What are the most harmful agricultural products in the world? You might be surprised by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realize this is a shocking claim. Of all the statements in my new book, Rebirth, it has caused the most outrage. But I’m not trying to tire people out. I try to represent the facts. Let me explain. Arable crops, some of which are fed by livestock, occupy 12% of the planet’s land surface. But much more land (28%) is used for grazing: in other words, for pasture-fed meat and milk. However, in this vast area, farm animals fed entirely on pasture produce just 1% of the world’s protein. Ranchers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature.” If so, imitation is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from more than 100 studies found that when animals are moved off the land, the abundance and diversity of nearly all wildlife groups increases. The only category into which the numbers fall when cattle or sheep grazing ceases are those that eat dung. Where there are cattle, there are fewer wild mammals, birds, reptiles and insects on the land and fewer fish in the rivers. Perhaps most importantly – because of their critical role in regulating living systems – they tend to be free of large predators. We don’t think about large predators in the UK because we’ve killed them off. Efforts to reintroduce the lynx and wolves have so far been thwarted by the objections of ranchers. In the United States, where large carnivores still exist, federal and state agencies wage war on them on behalf of cattle and sheep ranchers, often with stunning brutality. A federal agency called Wildlife Services uses poisoned bait, traps and snares and shooting from planes and helicopters to kill wolves, coyotes, bears and bobcats. Her agents have cremated puppies in their hideouts or dragged them out and beaten them to death. Global mass of farm animals – graphic Perhaps its most controversial killing tools are cyanide mines: spring-loaded canisters of sodium cyanide planted in the ground, which spray the poison into the faces of animals that stumble upon them. They have killed a wide range of endangered species, dozens of domestic dogs and at least one person. There are very few places – mainly parts of eastern and southern Africa – where pastoralists tolerate large predators, generally where income from tourism is high. Even if we manage to ignore this critical ecological issue, there is still a huge problem. Many ranchers now claim to practice “regenerative grazing.” The minimum definition of ecological regeneration is allowing trees to return to formerly forested areas. In the British uplands, to judge from the experience of deer managers, this means a maximum of about one sheep for every 20 hectares (50 acres). They may also not be preserved at all. On the plains, Knepp’s restoration project in Sussex shows how much production needs to fall to allow trees and other wildlife to return: it produces just 54kg of meat per hectare. If, as many chefs and foodies and some environmentalists suggest, meat only came from regenerative farms, it would be so rare that only millionaires would eat it. In fact, the vast majority of “regenerative” pasture-fed meats are nothing of the sort. It’s the renaming of ranching, arguably the most destructive industry on Earth. In the US, livestock grazing is the leading cause of land degradation. It has caused an invasive species called cheatgrass to sweep across North America, destroying ecosystems. Cattle fencing excludes wild herbivores and stops migration. The supposedly greener methods that some ranchers call “holistic management” or “programmed grazing” are just as bad for wildlife as conventional livestock. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. In the UK, my estimates show that around 4 million hectares of hill and mountain are used for sheep farming. Almost all of this land, much of which would otherwise support temperate rainforest, is treeless, as tree seedlings are highly nutritious and selectively eaten by sheep. There are more trees per hectare in some areas of inner London than in the “wild” British hills where the sheep graze. The rest of the vegetation is badly degraded. Four million hectares constitute 22% of the total cultivated area. It is roughly equivalent to all the land used to grow grain in this country and 23 times the area used to grow fruit and vegetables. But in terms of calories, lamb and mutton provide just over 1% of the UK’s food intake. Animal Rebellion staged a protest at London’s Smithfield meat market in 2019. Photo: Ollie Millington/Getty Images In other words, pasture-fed meat production is the main cause of agricultural spread. People are turning against urban sprawl: the wasteful use of land for housing and infrastructure. But the world’s urban areas take up just 1% of the planet’s surface, compared to 28% used for grazing. Agricultural sprawl incurs a very high ecological opportunity cost: the missing ecosystems that would otherwise exist. This is compounded by the carbon opportunity cost of pasture-fed beef and lamb. Meat production has two kinds of global warming impact: the climate balance, meaning the gases released by farmed animals; and its climate capital account, which means the carbon dioxide the earth could absorb if recharged. The current account balance is dominated by the powerful greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. Organic beef farms, whose animals take longer to grow and require even more land, lose twice as much nitrogen for each pound of meat as conventional beef farms. In most cases, their running emissions are surprisingly high, even compared to conventional beef farming, although some organic experiments, such as FAI Farms in Wytham in Oxfordshire, have found ways to reduce the time it takes for cattle for fattening. Ranching’s capital account is always in debit because wild ecosystems store more carbon than the fields and pastures that have taken their place. These debts can be huge. A carbon opportunity cost study published in Nature found that while the global average cost of soybeans is 17 kg of carbon dioxide for every kg of protein, the average carbon opportunity cost of a kg of beef protein is a staggering 1,250 kg. Another paper calculates that if we all switched to a plant-based diet, the carbon pulled from the atmosphere by recovering ecosystems would equal global fossil fuel emissions from the previous 16 years. The livestock industry has responded with a massive public relations campaign, seeking to convince people that pasture-fed meat helps reduce global warming by storing carbon in the soil. However, despite many claims, there is no empirical evidence that carbon storage in pastures can offset even the current emissions of grazing, let alone address capital debt. Just as the oil industry has tried to convince us that CO2 is good for the planet on the grounds that it is “plant food”, the livestock industry has tried to sow doubt and confusion about its enormous environmental impact. We live in a bubble of delusion about where our food comes from and how it is produced. We are dealing with stories when we should be dealing with numbers. Our gastroporn aesthetic, embedded in the bucolic fantasy, is one of the greatest threats to life on Earth. George Monbiot’s book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet is published by Penguin.
