems, our air and soil damage can be reversed with unexpected speed. Complete statistics on the Project are available online.

This is an incomparably important study. I hope that we can now hear less about technofixes involving filling the sea with iron filings or building machines to put carbon down holes in the ground. The Marin Carbon Project proves that by working with a natural process we can both feed ourselves and reverse global warming. Furthermore, it is something that we can all do ourselves without waiting for someone to form a new government agency and hire contractors.

Cows are Key

We can save the world one cow and one farm at a time. If this all seems too good to be true, bear in mind that it worked fine for some millions of years, building topsoil that was many feet deep. It is the current practices of extractive farming which need to defend themselves.

It is clear that far from being a destructive force, cows are the key to rebuilding air quality and soil fertility. Cows provide for us by completing the cycle of life on our own farms or on the rangelands of the world, turning sunshine into food of the highest quality and taking the excess carbon out of the air and putting it back into the soil where it is needed.

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Sidebar

CARBON

There is a finite amount of carbon. It exists in five phases:
In the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2);
In the biosphere: carbon is in the form of carbohydrate, that is, plant material;
In the pedosphere (soil) in three states:
• Labile pool: carbon from decaying plant material may oxidize and return to the atmosphere or it may be fixed by microorganisms and stay in the soil.
• Occluded light fraction: carbon is trapped inside soil crumbs where it will stay for years unless the surface is disturbed permitting oxidation.
• Heavy fraction: beneath the occluded light fraction, carbon is bonded to soil structure and is not available to microorganisms. Carbon in the soil behaves like a sponge. With increased carbon, soil holds more water and thus supports more plant growth which pulls more carbon out of the atmosphere, a positive feedback loop.

In the lithosphere (solid earth), carbon moves downward and occurs as crude oil, coal, diamonds or other carbonaceous compounds;

In the hydrosphere (oceans), carbon is mostly in the form of bicarbonate ions and carbonic acid.

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2014.

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