Provide the evidence that raising grass-fed cows is better for the environment, for the cows and for the climate than raising plants for human consumption.
We should raise plants for human consumption anyway. Nobody is advocating a nearly all-meat diet like the Inuits have. It's about having a diverse food system with various croplands and permacultures tuned to the local environment. Livestock are ideal for the drier areas of the world where while crops are ideal for the wetter areas of the world. There's no reason for them to compete for space.
Here's Allan Savory, an environmentalist whose career is based on reversing desertification, speaking at a TED talk about how he has advocated the use of cattle to reverse desertification:
Here are some of the benefits of grass-fed cows and other ruminants:
-Much of the land in the world consists of natural grasslands, shrublands, savannahs, and similar landscapes. These are moderately drier areas of the world, and are less ideal for growing crops. But grass thrives on those levels of rainfall and humidity. In a purely wild state, which in most areas no longer exists, millions of ruminants wandered over the land, forming a mutually beneficial relationship with the grass. This can be mimicked with Allan Savory style holistic management.
-Grasslands are diverse environments, with dozens of types of grasses, weeds, and wild plants mixed together. They don't need weed control or pesticides because the cows eat weeds along with the rest of what's there and bugs are beneficial rather than destructive to the grass and soil. In contrast, large croplands are artificial; they don't exist in nature. Bugs and weeds tend to destroy them, and so a variety of herbicides and pesticides (organic or chemical) are usually needed to keep them away, to maintain this fragile, artificial system from the fundamental diversifying forces of nature.
-Croplands are harvested and replanted year after year, which on a large scale often means mechanical harvesting with petroleum-based vehicles. This typically depletes the soil, reduces water retention of the soil, contributes to flooding, and contributes to harmful fertilizer run-off. In contrast, grasslands are permacultures; permanent landscapes that don't have to be torn up and recreated on an annual basis. Holistically managed livestock grasslands can create soil rather than deplete it.
-Dense grasslands have extensive root systems and grow quickly, allowing them to retain more rainwater and nutrients and sequester more atmospheric carbon than many types of annual planting crops, especially the dwarf versions of crops that have been designed for easy mechanical harvesting on a large scale. Cows and other ruminants play a critical role in pruning the grass, fertilizing the grass, and stomping plant mass down into the soil, and are a necessary part of how the grasslands came to exist and how they are maintained without turning to desert.
-Several environmentalists use holistic livestock management to reverse areas of desertification, which further sequesters carbon from the air and buries it into the newly created soil meters deep. Soybeans or wheat or corn or avocados or most other crops aren't suitable for this purpose; they're artificial systems that don't flourish as well in the drier areas.
-In
this post, which none of the anti-livestock debaters in this thread have even tried to respond to yet including yourself, I gave an example of a permaculture orchard that uses cows and sheep for mowing the grass in their orchards, using goats to clear away the weeds and vines around the trees, and chickens to peck away at bugs around the trunks of the trees. All of those animals fertilize the orchard also, sharply reducing their need to fertilize. This farm reduced their fuel consumption by 85% by using these animals to mimic nature's method pest control, weed control, fertilization, and mowing, and saved a lot of money by not having to buy much fertilizer.
I've read researchers claiming that grass-fed cows are more harmful to the environment (in large part because it requires a great deal more land, and the pasture requires maintenance and fertilizer) than grain-fed cows.
Historically, most cows are ranched improperly, in ways that are damaging to the grass and environment because they don't mimic nature. Specifically, they don't mimic the herding patterns, the cycle of how ruminants accelerate grass growth. Holistic livestock management does.
Did you watch the farmer talk about his farm in the youtube video I included in
my post that you quoted? He uses the holistic management techniques from Allan Savory, that guy in the TED talk video earlier in this post, and he hasn't used a single bag of chemical fertilizer in the 50+ years that his farm has existed. Here's another video where he specifically talks about his grass management:
He's a well-known farmer among permaculturalists and holistic cattle ranchers in the United States because he's a leader in showing how to do it well, how to get far more productivity from the land by mimicking nature.
Grain fed cows start their lives on grasslands, and spend most of their time on them. Then they get taken from grasslands and moved to a disgusting feedlot. On that feedlot, they are fattened up on varieties of grains and other things that have to be grown elsewhere, which is a horrible use of calories and land, especially since the cows start to get obese and sick on the grains and often require antibiotics. All of that grain (whether humans or cows eat it) requires water, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, etc.
Grassfed cows with holistic management techniques on areas of natural grasslands require daily movement of the cows to mimic how they move in nature, but other than that, the grass mostly manages itself with the levels of rainfall typical in those moderately dry areas, and with massive output of vegetation growth and carbon-sequestering soil production. Farmers like him can also collect their own rainfall in retention ponds for use in other areas or for drier months, which he does.
Natural diverse grasslands are optimized for the areas they exist in. They don't need pesticides, don't need herbicides, don't need much water apart from rainfall, and the animals provide the fertilization. In contrast, croplands are artificial, and generally require additional amounts of water, fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides to maintain their artificial existence, especially in any drier area. But since we still want and need vegetables, we need croplands in the wetter areas of the world as well.
And they all still emit methane
Methane is a more potent earth-warmer than carbon dioxide but stays in the air for only about a decade, about a tenth of the time that carbon stays in the air. Natural chemical processes in nature quickly remove it.
North America alone had tens of millions of methane-emitting bison and other ruminants prior to European colonization of the continent. Methane-emitting ruminants are a key part in the creation and maintenance of grasslands all over the world, and the grasslands remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in roots and soil.
Consider the input/output relationship of a holistically managed cattle ranch.
The bulk inputs are hydrogen and oxygen from rainfall, carbon dioxide from the air, and energy from the sun. These inputs grow the grass, and the growth is
accelerated by livestock when managed in a way that mimics nature, because the grass is kept almost continuously in its fast-growth phase of life.
The bulk outputs are carbon-rich soil, and beef that consists mainly of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Small amounts of methane are emitted, and then eventually removed by natural processes in nature.
So, when done well, carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere into soil in large amounts, which is where it's supposed to be. Holistic livestock management optimizes the productivity of this process, maximizing the amount of carbon that can be sequestered per acre. Joe Salatin, for example, uses holistic livestock management to grow four times as much grass per acre as farms in his region, and all of that translates to about four times as much carbon sequestration and soil creation, which also supports a lot of cows for food for people. Grasslands, due to how dense and quickly they grow under the right conditions, and how they form a permanent soil-creation relationship with the grazing animals, sequester far more carbon than trees, wheat, corn, soybeans, or vegetables in these drier areas.
So yes, livestock emit methane, which is a natural and short-lived greenhouse gas. In return, they eat and fertilize the grass to optimize the carbon-sequestering process of the grassland, thereby removing long-lived carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. If people would reduce their fossil fuel use, and convert significant portions of the lands currently used for grains to holistically managed grasslands, evidence and examples strongly show that we can reduce atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels, while emitting an amount of methane that approximates the amount emitted by wild herds.
require great amounts of water
Untrue, for holistically managed grasslands.
Various types of grasslands, shrub lands, and savannahs are the natural state in the moderately arid places of the world. A bit of water can be used for times of drought, but for the most part, rainfall is sufficient. As shown, many environmentalists specifically use holistic livestock management to reverse desertification and improve the ability of the soil to retain water from rainfall.
Further, many well-designed permacultures include ponds designed to collect rainwater and provide for most or all of the water uses on the farm for their other crops and for drier times of the year. The example I gave earlier of a permaculture orchard does this, and so does Joe Salatin on his farm.
and other resources in their slaughter, packaging, refrigeration, etc.
Vegetables, fruits, and grains all require supply chains and energy as well. Eating locally minimizes the resources needed for this for both plant and animal foods.
Large grainlands and many large vegetable fields use fossil-fueled mechanized seed-planting and crop-harvesting vehicles, usually require a lot of irrigation, usually require pesticides and herbicides, and usually require a lot of fertilizer inputs from trucks and trains.
Grasslands with grazing ruminants are the natural state of affairs, and don't require annual replanting and require little or no water input in the right areas, and don't require pesticides or herbicides or chemical fertilizer. They benefit from plant diversification rather than requiring the use of herbicides for weeds, and benefit from the various bugs that live in the ecosystem. They're mostly self-sustaining when managed well, and trucks come and take the cows for culling, which are then distributed. (In nature, they'd die of old age or be ripped apart by predators). Buying locally reduces overall resources used, and things like refrigeration can be solar powered. Many fruits and vegetables also use refrigeration anyway.
