I woke up this morning to an email from a very good friend. He sent me an article that studied the GHG emission (and other ecological factors) from agricultural products. He was wondering what I thought and how/why it seemed to differ from what I had previously told him about beef production with a negative carbon footprint.
So I spent my entire day reading that study, studies it cited and more literature on adaptive multi-paddock grazing. It was a good day.
Only a quick breakdown here because I will dedicate a full page to this later.
The study was a statistical analysis of 500ish other life cycle analysis (LCAs) of food production around the world.
The main flaw is that for all the LCAs of beef, papers did not take into account carbon sequestration from beef production. They only looked at emissions. So of course if you only look at what’s coming out of the system and not what’s going in then you’ll find beef very unsustainable. You’ll find everything unsustainable that way.
Following on that they ignored all studies that show high levels of carbon sequestration in soils from beef production.
They also appear to completely ignore the effects of erosion which is a huge contribution to GHG and largely caused by crop production.
*they compiled over 500 studies. I only checked a few to draw these conclusions. But I assume that if they were using studies that didn’t include soil carbon sequestration or erosion and didn’t mention it in their discussion that these are things they didn’t think or care about.
These are the facts. I think some people get upset when you defend beef like it was some sort of lie. It’s not. I want to heal the environment and mitigate the worst effects of carbon change too. I just can’t ignore certain evidence because it doesn’t fit the way I previously understood the world.
Perhaps it is counter-intuitive to us that cattle can be helpful because of what we’ve been raised to believe. But to Nature, it has always made perfect sense. And we better do our best to get on board with nature if we want to heal our ecosystems and live sustainably.
The study ended with a recommendation to change our diet to plant-based foods. It really doesn’t matter what you eat if it’s not sustainably produced. And almost all the food falls into that category. So let’s work to create and support sustainable food production when and where it exists and not get hung up on the species of the food.