What's the beef? Why people are questioning regenerative grazing
What's the beef? Why people are questioning regenerative grazing
Taking a deeper look at the challenges to regenerative grazing and animal agriculture.
I went to university to study journalism. I ended up working in public relations and then marketing and business strategy. I was let go from a consultancy because I felt like I was being asked to take part in greenwashing for a client. I fully understand the tricks that both sides like to employ to tell a story and persuade.
One of my favorite tools to combat these tricks is a piece of advice from an old journalism professor that I’ve used on both sides of my career.
If someone tells you that you can get all of the results you want without making a single change, start asking questions.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch and while Jesus turned water into wine, there’s no documented case of such an event in modern times. But what does that have to do with regenerative agriculture and grazing?
While folks like George Monbiot have long suggested that regenerative beef might be the biggest greenwash of all time, more moderate, science-grounded voices like Dr. Jonathan Foley of the highly respected and science-backed Project Drawdown have recently joined the choir.
But, sadly, regenerative grazing doesn’t always live up to the hype. The climate benefits are often smaller than claimed and only work under limited circumstances. Moreover, the more outlandish claims about regenerative grazing can act as greenwashing for the beef industry. Left unchallenged, this could distract us from pursuing more effective solutions and delay the changes we need to make in the livestock industry.
Importantly, Foley isn’t calling for the elimination of animal grazing as part of regenerative agriculture, he’s just saying that the benefits for the climate of regenerative grazing have been overstated and it isn’t a ‘silver bullet”.
It’s time to move past the hype, keep what’s good about regenerative grazing, and see it for what it has always truly been: one helpful, complementary piece in the larger system of solutions we need to address climate change in the food system.
And Foley isn’t alone.
NPR recently published a piece asking - “Regenerative agriculture is sold as a climate solution. Can it do all it says?”
Yet, when I reached out to the leader of a regenerative agriculture non-profit about the questions raised by Foley and in the NPR piece, I was met with not just a defensive posture but aggressive accusations. This person questioned Drawdown’s ethics, misleadingly framed the organization’s research, and accused Foley of supporting practices that are “anti-nature”. Regenerative grazing was framed as “no regrets” solution, they insisted.
As part of the Ecosystem Member podcast, we’ve talked with a lot of folks engaged in the development of the regenerative agriculture practice, including the board chair and a board member of the Regenerative Organic Alliance. My goal has always been to help people think more deeply about our relationship with food and as listeners have heard, how it gets to our grocery stores and eventually our plates. We’ve never had advertising and I’ve only spent money on the podcast.
So - from having talked to people on both sides of this issue - what’s the beef with regenerative grazing?
Let’s start with regenerative agriculture overall.
Regenerative agriculture has no legal parameters or official practices. It is simply an idea and a set of experiments that we can restore the quality of our soil by adopting practices that more or less resemble practices that our ancestors employed. Practices like cover cropping, low or no artificial fertilizer use, improved animal grazing, and low or no tilling or plowing.
While regenerative practices have been shown to sequester carbon delivering a climate benefit, they’ve also been shown to make farms more resilient in the face of extreme weather events, bringing about food and financial security for a huge industry. There’s a reason the United States government is investing $19.5B in “climate smart agriculture”.
Importantly though, regenerative agriculture is still very much in the learning phase. New data is constantly being released as more research is concluded and we learn about the short and long term benefits and drawbacks of these practices almost every day.
What is regenerative grazing?
While many people are fans of regenerative agricultural practices overall - reducing or eliminating tilling and planting cover crops for example - regenerative grazing is the most controversial practice by far.
Regenerative grazing (or managed grazing, or improved grazing, or rotational grazing…there are a lot of names that are used for very similar practices) is the idea that we can use livestock to do a more nature-friendly job of managing our agricultural lands. Cattle manure can replace intense and artificial fertilizers. Cattle hooves can aerate the land to replace plowing and tilling. Cattle can consume cover crops planted on the fields, reducing the need for creating feed elsewhere. (About 67% of crops grown are grown for animal feed.)
All of which sounds pretty good for humans. We get climate benefits, we get food security benefits and we get to use less or eliminate fertilizers of which many are harmful to our health. Plus, we can keep eating as many steaks and hamburgers as we’d like.
So why are some people not sold on regenerative grazing?
There has been a lot of ink spilled and podcast hours recorded on this issue, so I just want to focus on the primary reasons people question the effects of regenerative grazing specifically. In short, a lot of it has to do with the idea that by implementing regenerative grazing, we don’t really have to change much else when it comes to beef consumption.
Issue 1: Permanence
Permanence is a huge question in the climate community thanks largely to the controversy of carbon offsets. We know that there is a carbon cycle at play on Earth and specifically in agriculture. We also know that things like wildfires have torched tress holding hundreds of years of carbon that people sold carbon offsets against. A lot of carbon isn’t in permanent storage, it is just waiting to be released to the next phase.
In The Blue Plate, author and ecologist Mark J. Easter gives the example of the Great Plains. In the early 1900s when plow met land across the middle of the United States and agriculture scaled immensely, farmers inadvertently released one of the, “greatest pulses of carbon emissions in recorded history”.
As the NPR piece highlights, even regular occurrences like “droughts, heat waves and things like having to switch crops can cause that soil to leak carbon back into the atmosphere”.
This means that while regenerative grazing has shown to help sequester carbon, it might not be sequestering it for very long. And that’s a big problem.
Issue 2: Land Use and Scale
Matthew Hayek, Assistant Professor at New York University in the Department of Environmental Studies, posted on LinkedIn all the way back in 2018 that if we continue in the U.S. to eat beef at the same rate we did in 2018 (and since beef consumption has gone up, reaching a new peak in 2021), we would need to breed nearly double the amount of cattle because grass-fed cattle take longer to fatten and don't reach the same weight as grain-finished counterparts. And if we moved cattle off grain feedlots (CAFOs - concentrated animal feeding operations), we would need to use 270% more land than we already use.
Many suggest that this land could be better used as a climate change mitigator by simply letting it be, or in other words rewilding. And the most compelling argument in favor of this is around methane, a far more intense greenhouse gas than carbon. Methane doesn’t have a significant agricultural sink (The Blue Plate by Mark J. Easter) the way carbon does with the soil. And cattle produce a lot of methane - 45% of all agricultural emissions and 4.5% of all emissions in the United States. ( I admit, looking at these stats nationally are not always helpful because carbon and methane don’t respect national boundaries.)
If you rewild the land rather than turning it into grazing land, you not only have the associated biodiversity benefits of rewilding, but you also aren’t increasing the amount of methane emitting cows on the land. Unfortunately, CAFOs, while terrible for the welfare of humans and non-humans attached to them, are far more efficient emissions wise at producing a pound of beef (The Blue Plate by Mark J. Easter).
Ultimately, I didn’t find any research comparing the two that I felt was credible. I am sure it is underway somewhere and I look forward to its publication.
Issue 3: Greenwashing: Low/No and Carbon Neutral Beef
Where I tend to see people get really frustrated with regenerative grazing and other “tools” to reduce methane emissions like feed additives is when one small study or piece of information is used by a company to then sell a ‘climate solution’ when it isn’t actually clear that it is a real climate solution…yet.
That means, it is the Wild West of claims when it comes to beef - regenerative and otherwise.
For example, about four years ago, I had a debate on LinkedIn with the then Chief Marketing Officer of Burger King. AdAge, an advertising industry publication, published an article titled “How Burger King used cow farts to take over Twitter” about how Burger King made an ad after it had run very limited tests with UC Davis in California on adding organic material like lemongrass to cattle feed to reduce the methane emissions from raising it to become a hamburger.
The problem was, the Doctor at UC Davis who was the U.S. lead for the study publicly stated on Twitter when the ad went live that the research was “inconclusive and so far showed no methane reduction from lemongrass.” Burger King had cherrypicked results from the study limited to the component in Mexico to promote the reduced methane burgers for sale at just a few locations. The U.S. lead also clarified that it was “too early to say” if the lemongrass had any effect - positive or negative.
In addition to other comments, the CMO - who ironically later became the CMO of a vegan meat company - then decided it was just easier to attack my background rather than the question of having proper scientific evidence to make the claims the brand did. It seems like there is a trend here.
And the cherry on the sundae was that the ad also pissed off ranchers who felt it was an attack on their livelihood.
As I mentioned, I’ve spoken on the podcast with key people at the Regenerative Organic Alliance. The ROA has created a certification for regenerative, organic practices, but it is by no means an official, widely adopted or legal set of standards…yet. The only USDA-backed label I could find is called Low Carbon Beef and its not great.
How much of a reduction must be achieved to qualify for the “low carbon beef” label?
Producers who can prove that their cattle are raised in a way that emits 10 percent less greenhouse gases than an industry baseline can qualify for the certification scheme, which is run by a private company called Low Carbon Beef.
And of course, this creates a path to confusion.
A steak labeled as low-carbon is likely to have produced many times more emissions than other foods that a shopper might reach for as an alternative, says Matthew Hayek, an environmental scientist at New York University.
And even experts at the Canadian Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food weren’t buying it because the benchmark used by Low Carbon Beef was a little high.
Karen Beauchemin, an expert on cattle nutrition at Canada’s Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, also said that Beal’s benchmark seems a little too high: In Canada, the average carbon footprint up to slaughter is around 19 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per kilogram of carcass weight. Higher benchmarks mean that more producers will automatically find themselves within Low Carbon Beef’s 10 percent threshold, which might lower the incentives for farmers to reduce their carbon emissions further.
One of America’s largest meat companies has its own version with ‘climate friendly beef’, yet no one is sure outside of Tyson HQ what that actually means.
To earn the “climate friendly” label, Tyson requires ranchers to meet the criteria of its internal “Climate-Smart Beef” program, but EWG notes that the company fails to provide information about the practices that farmers are required to adopt or about which farmers participate in the program. The only farm it has publicly identified is the Adams company in Nebraska.
Why does this matter? When people get confused, they tend to stick with what they know. And if it turns out we do need people to swap beef for chicken or fish, reduce overall beef consumption or eliminate beef from diets completely, greenwashing is only making the job harder for our future selves.
So where does that leave us?
As Easter writes in The Blue Plate, “An optimistic story has emerged that grazing livestock can lead to more carbon in the soil. In some cases that is true, but not necessarily everywhere, and the increase in soil carbon does not continue forever.”
It’s the perfect summation of the issue. Both sides want an easy answer for a question that is still being researched. There’s just not a clear answer…yet.
Those who advocate for the end of animal agriculture can poke a lot of holes in the research that supports regenerative grazing (as Monbiot has done a lot) and offer alternatives like rewilding that have research that supports their implementation.
Those who advocate for regenerative grazing will show you the positive results of research done so far and encourage its expansion for greater impact. And best of all, it won’t require a reduction in meat consumption as one regenerative agriculture non-profit claims.
My only suggestion is to stay interested and investigate every claim of all parties making claims, especially those who promise a free lunch. In the mean time, please just don’t ask me about the environmental impact of wine.