The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat
(Page 4 of 8)
April/May 2009
By Richard Manning
Yet there are even more benefits to intensive grazing systems. Consider that the upper Midwest was flooded in the spring of 2008, an inundation that caused catastrophic dislocations, massive erosion of topsoil and billions of dollars in damages. This is the landscape of corn and soy agriculture. Iowa, for instance, has been almost wholly converted to row-crop agriculture, maintaining only about 1 percent of its native habitat, which was largely prairie and oak savannah. A plowed field sheds rainwater almost as fast as a parking lot does; the soil can absorb, at most, about 11⁄2 inches of rain in an hour. A permanent pasture can suck up as many as 7 inches of rain in an hour. That’s the difference between floods and no floods.
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Most astonishing of all is what happens after the land is restored to grassland. Grass, like most plants, reacts to changing conditions. It builds a root system to support its leaves and stems, but when a cow munches off the top of the plant, there’s not enough energy left to support all its roots. The plant reacts by sloughing roots, then builds back deeper roots as aboveground parts regrow.
Deep rooting is, in fact, an overlooked factor here. All of our row crops are shallow-rooted and so for generations they have worked a narrow layer of the soil. Constant harvesting of these crops has depleted this topsoil of essential elements such as magnesium and calcium. As a result, both are now lacking not only in our diets, but also in the diets of livestock. This is a human health issue, but veterinarians say it also creates a mineral imbalance in grain-fed livestock that lies at the root of many of their health problems. In contrast to shallow-rooted row crops, deep-rooted grasses dig down to fresh minerals. Those minerals then become available to everything up the food chain, supporting the overall health of the entire system.
The roots that are sloughed-off after every grazing rotation are equally important; they become decaying organic material that feeds microorganisms, restores subsoil health, creates water-absorbing voids, and ultimately steadily increases the organic matter — or carbon content of the soil. There are big implications here both for building fertile soil and fighting climate change.
Using Intensive Grazing to Store Carbon
When American settlers first busted Midwestern prairies, they worked highly fertile virgin soil that was about 10 percent organic matter. On average, 150 years of agriculture has cut that vital organic matter by more than half and released huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the leading driver of global warming, into the air. Permanent pastures managed correctly can tap solar energy to pump about 1 percent of organic matter back to the soil each year. If we convert from grain-fed to grass-fed meat, we can turn millions of acres of row crops into carbon sinks, and use permanent pasture to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow global warming, as well as conserve water.
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