As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise many people are looking for an easy one-size-fits-all solution to our climate problem. One of the trendiest options is going vegan. Over recent years people have raised questions about the impact of eating massive amounts of meat and suggested that everyone going vegan could solve our climate crisis.
So, what’s the real environmental impact of our meat, and can going vegan really save the environment?
Many are concerned about the amount of water and food it takes to produce a pound of beef, but the reality is a typical cow’s water footprint is 94% green water. This means that 94% of a cow’s water footprint is just rainwater, and of course, once that water is used it’s not gone forever. It’s urinated out and cycled back into the environment. In fact, almonds end up using less green water than beef.
Additionally, many are worried about the amount of food it takes to produce a pound of beef. Couldn’t we be feeding more people with all that food? More than 85% of livestock feed is non-human edible, and in the end, 4.3 billion kilograms of non-human edible food gets fed to livestock.
In a recent “What I’ve Learned” video the narrator goes into many of the common problems with the carbon footprint of our meat and why it’s actually more nuanced than you might think.
At the end of the day, the government and big businesses need to be held responsible for their role in destroying the environment. The role of fixing the environment does not fall on the individual consumer, but rather, the producer. If you’re curious about how eating sustainable agriculture stacks up against going vegan check out this article.
Top Three Meat Producers Issue Multiple Recalls For Beef, Chicken Due to Metal, Plastic, Rubber, Wood Contamination
On January 30th Tyson recalled 36,420 pounds of chicken nuggets due to potential rubber contamination.
A recall on 5-pound bags of “Tyson WHITE MEAT PANKO CHICKEN NUGGETS” that were produced on Nov. 26, 2018 and have a use-by date of Nov. 26, 2019 was issued after consumers complained of “extraneous material, specifically rubber” in the product, according to the press release.
Pilgrim’s Pride Corp is owned by JBS S.A., a Brazillian company, which is the largest meat producer in the world. They also recalled about 60,000 pounds of chicken products due to possible rubber contamination.
The problem was discovered on Jan. 30, 2019 when the company was informed by Publix Super Markets’ employees about a consumer complaint regarding white rubber in the products.
On March 22 Tyson Foods recalled approximately 69,000 pounds of frozen, ready-to-eat chicken strips due to potential metal contamination.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) said here late Thursday it had received two consumer complaints of extraneous material in Tyson’s chicken strips and that there were no reports of illnesses.
Tyson is recalling all its fully cooked buffalo-style chicken strip fritters, crispy chicken strips and chicken breast strip fritters, which have a use-before date of Nov. 30, 2019.
On April 3 Tyson Foods recalled about 20,000 pounds of ready-to-eat beef patties due to plastic contamination.
A Tyson unit, AdvancePierre Foods, is recalling ‘fully cooked flame-broiled beef patties’ after two consumers complained about soft purple plastic in the product, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service said the USDA on Tuesday.
The USDA categorized the recall as ‘Class II’, which indicates a remote probability of adverse health consequences from the use of the product.
Perdue Foods, reportedly the third-largest American producer of broilers (chickens raised for human consumption) has had a couple of recalls of its own.
On January 17th Perdue Foods LLC recalled their “Simplysmart Organics Gluten Free Chicken Nugget Products” because of potential “foreign matter contamination.”
The problem was discovered when the firm received three consumer complaints that wood was found in the product.
Then slightly more than a week later on Jan. 28, Perdue recalled more than 16,000 pounds of “Refrigerated Fun Shapes Chicken Breast Nuggets” due to “misbranding and undeclared allergens.”
Perdue Foods, LLC, a Bridgewater, Va. establishment, is recalling approximately 16,011 pounds of ready-to-eat (RTE) chicken nugget products due to misbranding and undeclared allergens, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced today. The products contain milk, a known allergen, which is not declared on the product label.
That’s three recalls in four months so far this year for Tyson Foods, the world’s second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork. And that’s one recall by JBS S.A., a Brazillian company, the largest meat producer in the world. And there are two recalls for Perdue Foods, the third largest broiler chicken producer.
Tyson and Perdue are also known for poor treatment of their animals:
Calling Meat Alternatives “Meat” Illegal in Missouri – First State To Pass Law
Missouri is the first state in the U.S. to ban the word “meat” on faux meat products like garden burgers and Tofurky. Using the term “plant-based meats,” and “vegan faux-meat” can find the business owner in jail for up to a year. This law was brought to you by The Missouri Cattlemen’s Association.
The legislation defines meat as ‘any edible portion of livestock or poultry carcass or part thereof’ and requires that any labeled meat product is derived ‘in whole or in part, from livestock or poultry.’ Violators of this definition will henceforth be subject to up to one year in prison and fines of up to $1,000.” – Forbe’s
The law will also apply to “clean meat” which is produced by growing and multiplying cells in a lab. Animal rights organizations and environmental groups aren’t keen on the new law. It’s estimated that if we switched to eating lab-grown meat, we would cut agriculture emissions by 96%.
Missouri is the first state but not likely the last. The American beef industry has been lobbying to get “meat” banned from vegetable-based products for years, and meat industries want the ban to be nationwide.
The industry has cause for concern. TreeHugger says,
Americans ate 20 percent less beef in 2014 than they did in 2005. Veggie meat substitutes, by contrast, are a growing industry. And who knows what’ll happen when lab-based meats start making it into grocery stores.”
Massive Beef Recall for Plastic Contamination, Including Kroger Stores
More than 35,000 pounds of ground beef sold by North Carolina food processor JBS USA has been recalled after a consumer found hard, blue pieces of plastic in a package. The ground beef is in a variety of packages and distributed through Kroger locations in North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Illinois and eastern West Virginia as well as Food 4 Less and Jay C stores located in the Midwest. Kroger spokeswoman Kristal Howard addressed the recall, saying that Kroger “verified that none of these products are in our stores today…We encourage customers to check their freezers for the potentially affected products and not to consume them but throw them away or return them to their place of purchase for a full refund.”
This is by no means the largest recall of meat with plastic bits this year. In addition to the current recall, 60 tons of beef and 67 tons of Salisbury steak were recalled earlier in the month of April for plastic fragments and pieces of bone, respectively. The past two years, 2016 and 2017, saw the highest numbers of meat recalled for extraneous materials like plastics in the past decade. While those numbers can be partially attributed to massive single occurrence recalls, the fact remains that we are finding more plastic than ever in our food.
This recall, coupled with the ongoing Romaine lettuce scare, make it seem like our food system is headed for an unpleasant awakening. The United States Department of Agriculture doesn’t even keep track of microplastics, a growing issue for seafood. Water is a fundamental part of our food chain, and discoveries of microplastics in bottled water will translate to an agricultural setting if they haven’t already.
Can Environmentalists Eat Steak? Is Grass-fed, Free-range Better?
Healthy animals mean a healthy environment, right? What about concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)? These “factory farms” must be cancerous to the environment.
This all seems like common sense, but our common sense can sometimes lead us in the wrong direction.
Gassy Cows and Global Warming
Many studies point to the fact that the production of beef pollutes the atmosphere with more greenhouse gases than the production of any other food. This is because cows are ruminants — a type of animal that acquires nutrients from plant-based food by fermenting their food in a specialized stomach. Because of this fermentation process, cows burp, fart, pee, and poop persistently throughout the day, which adds more greenhouse gases — like methane gas and nitrous oxide — to the environment.
Although fluorinated gases that are commonly used as refrigerants and aerosol propellants are the most potent and longest lasting greenhouse gasses, methane gas and nitrous oxide still have a 25 and 300 times greater impact respectively on global warming than carbon dioxide. Cows and other ruminants also eat plenty of oxygen-producing, carbon-dioxide-absorbing plants.
The Case Against Raising Healthy and Happy Cows
At this point, you may be thinking that cows that live long and healthy lives on pasture are bad for the environment, and you are not alone. Dr. Bill Ripple is a prominent ecologist known for his work researching the roles of large carnivores in ecological systems around the world, and he agrees with you.
Ripple took his expertise to climate change and found that pastured cattle contributed two to four times more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than cows raised in CAFOs.
This isn’t even the worst of it. Cattle have also been found to destroy ecosystems with their grazing. In 1990, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service banished grazing cattle from a 278,000-acre refuge called Hart Mountain to try to restore the ecosystem that was presumably destroyed by grazing cattle. After two decades, trees, shrubs, and flowers flourished providing a beautiful environment for birds, antelopes, and other species to thrive.
This suggests that healthy and happy cows destroy the environment in multiple ways. They produce potent greenhouses gases with their inefficient digestive system and make it hard for ecosystems to thrive. But what do you do if you want to have a big juicy steak and stop global warming?
Bill Ripple’s findings suggest that you should get that steak from a sick and diseased cow that is confined to a jail cell and has a shorter lifespan. Or just give up steak all together and become a vegetarian or vegan. Problem solved!
Hold on, what about all of the cattle? Even if we don’t eat them they will still be grazing, burping, and farting. Should we — dare I say — kill them?
The Bigger Picture: Joel Salatin and Sustainable Farming Practices
The amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside.” – Joel Salatin
That’s a brief excerpt from Joel’s rebuttal to the assertion that sustainable grass-fed beef is bad for the environment.
Joel Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia — a farm that produces pasture-raised, beyond organic beef, pork, poultry, eggs, and rabbits.
In his rebuttal, Joel continues by explaining that “…wetlands emit some 95% of all methane in the world.” If you were to fact-check his statement you’d find it to be true, which suggests that if you are going to blame happy and healthy livestock for global warming, you should blame nature as well. Better yet, blame your trash, too — it should know by now not to produce methane gas.
But still, according to Dr. Ripples, findings at Hart Mountain, Salatin’s farm should be struggling to maintain lush green pastures. Although this may be true for other farms that Salatin claims are under “neanderthal management”, Polyface farms uses many different methods like rotational grazing to get the most out of the land while keeping it lush and fertile.
Regardless of what Joel Salatin says, CAFOs are still known to be a much more efficient use of land, and the animals they produce add much less greenhouse gas to the atmosphere due to their shorter lifespans.
Should we just give up on raising happy and healthy livestock?
CAFOs are a NONO
It is a fact that CAFO beef produces less greenhouse gas emissions than grass-fed beef, but this reductionist approach to climate change leaves out many other factors.
For example, animals raised in CAFOs are usually fed GMO soybean, GMO corn, and GMO grain feed. GMOs themselves may not be an issue for the animal (which is debatable), but these GMO crops are covered in pesticides. These pesticides contaminate the meat, the soil, and the water, while the synthetic fertilizers that are used contribute a substantial amount of nitrous oxide — the second most potent greenhouse gas — to the atmosphere.
These growing practices deplete the soil of its nutrients and mycorrhiza ( soil probiotics), which causes us to use more pesticides and fertilizers to yield the same amount of food. These poor farming practices contribute 75% of all the nitrous oxide found in the atmosphere.
The way that animal waste is handled in CAFOs is also a problem that contributes excess nitrous oxide and methane gas to the atmosphere. The manure and urine often accumulate into a “poo lagoon” that contaminates the soil and water with pesticide and antibiotic residues, methane, and nitrous oxide.
When we consider all of the evidence, both Bill Ripple and Joel Salatin are right. Pasture-raised cattle — without a doubt — produce more greenhouse gases than any other animal. But — at the same time — livestock can be raised in a way that is much better for the environment (as a whole) than CAFO-raised livestock.
The beyond organic farming practices that farms like Polyface and White Oak Pastures use are making it possible for this to happen — making it possible to have healthy meat, healthy humans, and a healthy environment at the same time.
Joel Salatin is ahead of his time when it comes to farming. He uses ingenious methods that work together with nature to create healthy meat and a healthy ecosystem.
For example, instead of letting the manure and urine sit in “poo lagoons” and contaminate the water, it is used as a natural soil fertilizer. The bugs and pests that are attracted to the manure and urine are then eaten by the chickens, who act as natural “pesticides”. This helps maintain the health of the soil and foliage while reducing the amount of methane gas and nitrous oxide that is released into the atmosphere. Joel also moves the animals to different pastures so they do not overgraze specific plots of land. By doing things in this way, he maximizes efficiency and maintains a healthy ecosystem.
As Joel Salatin’s methods — and the methods of many other farmers like Will Harris at White Oak Pastures — continue to evolve, we will be able to ensure a happy and healthy life for us, the animals, and the environment without the need for CAFOs and mono-cropping.
But we still didn’t figure out how to stop global warming, and the solution is not to keep cows from burping, farting, pooping, and peeing.
Although this article focuses heavily on the effects that meat production has on the environment — here’s the punchline — agriculture (including livestock) only contributes 9% to the total greenhouse gas emissions.
This is why you can’t blame the cow for burping and farting so much — the problem is us.
We dug out fossil fuels that weren’t a part of the environment anymore and added them back to the atmosphere at such rapid rates that we are causing the planet to change just as rapidly. Even 7.5 billion cows burping and farting at the same time couldn’t do that.
The solution to global warming doesn’t solely rely on our meat consumption. Saving our planet requires a multi-faceted approach.
How To Stop Global Warming
It all starts with using less electricity and gas and using more energy from renewable resources. Rather than driving to the gym to get your exercise, combine exercise with other activities you will do anyway. To conserve electricity, use natural light or lights that are powered by a hand crank or the sun.
When it comes to food, buy the highest quality food that is as local as possible. High-quality, bio-dynamic, or beyond-organic foods are much better for your health and the health of the environment, and eating local ensures that less gas will be used to get the food to your house. But what about meat?
When it comes to eating meat, moderation is key. Meat — without a doubt — is packed with nutrition, but most of us consume much more meat than is necessary.
An NPR article from 2012 found that the United States had the second highest meat consumption in the world — consuming 270.7 pounds per person every year. This works out to 3/4 of a pound of meat per day. But how do we know how much meat is enough?
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations — “…to effectively combat malnutrition and under-nourishment…” — they suggest consuming 20g of animal protein per person per day.
This means that eating around 1/4 pound of lean meat or fish or 3 eggs a day is just enough to prevent some vitamin and mineral deficiencies. It would be even better for the environment, however, to limit your consumption of beef and replace it with other animal proteins that have the lowest environmental impact like eggs, mussels, and oysters.
A Better Lifestyle for You and the Environment
Let’s make the complex topic of climate change simple. Here are some practical steps you can use to build a life that is healthy for you and the environment:
Source all of your foods from local organic farms
Combine your daily exercise with practical tasks to cut down on gas and electricity
Get all of your fruits and vegetables from beyond organic and/or bio-dynamic farms
Get all of your animal products from sustainable farms like Polyface or White Oak Pastures
Limit your animal protein servings to a quarter pound of meat a day
Eat most of your animal proteins from animals that have the lowest environmental impact like eggs, mussels, and oysters.
Reuse, repurpose, and recycle as many food scraps as possible to limit the amount of methane produced by landfills. To find out how, read our article on how to reduce food waste.
Limit your use of air conditioners (especially in cars) and aerosol sprays to reduce the amount of fluorinated gas that accumulates in the atmosphere.
By making as many of these adjustments as we can, we will improve our health, animal health, and environmental health — so that we can clean up the mess that we created.
