Grass-fed cattle farming may seem more idyllic than high-density feed lots, but it isn鈥檛 any better for the climate, new research finds.
Compared to industrial operations that require a lot of calorie-dense farmed food, feeding cattle on marginal grasslands that humans can鈥檛 farm might seem environmentally savvy. Unfortunately, the new study finds that even the most efficient grass-fed beef operations emit just as much or more greenhouse gases than industrial farming.
Beef is the most resource-hungry of the food staples, requiring 28 times more land, 11 times more water, and six times more nitrogen fertilizer than other livestock, according to a 2014 article published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Cattle also emit 10 times more greenhouse gases than other livestock, in part because of the agricultural inputs needed to grow their feed, and in part because they directly emit methane from their digestive systems. Grass-fed beef has been put forth as a potential way to ameliorate this impact, claims Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at Bard College in New York who analyzes the climate impacts of agriculture.
Typical industrial cattle operations have two phases. First, cows give birth to calves and nurse them while...
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