Articles | Cows Against Climate Change

Written by Rebecca Hosking | Posted on 16/11/2009 | Category: Real Food

The idea that eating meat is inherently disastrous for the climate is pretty much universally accepted. From Stella McCartney’s “meat free Mondays” all the way up to the likes of Lord Stern and the United Nations the same message is clear –rearing large numbers of livestock cannot be squared with the preservation of our environment.

Whilst in the process of seriously reconsidering the long term future of livestock farming there was a niggling thought at the back of my head that something about the “livestock is bad” assumption wasn’t sitting comfortably with what I was taught about ecology.

Before people started farming livestock, the world’s grasslands were positively heaving with grazing animals. When humans first got to Australia, North America and even Europe there were almost unimaginably vast herds of grazing animals. We can still see the remnants in a few small pockets of Africa but we have lost the giant grazing marsupials of Australia and the estimated 100 million American bison are now largely gone. All these animals belched and farted methane but they didn’t cause global warming. So what’s wrong with the animals, like cattle, we have replaced them with? In short, nothing. The problem lies in how we rear them.

Most of the meat and dairy we currently consume is produced by feeding animals vast quantities of maize, soya and other grains. The industrial arable farming that produces the grain is systematically emptying the world’s soils of their organic matter (which means carbon). Adding insult to injury, the unnatural grain diet is causing grass eaters like cattle to produce much higher levels of methane than normal.

To find out how to properly rear grazing animals we need to look beyond our forefathers to when the herds were managed by nature. Before human intervention, the vast herds of grazing animals were continually pushed around by pack hunting predators. This meant they tended to bunch up tight and spend very little time in the same place before moving on. This is how the grass liked it and it thrived. As it did so it locked down countless tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere in the form of soil rich in organic matter. Thanks to the bison herds, this was the kind of soil we discovered on the prairies of the United States. It was rich, fertile, metres deep and contained billions of tonnes of carbon. This is the same soil we turned to dust in the 1930s after just fifty years of growing crops.

It’s not even that our clever human system is more productive. As nature’s herdsmen, wolves, lions, hyenas, hunting dogs and the like successfully maintained considerably higher stocking densities than us whilst simultaneously increasing the fertility of the grasslands, reducing erosion, sequestering carbon, improving water supplies and reducing disease. They did this with no fossil fuels, no chemical fertilizers, no pesticides, no antibiotics, no genetic modifications, no artificial insemination and they did it for millions of years until we stopped them.

The ability of well managed livestock systems to lock down carbon is not a new discovery. Thanks to questioning pioneer farmers such as Andre Voisin and Allan Savory we have known for fifty years how to mimic this natural grazing. Time after time it has been shown, when done properly, to restore manmade deserts to lush grassland, sequestering vast volumes of carbon in the process. It is an effective strategy in almost all climates but has particular benefits in arid regions. The only side effects seem to be increased biodiversity, fewer droughts and happier, better fed local communities.
 
The carbon holding potential of soil is enormous, four times greater even than that of the rainforests. It has been estimated that increasing the organic content of the world’s soils by a tenth of a percent a year would sequester as much atmospheric carbon as the world produces from burning fossil fuels in one year. This rate of sequestration is distinctly possible with the help of livestock, so why aren’t we mobilizing the bovine army? Why aren’t we all talking about “Cows Against Climate Change”? Who knows? I’m sure the reasons are many and varied but I bet none of them will be based on common sense and ecology. The fact that the current grain based system makes billions in profit each year for huge powerful agricultural corporations may have something to do with it, but hay, that’s me just guessing.

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