Recently the Washington Post published a piece titled, “Are my hamburgers hurting the planet?” In it the author, Sarah Kaplan, argues that cattle are a significant driver of climate change. This is not a new claim and plenty of other publications have argued the same thing. But the Washington Post piece is a good example of what many will argue.
As someone who got into agriculture in part for environmental reasons, running into these same arguments time and time again is a bit frustrating. Kaplan’s piece assumes a monolithic beef industry, making no mention of the varying practices of beef production in the country and the different ways these practices impact the environment. By making such an assumption, the article makes assertions about cattle in general, rather than addressing the problems associated with a particular kind of beef production.
I want to address three of Kaplan’s points. Before diving in, I do just want to say that by addressing Kaplan’s points I am not making a claim about the driving factors of climate change. There’s no denying the increase in carbon into the atmosphere, but there are various models and approaches to understanding climate change. Some see the rise of atmospheric carbon as the primary driver of climate change whereas some see it as another symptom of more fundamental causes, such as the disruption of the water cycle. I can’t pretend to know enough about the various models to adjudicate between them. By responding to Kaplan’s piece, I just want to show that even assuming the veracity of the climate change model she accepts, her arguments against cattle per se don’t hold.
Cows and Methane
So, to those three points. First, at the beginning of the article she writes, “Cows are ruminants, meaning that microbes in their multi-chambered stomachs help them digest by fermenting their food. This process produces the powerful greenhouse gas methane, which gets released into the atmosphere when they burp.” Yes, cattle do release methane from their rumens. But methane is constantly being emitted into the atmosphere and then reabsorbed into the environment. The graphic below from the Global Carbon Project shows that almost all the methane that gets released into the atmosphere is reabsorbed, making it a much smaller contributor than CO2 to the amount of atmospheric carbon.
Rotationaly grazed cattle, in contrast to feedlot cattle or continuously grazed cattle, stimulate the pasture to deposit more and more methane into the soil, which has a huge capacity to store carbon. In such systems, cattle actually help reduce the amount of atmospheric methane.
Grassland Carbon Sinks
Second, Kaplan notes that millions of acres of trees have been cleared for agricultural purposes. Kaplan writes, “Here again cows are a major culprit. Because ruminants have slower growth and reproduction rates than other animals, they require more resources to produce something a person can eat. Beef requires about twice as much land per gram of protein as chicken and pork, and 20 times as much land as the equivalent amount of protein from beans.” The implication seems to be that because cattle require more land per gram of protein than other livestock or legumes, then they are more responsible for increasing atmospheric carbon.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes trees are better carbon sinks than other kingdoms of plants. However, there is plenty of evidence showing that grasslands are more effective carbons sinks than trees. Good grassland management, particularly well managed grazing only increases the grasslands ability to deposits carbon in the soil. Kaplan’s recommendation of turning a “million square miles of land into forest” in order to help “offset all emissions form the food that is grown” is disconnected from the reality of the carbon cycle. Again, the solution isn’t getting rid of cattle, but raising cattle in the right way.
Crops and Livestock
Third, and finally, Kaplan argues that replacing some or all of our beef with vegetables and legumes is a way to reduce atmospheric carbon. It begs the question of whether vegetables and legumes really do release less carbon into the atmosphere than well-managed cattle. The answer, as far as I know, is “it depends on how they are grown.” Crops can be grown regeneratively, that is, in a way that improves the soil’s health and thus its capacity to store carbon, or in a way that degrades the soil.
I can’t say whether cattle or crops are better at improving soil health, and I’m not sure that there is even enough data out there to show one way or the other. But again, it’s a question of what methods and practices are used, not about the animal or plant itself.
A question I would have for Kaplan or others who see cattle as a problem in and of themselves, is whether the 30-60 million bison that used to graze our grasslands were causing climate change? Bison can be twice the size of cattle, and there were probably at least as many bison in the US in the 1500s as there are cattle today.
But to answer the original question, is your hamburger hurting the planet? It depends.