Cows and Climate

Cows and Climate

    Beef.  It's there almost everywhere, dominating landscapes and lining the shelves of meat counters, even altering governments as they move water channels and knock down forests to make way for ranchers.  So what does all of this have to do with climate?  As it turns out,  quite a lot.  Author Richard Manning looked into our ranching practices and discovered that for the most part, we in the U.S. and elsewhere might be doing it all wrong...

    So you likely already know about the life of a cow (word of warning: the following is toned down but still quite descriptive regarding the raising and slaughtering of cattle so some of you might want to skip this part and jump right to the next paragraph), born and raised in captivity, separated from their mother after two months for branding and castration and given a variety of vaccines (this summary from the Cattle Network: Booster viral respiratory vaccine-MLV strongly recommended /often required by special sales. a. For Replacement Heifers: Viral respiratory with Campylobacter fetus (Vibriosis) and 5-way Leptospirosis vaccine included...Booster 7 way Clostridial if required by label direction...Pasteurella multocida and/or Histophilus somni (formerly known as Hemophilus somnus) vaccines...If castrations and dehorning were not done earlier, these practices need to be completed as soon as possible.  Tetanus vaccination is strongly recommended when performing late castration; especially if banding...Modified Live Vaccines (MLV) provide fast, broad immunity and are excellent stimulators of cell-mediated immunity...Try to minimize the number of vaccines given at one time as much as possible.  Multiple vaccinations cause neck soreness...Letters in a vaccine name mean: IBR, BVD, BRSV and PI3 : Diseases included in a viral respiratory vaccine; An “FP” in the vaccine name stands for “fetal protection” and means protection against fetal infection and abortion due to the BVD virus; An “HB” in the vaccine name stands for the strain of Leptospira known as “Hardjo bovis” that is a common cause of abortion in cattle; “HS” stands for “Histophilus somni” (formerly known as Hemophilus somnus); “L5” stands for the 5 strains of Leptospirosis; “V” stands for “Vibriosis”), put back to pasture with their mother for another four months, then weaned and put in a pen and headed for the feedlot where antibiotics and drugs designed to speed their weight gain are added to their feed (after weaning dairy farmers want the lactating mother to continue to produce so that they can capture the milk), then after little over a year it is time to walk up the ramp and have a steel bolt shot in their head (think No Country for Old Men with Javier Bardim if you want to view such a device), the line moving at 400 head per hour, their adrenaline flowing and some of them pregnant (they will still be slaughtered and if the calf fetus is alive inside, it will be killed when the cow is skinned and opened up).  At the moment of death, whether when the bolt gun strikes or when their jugulars are cut, all of that adrenaline and those chemicals and drugs are frozen in their meat, headed to the shelf for packaging...and human and pet consumption.  And despite meat consumption dropping, the number of slaughter houses actually increased in the U.S. as they neared 900 in number, as of the April 2015 figures from the USDA.  The above, as a reminder, is primarily for cattle raised for meat...veal calves, mainly males, are slaughtered at 5-7 months of age; said Bloomberg Businessweek: A typical steer weighs from 1,300 ro 1,400 pounds.  Its carcass yields about 850 pounds of meat, which sells wholesale for an average of $2,300, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  The hide sells for about $100, making it a mere 4.3 percent of the value of the animal. (Dairy cattle hides cost a little less, but the meat-t-hide ratio is the same)

    Okay, that wasn't pleasant reading...reality, but not pleasant (and trust me, I tried to be as gentle and non-graphic as possible for it is actually much worse a process).  But here's the deal with cattle production.  It takes a lot of everything to raise a cow...water, corn, hay, antibiotics.  And this is where author Manning begs to differ with our current methods of feedlots and instead writing about heading back to a grass-fed system.  In his earlier piece in OnEarth, he wrote: ...the grass-fed system has matured to the point where significant chunks of the nation's corn-ravaged landscape can be converted into far more sustainable permanent pastures -- without a loss in production.  At the heart of this shift lies a humble leap in technology, a fencing material called polywire...composed of a single strand that resembles yellow-braided fishing line. This makes cheap, easily movable, and effective electric fences, and it is the key to the whole operation...Modern grass farmers almost universally rely on something called managed intensive rotational grazing.  Polywire fences confine a herd of maybe 60 cows to an area the size of a suburban front lawn, typically for 12 hours.  Then the grazier moves the fence, to cycle through a series of such paddocks every month or so.  This reflects a basic ecological principle.  Left to their own devices in a diverse ecosystem, cows will eat just a few species, grazing again and again on the same plants.  As with teenagers at a buffet, cows that eat this way are not acting in their own best nutritional interests.  Rotational grazing, which forces them to eat the two-thirds of available forage that they would normally leave untouched, produces much more beef or milk per acre than does laissez-faire grazing...Quality, of course, is just as important as quantity... this varies widely according to a range of conditions, not the least of which is the skill of the grazier.  Sugar content is key to quality beef, and it is affected by the mix of grass species, the matching of species to local climate and soil, the proper selection of complementary forbs (such as clovers), and proper rotation time. 

    What's surprising about this method isn't the increased profit that ranchers see, but the benefit to the soil (remember the plowing of the land releasing more carbon?...same with cattle causing runoff erosion).  Humans can't eat grass, an assertion that sounds odd, considering that something like three-quarters of all human nutrition comes from wheat, rice, and corn, all of which are grasses. But what we eat is actually their seeds, the dense package of complex carbohydrates that is the specialty of annual grasses.  Perennial grasses, which are more common, devote a larger proportion of their energy to roots, stems, and leaves, and the building block of these is cellulose...The health of that larger system sponsors a rich microbial world beneath the soil, where lowly creatures like dung beetles and earthworms grind away at the task of cycling nutrients.  Perennial grasses build deep roots that can extend more than 10 feet below the surface.  Shallow-rooted annual crops rapidly deplete trace minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and iodine, but the roots of perennials act like elevators, lifting these minerals back into the system and making them available to plants and everything else on up the food chain...Churchill (one of the farmers he interviews) and hundreds of farmers like him have found that they can take productive corn and soybean land and convert it to perennial pasture, and in the process make more money than highly subsidized corn and soybean farmers.  This flies in the face of the assumptions of agricultural economists worldwide, who have traditionally believed that the highest and best use of the world's most productive lands is row-crop agriculture.

    And that thought of soil erosion and runoff?  It's not considered Minnesota-nice to say so, but this expensive inundation is simply another cost of corn and soybean agriculture.  Iowa, with the best and flattest prairie topsoils in the nation, has the most altered landscape of any state.  Sixty-five percent of its land is planted to corn and soybeans.  The state has less than 1 percent of its native habitat left, almost all of which was tallgrass prairie and oak savannah before European settlement.  That earlier system included sinuous streams and riparian areas full of wetlands and flood-catching vegetation, but the thirsty prairie has been flattened and plowed into fields that shed rainwater almost as fast as parking lots do.  Many of the fields have been underlain with drainage tiles that speed up the flow of surface water into rivers, exacerbating flooding.  A stretch of pure prairie will absorb five to seven inches of rain an hour, meaning that 12 feet of rain in a 24-hour stretch yields no runoff.  Normal absorption on corn and soybean land ranges from 0.5 inch to 1.5 inches an hour, meaning that comparable rainfall yields catastrophic floods like those of 2008.  

    And profit?  Todd Churchill says one reason he can make more money than a subsidized corn farmer is that he can produce about two steers per acre.  It takes roughly the same acreage to grow the 3,000 pounds of grain used to finish a single steer in a feedlot.  But can enough land be converted to pasture to make any real difference to the landscape?  The swath of destruction that is corn agriculture occupies about 80 million acres, mostly in the Midwest, an area only slightly smaller than California.  At least half of that acreage is used to grow corn for livestock.  Is it really possible to imagine something so radical as the transformation of 40 million acres of land?...In fact, it's been done before.  In the 1970s and 1980s, and at the urging of the federal government, farmers greatly increased the acreage under cultivation, plowing up land that had been idle since the Dust Bowl.  This triggered a huge increase in erosion, which in turn triggered the federal Conservation Reserve Program.  At present farmers receive about $1.8 billion a year and have converted a total of 34.7 million acres from row crops to grass.  But high grain prices have spurred farmers to begin pulling those acres out of the program at an alarming pace, about two million acres in the last two years.  The grass-fed beef and dairy market offers an opportunity to reverse that flow and at the same time insulate the land from plows driven by high grain prices.  Moreover, the $1.8 billion subsidy that farmers receive from taxpayers nets them an average of $51 an acre.  Grass farmers can net as much as eight times that amount on converted corn and soybean land.


    It would seem that such a different perspective is worth looking at.  A recent special on returning beavers to their once-native habitats is proving beneficial...they respond to the sound of cascading water, their engineering instincts causing them to "plug the leak."  Once this was discovered, the beaver went from being a pest (to be trapped and killed due to plugging up drainpipes) to an ally (poles merely diverted the falling water sound to a different point, causing the beavers to move their dam to a different area and leaving the drainpipes alone).  The result?  In many areas, rivers returned to a natural path, along with riparian wildlife and a healthier ecosystem.  From the Everglades to the dams falling in the Klamath River in Oregon (scheduled for 2020), human engineers and ranchers are beginning to rethink some of their tried and true ways as perhaps not quite as efficient as the old back-to-nature way.  It's the old "leave well enough alone," only this time, the thinking might be large enough to change entire (and massive) industries.  Imagine that, nature working with humans and all of it happening simply by us stepping back for a bit...sort of like gazing over the beauty of a national park.  If that's puzzling to you, take a peek at the struggle John Muir had at even getting some of those areas turned into national parks...fighting ranchers and vendors and entrepreneurs and Washington, all so carefully captured in the Ken Burns documentary of a few years ago and now being repeated on PBS.  Who knows, that "park" of the future we admire might be nothing more than an old feedlot, one now back to perennial grasses and herds of cattle peacefully grazing...happy cattle (temporarily), happy land, happy ranchers and farmers, and happy earth.  Future generations might think that someone thought to listen after all...