The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat
(Page 5 of 8)
April/May 2009
By Richard Manning
The carbon balance of any given enterprise is a complicated matter. We’ve understood some of this in looking at the carbon footprint of farming, but in fact, we have not made it complicated enough. There is a complex energy stream feeding industrial agriculture, both in fuels for transportation, tillage, storage and processing, and also in the natural gas used to make chemical fertilizers. All this makes modern industrial agriculture energy intensive and therefore gives it a pretty big carbon footprint.
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Yet focusing only on the energy flow of farming greatly understates the problem, because it doesn’t take into consideration the natural vs. unnatural cycling of organic matter. In corn and soy production, tilling adds oxygen which causes organic matter to decay, or oxidize, and be released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Researchers have taken a closer look at this and found that tillage not only releases carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide (both greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming). True enough, a growing corn field sucks up a lot of carbon dioxide, but then releases it all back almost immediately when the disced down stalks and leaves decay. Without exception, all of the tillage systems examined in one study published in Science were net contributors to global warming, and the worst offenders were the annual crops corn, soybeans and wheat farmed with conventional methods. Meanwhile, fields of perennial crops in the same study pulled both methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stashed it safely in the soil. There is even some evidence that perennial grasslands are, under certain conditions, even better at sequestering carbon than forests.
A conventionally farmed corn or soybean field is a source of global warming gases, but a permanent pasture is a pump that pushes carbon back into the soil where it increases fertility. Even though we harvest meat from the pastures each year, still the soil grows richer and holds more carbon. We get all these benefits thanks to solar energy, plant photosynthesis and natural cycles of grasslands and grazing animals.
So just how powerful could this tool be, were we to think as big as transforming American agriculture? Collecting data on the carbon storage potential of intensive grazing involves numerous variables, and overall estimates are not yet available. But using figures for annual and perennial crops reported in the recent Scientific American article “Future Farming: A Return to Roots?” we can get a rough idea of what effect the grassfarming revolution could have on global warming. Production of high-input annual crops such as corn and soybeans release carbon at a rate of about 1,000 pounds per acre while perennial grasslands can store carbon at roughly the same rates. This suggests that if we converted half the U.S. corn and soy acres to pasture, we might cut carbon emissions by roughly 144 trillion pounds, and that’s not even counting the reduced use of fossil fuels that would also result. That’s not a bad side benefit to a transformation that makes sense on so many other levels as well.
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