When it comes to quantifying land used for either meat production or growing "plant-based foods," things can get a little messy, and I've been finding that a lot of the information that exists out there gets misinterpreted, or just outright misunderstood. Keep this quote in mind:
No doubt there's a lot of misinformation out there on the Interweb, so much that you just have to use the DBEY(R/S)OTI method:
And as someone that likes to peruse the variety of information posted on social media and websites and such, I get to come across some odd balls that makes my head cock sideways at times. Especially when I come across a few different vegan memes that have different statistics.
I have to say, before I begin, that the vegans do have it right. By that, I mean that you most definitely can and will produce a lot more "plant-based food" (i.e., vegetables, starches, fruits, and grains) on an acre of land than you can meat (be it from cattle, pigs, poultry, sheep, or goats). I am not questioning that aspect of the "meat vs. veggie" argument.
However, I have several "beefs" with this simplistic-seeming fact. Those issues I will address in the next blog post The Beef vs. Vegetable Land-Use Argument: Why It's Really a Non-Issue.
The primary talking-points I really want to address here and now are the actual statistics or numbers that vegans use to bring up the land-use vegan vs. meat argument. Not so much the discrepancies, but rather what the numbers are actually telling us.
Two primary memes, both with their relatively inconvenient discrepancies are what I really want to focus on in this post, largely because of the difference in beef amounts per amount of land required. The third meme I'm going to talk a bit about as well is just a bit different, as it will look at the amount of land needed for a person of a particular dietary choice to live off of for an entire year.
But before we begin, just let me make the note the two major factors being disregarded in both memes:
Largely these are ignored because they're variables, and variables make things quite complicated. I believe I will cover these more in the second blog post.
I think it's best to look at the beef side first and foremost, just to see where the number above actually stands.
As already mentioned above, time is the variable that is largely ignored. However, I tend to assume that this is based on a full year of production, or a full "growing season."
The authors fail to define what "acre-days" are throughout the paper, leading one to assume that their "5 acre-days" versus "1.7 acre-days" means 5 acres per animal unit per day versus 1.7 acres per animal unit per day. That gives rise for my second reason SRBC paper is unreliable:
To convert the SBRC's linked articles' statistics, 5 acres per cow-day (or per AU per day) (= 1 cow-day/acre ÷ 5 acres/cow-day) = 0.2 cow-days per acre for pasture; and 1.7 acres per cow-day (= 1 cow-day/acre ÷ 1.7 cow-days per acre) = 0.6 cow-days per acre.
One (1) Animal Unit = One Cow-Day = One (1) 1000 lb cow or cow-calf pair consuming ~26 lb of dry matter forage per day.
Therefore, Reason 2 shows very clearly that the authors are surmising their numbers on unrealistic and extremely low forage productivity for any land base, crop or otherwise!!
So, again, take note! The SRBC article is way out to lunch and an unreliable reference for any meme, and for use in any article, blog or otherwise!!
Their ball park average for number of acres per year per cow-calf pair is 1.5 to 2 acres. So to convert that into cow-days per acre:
Working backwards from their pre-determined 137 lb of beef (boxed and ready to serve), and assuming that 60% of the live-weight is dressing weight, and 60% of dressing weight is boxed beef, 137 lb of boxed beef goes to (137 ÷ 0.60 =) 228.33 lb dressing weight, and 228.33 lb dressing weight goes into (228.33 ÷ 0.60 =) 380.55 lb live-weight.
Without looking deeper, sure 380.55 lb (round up to 381 lb) is quite a small animal, but we must remember that this is the amount of live-weight expected on one acre for, supposedly, an entire year.
Since we know that the finishing live-weight for cattle, depending on the frame score (see Target Slaughter Weights: Are Your Beef Cattle Fat Enough for Market), and using the standard animal unit, we can figure how many acres the meme is actually referring to.
If we were to use the cow-day values I calculated from the NRCS article, I can figure out how big the meme is thinking a finisher bovine *should be* according to their value of 137 lb of boxed beef derived from per acre per year.
So, funnily enough, the values from NRCS that VeganStreet sourced from actually surpass the amount of meat that would come from one acre in a year. Not by much, of course, but significantly enough to cause anyone who hasn't even done the calculations like I did to question the validity of this meme.
Realistically, a single steer raised for slaughter is not going to be eating the same amount of forage from the first year of purchase to the end of his life.
A young steer is purchased when he's 600 pounds. At 600 pounds he's eating about (600 lb bodyweight * (2.6% bodyweight consumed feed DM per day * 100) =) 15.6 lb of DM forage per day. As he increases in bodyweight, so the amount of feed he needs to consume will also increase. To demonstrate, if target slaughter weight is 1400 pounds, then the daily dry matter intake (DDMI) would increase for every 100 pound gain in body weight as:
For a steer to get to 1400 lb in one year, he would need to have an average daily gain (ADG) of 2.2 pounds per day.
So that means that if we were to estimate how long it takes that steer to gain 100 pounds, at that rate of gain it would be about 45.5 days. From that estimate we can further estimate how much feed that steer is going to need, at 45.5 day intervals, over time.
I won't bore you with all the math. But just to demonstrate yet again, just how much feed a 600 lb steer, to get to 700 pounds, needs to eat (on a dry-matter basis) over 45.5 days, I just use this calculation:
If you're following along with your own calculator, you basically just need to use the same calculation for each hundred-weight increase over the 45.5 day period. Then add all those values up to get how much feed that steer will need. Here's the values that I came up with, added up to the grand total:
You're probably wondering why I'm going to all this trouble to determine how much a steer will eat over a year. Stay with me, we're getting there.
When raising cattle on grass, the important thing to remember is: Grass will grow back. It will grow back readily particularly if you are using managed rotational grazing in an area where you can get at least two or three grazing sessions per grazing season, and timing your grazing so that you are having cattle eat grass at the right time at each session.
Now, 10,647 lb of required forage per year for that bovine actually can be easily met in a good productive area that is even under 140 cow-days per acre (per the calculations derived from the meme above). An area with forage productivity of 115 to 120 cow-days per acre might be enough to meet the forage intake requirements of that steer with a year-round, management-intensive grazing (MiG) system.
And that is quite possible on one acre. Again, particularly in areas where winter is quite mild, and MiG will keep grass productive.
No kidding. By my calculations, and with the help of an Excel spreadsheet on these very calculations that I developed, a person can actually raise a single steer to 1400 lb slaughter weight on one acre that is producing 125 cow-days per acre of grass; with daily moves, a 45.5 day rest period, that steer can graze between 0.005 and 0.01 acres (= 217 to 435 square feet) of pasture land per day, with almost 3 sessions per pasture during that entire year.
And that means that, on one acre with 125 cow-days per acre of forage for that single animal, a person can get 504 lb of boxed, ready-to-eat beef on that single acre.
Pretty cool, eh? And, even with NRCS's numbers, it's not impossible to get even more pounds of boxed beef per acre; 1.5 to almost double the amount of boxed beef I calculated above!
Of course that's not saying that all areas in the world will have enough grass for to produce that amount of beef per acre, and there are other variables I didn't mention that will influence the ability to produce some grass-finished beef on one acre, but it goes to show you that you certainly can raise more beef on less amount of land than what's been conventionally thought possible. (I do believe this might be a good excuse to make another blog post about the misconception that "there's not enough land to have grass-fed cattle..." Some other time.)
The easy answer is that it is highly variable. It really depends on soil type and quality, moisture, cultivars used, location, organic vs. conventional, climate/weather conditions, etc.
The meme claims that 53,000 lb of potatoes and 40,000 lb of tomatoes can be grown on an acre, assuming on an annual basis. From my research below, I've found some very different, and widely varying answers that questions the validity of the meme's claims... yet again.
For potatoes, the average yields differ quite substantially from year to year, and in different areas. Some examples I pulled from a Google search:
21,200 lb/acre of organic, 32,800 for conventional according to U of WI-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (1992 article)
2012 potato yield for Canada, on average is 27,550 lb/acre according to this Statistics Canada document. In the same document, 2012 data for potato production in the USA was approximately 42,560 lb/acre, and in the same year, for Mexico, was 23,440 lb/acre.
In Washington State, the average potato production (for 2011) was 61,000 lb/acre (USDA Census of Agriculture pamphlet for Washington)
For Oregon alone, it boasts the "highest potato production" at (per the meme's source above) 53,000 lb/acre (from OregonSpuds.com's Potato Trivia)
For tomatoes, I also found even more extreme variabilities with tomato production, with no real averages like with potatoes.
Basically, tomato growers will plant between 2,400 to 5,800 plants per acre. How much each plant will yield per growing season is variable, but most suggest to expect between 10 to 30 pounds of tomatoes per plant. Some folks are capable, if using the right varieties and ensuring good growing conditions, of 50 to 80 pounds of tomatoes per plant!!
This means, on a per acre basis, 2,400 plants on an acre may yield between 24,000 lb/acre to 192,000 lb/acre. If a person had 5,800 plants per acre, then they could expect to get between 58,000 lb/acre to 464,000 lb/acre.
Meat, by definition means "...the flesh of an animal, typically a mammal or bird, as food (the flesh of domestic fowls is sometimes distinguished as poultry)" (from Oxford Dictionary)
One and a half acres will produce more meat from one species than another due to space requirements as dictated by body size. (For example, chickens need less space than pigs, and pigs need less space than cows, in that order.)
This meme is actually making things far more complicated and more off the mark than a person thinks. If this Cowsmackery meme is going to be using the quote that 375 pounds of MEAT is produced on 1.5 acres, then that obviously means I need to really break things down and take a look at several things:
Without even starting on the calculations, I can tell right off that the meme is incredibly far off the mark.
And I'll also tell you right now that they're talking about beef being produced from that 1.5 acres, NOT "meat." But I'll get to that after I crunch the numbers for the various animals raised for meat.
Let's just see how many animals, of each species, it takes to even make 375 lb of ready-to-cook meat:
Beef: One (1) 1042 lb steer (Frame score 3, small-framed; assuming dressing percentage is 60% of live-weight, and weight of final retail cuts are 60% of dressing percentage)
Pork: Three (3) 250 lb pigs (assuming dressing percentage is is 70% of live-weight, and final retail cuts are 70% of dressing percentage)
Lamb / Chevon (Goat): Ten (10) 150 lb lambs (assuming dressing percentage is 50% of live-weight, and final retail cuts are 50% of dressing percentage)
Turkey: Seventeen (17) 30 lb turkeys (assuming dressing percentage is 80% of live-weight, and final butcher weight is 90% of dressing percentage)
Chicken: One hundred (100) 5 lb broiler chickens (assuming dressing percentage is 75% of live-weight)
Now, we need to find the time it takes to raise each of these species to get to slaughter (from birth):
From there, we can answer the question of how many animals can be raised for a year, using rotational grazing systems, on 1.5 acres (assuming pastures are productive all year long, and all animals won't need any other outside supplementation).
But, before we even do that, the question we need to answer first is how much do each of these animals eat per day? Since there's always a difference in body weight, it makes life and calculations much easier if the expected amount any species of animal is going to eat is based on dry matter intake on a percent body weight basis:
Now we can look at how many animals can be raised, or pastured, on just 1.5 acres (ONLY of each species!):
Rabbits: One thousand three hundred thirty-six (1336) 5 lb rabbits (or 4 batches of 334 rabbits in one year)
As with the first meme, I based my calculations on a pasture-based system that took into account the amount of grass produced, rest period needed for each pasture, amount of time spent in each paddock, weight and dry matter intake requirements of each species, and a few other things, to come up with the above calculations. Having a spreadsheet were I can just plug in a couple numbers and already have the formulas put in place is all I needed to do to come up with the above numbers.
Now, if we ignored the whole pasture-raised thing, and just looked at 1.5 acres as one, ginormous "factory farm," or CAFO (confined feeding animal operation), which can be easily done on 1.5 acres of land, we can answer part 2 of question 2 which I posed above about, "How many animals can 1.5 acres hold to be raised for meat per year?"
As I already mentioned, the space requirements for each species is different simply because of their body size. Do you want to know what the CAFO-standard space requirements for each species actually is? Okay... be prepared to be shocked (as if the values I came up with above hadn't put you into shock therapy already...)
Using those values above, let's see just how many animals 1.5 acres (65,340 sq. ft) could actually hold in intensive confinement:
These values do not take into the extra space needed to grow the feed for these animals. This is why my choice of words are to "hold," not "support." "Support" would indicate also growing feed on that same parcel of land to feed those critters.
That means that the numbers of how many animals 1.5 acres can hold (under intensive confinement) are grossly inflated because they don't support the ability to grow feed for the animals. For most animals, more than twice the land, if not greater, will be needed to raise just a fraction of most of the animals in this list.
And that means that I'm going to ignore those values above, and only use the ones I made for raising animals on pasture to answer my third question:
Using the same dressing and and cutting percentage weights that I started off with to look at just how many animals need to be killed to produce 375 lb of meat, here are the results that I came up with:
Turkeys: One hundred thirty-four (134) 25 lb turkeys will give 2,412 lb of ready-to-cook whole turkey;
Geese: Two hundred fifty-six (256) 13 lb geese will give 2,329.6 lb of ready-to-cook whole goose meat;
Chickens: Two-thousand four (2,004) 5 lb broiler chickens will give 7,515 lb of ready-to-cook whole chicken; or
Rabbits: One thousand three hundred thirty-six (1,336) 5 lb rabbits will give 801.6 lb of ready-to-cook/eat whole rabbit.
Right off the bat that makes the meme's 375-pounds-of-meat claimed value so far off the mark I'm laughing hysterically in my chair right now.
But really, where are they coming up with 375 lb of "meat" on 1.5 acres? That's the next big question I want to answer and figure out, like with the first meme above.
I think we can all agree that it's actually based on meat from cattle, not the disingenuous term "meat" that was, in my honest opinion, stupidly used.
As mentioned above, I'm going to assume that 375 lb of beef is boxed beef, and not the dressed weight after slaughter. So, the actual weight of the animal is:
According to Grassfed Solutions link on "Target slaughter weights: Are your beef cattle fat enough when they go to market?" a 1042 lb steer is between a frame score of 3 and 4 for steers, and 4 to 5 for heifers. This indicates the size of the steer is on the large side of "small frame" or medium-framed.
Frame scores (based on hip height in conjunction with age) range from 1 (one) to 9 (nine), with one being the smallest. Miniature cattle, I believe, could be smaller than FS-1 cattle... but let's not get into that.
Most cattle are slaughtered when they reach between 1300 and 1500 pounds. Either of these animals should yield 460 lb to 540 lb of boxed meat. And those sized-animals are large-framed animals.
In order to find out how to get 375 lb of beef from 1.5 acres, I need to, again, work backwards from the point of the actual live-weight of the animal so that I can ultimately find out the forage productivity of that 1.5-acre parcel. Here's basically what I did:
I'm expecting about 50% utilization of a pasture (where half of the forage is eaten, the rest trampled and sodden on), and daily rotation, with 120-day rest period per paddock.
On 1.5 acres, that means that I would probably need (1.5 acres ÷ 121 paddocks =) 0.0124 acres per paddock. Or, to do it in square footage, 1.5 acres (43,560 sq. ft./acre * 1.5 acres) = 65,340 sq. ft; Therefore 65,340 sq. ft. ÷ 121 paddocks= 540 sq. ft. per paddock.
The expected amount of forage, therefore, that a pasture is expected to produce is (54.2 ÷ 0.0124 acres per paddock =) 4371 lb/acre of forage.
To the average Jane/Joe that seems like "lots of space to roam" but to me, that's too much space for just one animal to cover sufficiently in one day. If there's a lot of forage available per day, which my next calculations show that shouldn't be the case:
In other words, on a really shitty pasture (pardon the pun) you can graze one 1042 lb bovine on 1.5 acres. But there's a catch.
The number of times that bovine will need to go over that pasture in a year is eight times (0.0326 acres/paddock/day * 365 days = 11.899 total acres needed for entire season (with no returning to previous paddocks grazed) ÷ 1.5 acres = 7.9 or 8 required grazing sessions for 1.5 acres in one year-long grazing season). Not all pastures are going to be that productive, especially when they have that low of forage quantity to begin with.
On the other hand, the pasture with 84 cow-days per acre will mean that it will be gone over less times over the year, make that only three grazing sessions per year (0.0124 * 365 = 4.5 ÷ 1.5 = 3 sessions for 1.5 acres in one year-long grazing season).
But the question is, are pastures only that good to graze on? My answer is look at how much a lot of hay fields can produce. You can get some that will be highly productive, as in around 4 to 5 tons per acre (or 8,816 lb/acre to 11,020 lb/acre), or more--some hay fields can get as much as 10 tons/acre (22,040 lb/acre). If a pasture can be made to be as productive or better as the average hay field (no matter if it's irrigated or not), then that means that a person can indeed raise more beef than what the meme is suggesting on one or 1.5 acres. Easily; like at least double the amount of beef than what Cowspiracy's meme is proselytizing.
So, is this second meme out to lunch? Not entirely. It's only indicative of pasture mismanagement that doesn't manage grass and animals to their full potential. It also doesn't show the huge potential that better grass management can do to actually help increase pasture productivity and thereby needing to increase the size of the herd to match that increased productivity.
This meme is also suggesting that a person can get 37,000 lb of so-called "plant-based food" (or rather, just food excluding meat and poultry) on 1.5 acres. That, in my mind, translates to the ability of getting 11 tons/acre of vegetables/fruit/grain etc.
In the first meme above I already showed the incredible variability and discrepancies between the amount of potatoes and tomatoes--"plant-based food" essentially--that are even produced on just one acre of land. Compared to those, 37,000 lb of vegetables, fruits, and/or grains on 1.5 acres (or 11 tons/acre) is not exactly a whole lot.
Therefore this meme shows, yet again, a poor example of the potential productivity of any area of land that is even capable of being used to grow food for people.
Now that I've crunched the numbers and really took a hard look at what both memes were (and were not) showing, I would like to switch gears and provide another post to explain why the land-use argument comparisons are really a non-issue, and as much of a proselytizing erroneous statement that needs to be taken with a giant grain of salt as any vegan shock-value "fact" should be regarded.
Labels: beef, cattle, cows, goats, grass, grass-fed beef, grass-finished, grazing, lamb, land-use, livestock, pasture, pork, poultry, slaughter
It's funny how animal rights activists pride themselves in how they believe that they know everything about animal agriculture and livestock, from the history of agriculture to digestive physiology to grazing management. They believe that they know it all so much that they feel the need to "educate" a farmer about how much "better" it would be if animals are raised a different way, or not raised at all.
The problem is that they've got themselves so deeply convinced that they know it all--I've heard also how they quickly try to cover their asses by claiming that they don't try or wish to call themselves "experts" on agriculture, even though their contributions to a debate with me to prove me wrong make themselves appear otherwise--that they become blind to the fact that they don't know a damn thing of what they're talking about. They get so stupid that they don't even know they're that stupid.
I'm ARA bashing, I know, but there's a reason for it. About a month ago I got into a debate with one such ARA who figured he's heard "all the meat-eater arguments" and knows all the rebuttals to such arguments. But there's just too big of an elephant in the room to ignore: He honestly didn't.
This particular activist, whose name I won't mention here nor what animal activist organization he's a part of (although he's a part of one of those organizations that condones the actions of stealing or "liberating" animals as a means to "rescue" them), thought that he could provide a good rebuttal to some of the farming arguments that actual farmer or agriculturally-literate folk were providing. I kept a few of his gems to talk about on here to make a couple more posts on.
"How do you propose to grow crops in areas that are very arid, and feed people? Without massive amounts of irrigation, YOU [CANNOT]. [It's] not even sustainable, let alone regenerative. However you can grow livestock (they can walk to water sources, plants can not) and the livestock have been shown in many cases to improve arid grassland areas and reverse desertification. Remove animals from an ecosystem and [you're] doomed to failure."
"Re: Growing crops in arid environments is not possible, but raising animals is: It's not possible to raise animals without growing crops as well. To produce one pound of cow flesh, you must feed ten pounds of grain. People who live in arid environments and choose to raise animals are forced to either import feed or grow it themselves, with much difficulty. It would be much more sustainable to directly eat the grain."
To me, who comes from a farm and has immersed herself quite a bit into regenerative agriculture and grazing management, this response from the ARA is quite amusing, to say the least. For those of you who aren't as knowledgable about farming and grazing practices who may not share my thoughts and may start thinking that the ARA is making sense, then let me take you further to explain why this young activist is proving himself to be the poster-child for the Dunning-Krueger Effect.
While I do realize that Rich could have been a little more clearer about the fact of the matter that cows need and eat grass more than they do grain, the ARA here has clearly made the assumption that cows require grain all through their life, including the cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this) argument that "it's not possible to raise animals without growing crops as well."
Unless I make an argumentum ad logicam (argument to logic) fallacy, the ARA is creating the kind of fallacy that assumes that, because raising animals and grain production occurred around the same time agriculture first started, therefore it must be that animals need grain to live. The logic he was making was mistaking correlation for causation.
That is assuming that the definition for "crops" in the context of the ARA's argument/statement above, is primarily that of short-lived plants grown for the harvest of seed (i.e., grain, oilseeds, pulses) on arable or cultivated land. Thing is, to be really technical, pastures and hay lands could also by lumped under the much broader definition of crops which is the growing and harvesting a variety of plants for food and feed purposes of people and animals, further brought together as "forage crops" or even "perennial forage crops." However, since the ARA's statement is directly correlated to cultivated annual crops, I wouldn't be making an argument-to-logic fallacy.
Therefore, the fact that the advent of raising farm animals and the growing of grain and other food crops occurred at the same time does not mean that farm animals need grain for their survival. In reality, for most farm animals--particularly cows and cattle--they really can do just fine without.
That's what Rich was trying to teach the ARA about above. Animals, particularly cattle and cows, don't need grain to survive, much less to be raised. Cattle are ruminant animals, with a four-chambered stomach specially designed for digesting and breaking down the kind of plant matter that we humans cannot eat, thanks to several million microbes living in their rumens. Because of this they can thrive just fine on grass and other edible forbs (including legumes like alfalfa) without needing that grain.
The only time cattle need grain is if the plants aren't meeting their nutritional requirements, or the cattle themselves are metabolically not suited to such a roughage diet.
It's like this: Putting a herd of Holsteins (your average black-and-white dairy cows) out on native grassland would be animal abuse because those cows are not genetically, or rather metabolically equipped or adapted to thrive on such coarse forage. They'd starve to death with their stomachs full of the stuff.
But when you get beef cattle like Herefords or Texas Longhorns on that same patch of ground, they're much more likely to gain weight and/or produce enough good-quality milk to raise some nice healthy calves. These are just two exemplary breeds of course, but other grassy-type breeds like Devons, Red Polls, Galloways, and the more hardier heritage bloodlines of the Aberdeen Black/Red Angus breed would do just as well.
The thing is, for a farmer to have their cows earn their keep on a pasture-based operation, those cows need to be able to gain and produce milk on forage (grass and legumes primarily) alone. Feeding grain should be a rarity, not a regular occurrence. If a farmer's cows are needing to be fed grain on a regular basis, then it might be time to think about a) changing the genetics of the cowherd, and/or b) take a step back and see what else may be wrong with how things are being managed.
The fact is that the ARA completely missed the point that Rich was directly talking about raising cattle on grass. Not grain. So our ARA friend just had to throw in the parroted rhetorical strawman fallacy phrase, "To produce one pound of cow flesh, you must feed ten pounds of grain." Does that not help the ARA's stance much on this subject? No, I didn't think so. Nor does it help that the ARA's continuing on with is cum hoc fallacy arguments.
So I hope you can tell that the ARA was all over the feedlot model, not the grass-finishing model, and couldn't discern the difference. Once again, if you haven't noticed already, Rich was talking about grazing cattle on grass, not feeding them grain. Talk about taking things out of context.
So once again, because cattle are ruminant animals designed to live and thrive on primarily grass, there is no "must" with feeding grain to even get a steer up to slaughter weight. None whatsoever.
The only reason you "must" feed grain to cattle is because it's a much quicker way to get finisher cattle fatter in a shorter amount of time. Grain and stored feed also ensures that a feedlot operation can finish cattle and truck them out to the slaughter plant at any time of the year. It's also been the answer since the 1950s for cheaper, more marbled (fatter) beef by an increasingly urbanized consumer population.
Grass-finishing, on the other hand, is seasonal; according to folks like Joel Salatin and Nicolette Hahn Niman (author of Defending Beef), the best time to send grass-finishers to slaughter is between the first killing frost and the leaves turning colour to get the best flavour and quality beef. It also takes longer for cattle to reach the right age and weight for slaughter.
But still, there is no "must" in feeding grain to cattle. Only if you're striving for quicker, fatter, bigger, younger and don't care much for quality of the beef.
I know I'm making a bit of a straw man fallacy here, so forgive me. The ARA is close to being right that about that amount of grain needs to be fed to get a pound of beef (actually it's more closer to 6 pounds, not 10 [which is a 1950s value]), and especially that it's not as nearly as efficient as feeding grain to pigs or poultry.
But the reality is that cattle are more healthier and happier being raised on perennial forage. I'm pretty sure that a steer would sooner be out grazing a tasty perennial salad bar full of different species of plants and getting moved to a new grazing spot every one to three days, than he would standing around in a dirt lot full of dust or mud when it rains, and having the nearly same damn feed mix to eat day after day, twice a day, for four to eight months long.
I know. I've seen how steers react when they get the opportunity to eat fresh grass over the same old hay, silage and some grain. If you had them to choose between some silage that's been fermenting and put out for them at the bunks and a sward of fresh grass, they would go for the grass first and ignore the silage. That's why for most folks who do the conventional way of feeding cattle through the winter need to keep their animals in the dry lot to clean up the silage pile before they go to grass. Otherwise, if those animals went to grass first before the silage pile was cleaned up, it would be mighty hard to get them to clean it all up in time to get the pens cleaned out in the spring.
And for the farmer, it's a lot cheaper to graze than it is to feed. It doesn't take a whole lot of money to make grass grow. But money needs to change hands if a farmer needs to get or even grow some grain to feed his cows. Same with making or buying hay and silage.
If there's more than one way to raise and finish cattle on grass to get a quarter tonne of beef per animal without breaking the bank in the long term and without causing harm to the landscape by avoiding poor management practices (like "free-ranging"), then why is there a "must" with feeding grain to cattle to get the same product when it costs a lot more--both financially and ecologically--to do so? It makes no sense!
I found it very ironic that the ARA literally confirmed--repeated, more like--what producer Rich said above with this statement,"People who live in arid environments and choose to raise animals are forced to either import feed or grow it themselves, with much difficulty." But wait until you see what this particular sentence lead into below!
It's one of those, "No shit, Sherlock!" moments that still completely missed the point that Rich was directly referring to grazing cattle grass, not feeding them grain.
Because this ARA made the cum hoc fallacy above about can't raise animals without raising crops too, he's got it in his head that cattle can't be raised in arid environments either because they need these crops to keep them alive, which is a load of bullshit.
Yes, ARA Sherlock, it is more difficult and costly to grow or import feed to feed to cattle. BUT, because it's not impossible to raise animals without crops (grain) and you don't need any grain to get some good quality beef, why in the hell would anyone be stupid enough to do or think that they need to grow or truck in grain to feed their animals in the first place?
Arid environments aren't devoid of grass; they haven't been in the past before a bunch of greenies decided that cows are bad for the land, and range science has adopted the reductionist management reasoning that overgrazing means too many cows on the land (which is not true at all). And the grass that historically and naturally grew there didn't need irrigation or man-made chemicals to grow and thrive there. They needed grazing ruminant animals with their hooves, their dung, and their mouths--not necessarily in that order--to eat and trample and poop on those plants to encourage more grass to grow and feed and support even more life.
So, why in the hell does that land need to be used for growing petroleum-guzzling, resource-inefficient, ecologically/environmentally-destructive crops instead? The answer is that it doesn't!
What those arid environments need is more perennial-based systems that can support more livestock, and which is also supported by livestock and the people managing them to encourage more perennial native plants. This in turn supports more plant life and more animal life. You simply cannot get that when you replace that natural system with a monoculture of corn.
THAT is what Rich was referring to as a more regenerative way of bringing the land back to life using more livestock, not less.
Let me get one thing straight: Sustainability is about maintaining a closed system. Crop production is anything but a closed system.
So how is it really "more sustainable" for people to eat the grain rather than have the animals eat the grain, when the animals in question (being cows) don't particularly need the grain in the first place, and if they do, won't need much of it anyway?
And since when are most people going to be eating lots of grain? Grains need to be processed--milled--somewhat before it's actually viably suitable for human consumption. Otherwise it's just nutrition-less carbohydrates that, for most people, make them fat and unhealthy.
Otherwise, growing grains conventionally require outside inputs in terms of fertilizers, pesticides, and petroleum (fuel), and the outputs are going to be the grains with a lot of nutrients within them, as well as soil particles that get blown or washed away with the wind or rain because there is very little to no cover on the soil surface.
When grains are fed to people, there's no human manure that gets put back on the fields. No, more man-made fertilizers are made so that more grain can be grown the next year. A lot of water still needs to be used to grow these crops, and in arid environments that means having to access below-ground aquifers that could be drained down further if more grains need to be grown.
And if grains can't be grown, but other possibly more water-intensive crops can be grown, well farmers will grow them. What's grown in excess is exported to other parts of the country.
How is that sustainable again? Well, it isn't. It isn't more sustainable than raising animals on a perennial vegetative landscape that doesn't require near the amount of inputs that a lot of crops do.
And if we're going to look briefly at Regenerative Agriculture, the current industrial conventional means of producing grains and other foodstuffs today is NOT regenerative; it's Degenerative.
Yet how can someone continue to support a much more degenerative system of agriculture and claim that it's "better" than raising livestock in a regenerative agriculture that really is ever-growing?
Apparently this ARA can. Ignorance is bliss I guess, especially when you're an ARA who's only understanding of farm life comes from vegan propaganda movies and videos and misinterpreted captioned photos.
My next blog post targets this same ARA's response to my comments on cattle grazing and soil health. You won't believe until you see the kind of ludicrous "facts" he tried to "educate" me with on how annual crops were better for the soil than cows being intensively managed on pasture!!
Labels: agriculture, animal rights, cattle, cattle grazing, cows, cows eat, ecology, environment, farming, feeding, feedlot, grass, grass-finished, grazing, grazing management, livestock, raising on grass