By James E. McWilliams, The New York Times, April 12, 2012
The industrial production of animal products is nasty business. From mad cow, E. coli and salmonella to soil
erosion, manure runoff and pink slime, factory farming is the epitome of a broken
food system.
There have been various responses to these horrors, including some
recent attempts to improve the industrial system, like the announcement this
week that farmers will have to seek prescriptions for sick animals instead of
regularly feeding antibiotics to all stock. My personal reaction has been to
avoid animal products completely. But most people upset by factory farming have
turned instead to meat, dairy and eggs from nonindustrial sources. Indeed, the
last decade has seen an exciting surge in grass-fed, free-range, cage-free and
pastured options. These alternatives typically come from small organic farms,
which practice more humane methods of production. They appeal to consumers not
only because they reject the industrial model, but because they appear to be
more in tune with natural processes.
For all the strengths of these alternatives, however, they’re
ultimately a poor substitute for industrial production. Although these smaller
systems appear to be environmentally sustainable, considerable evidence
suggests otherwise.
Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows.
Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to
raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass
(all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres
per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed
for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has
been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle.
Nothing about this is sustainable.
Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice
is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who
raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one
thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful
leg injuries after several weeks of living a “natural” life pecking around a
large pasture. Free-range pigs are routinely affixed with nose rings to prevent
them from rooting, which is one of their most basic instincts. In essence, what
we see as natural doesn’t necessarily conform to what is natural from the
animals’ perspectives.
The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic.
Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is
that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow
decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests
that it wouldn’t last. These businesses — no matter how virtuous in intention —
would gradually seek a larger market share, cutting corners, increasing
stocking density and aiming to fatten animals faster than competitors could.
Barring the strictest regulations, it wouldn’t take long for production systems
to scale back up to where they started.
All this said, committed advocates of alternative systems make one
undeniably important point about the practice called “rotational grazing” or
“holistic farming”: the soil absorbs the nutrients from the animals’ manure,
allowing grass and other crops to grow without the addition of synthetic fertilizer.
As Michael Pollan writes, “It is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable
agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients.” In other words, raising
animals is not only sustainable, but required.
But rotational grazing works better in theory than in practice.
Consider Joel Salatin, the guru of nutrient cycling, who employs chickens to
enrich his cows’ grazing lands with nutrients. His plan appears to be
impressively eco-correct, until we learn that he feeds his chickens with tens
of thousands of pounds a year of imported corn and soy feed. This common
practice is an economic necessity. Still, if a farmer isn’t growing his own
feed, the nutrients going into the soil have been purloined from another, most
likely industrial, farm, thereby undermining the benefits of nutrient cycling.
Finally, there is no avoiding the fact that the nutrient cycle is
interrupted every time a farmer steps in and slaughters a perfectly healthy
manure-generating animal, something that is done before animals live a quarter
of their natural lives. When consumers break the nutrient cycle to eat animals,
nutrients leave the system of rotationally grazed plots of land (though of
course this happens with plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer
systems and septic tanks (in the form of human waste) and in landfills and
rendering plants (in the form of animal carcasses).
Farmers could avoid this waste by exploiting animals only for their
manure, allowing them to live out the entirety of their lives on the farm, all
the while doing their own breeding and growing of feed. But they’d better have
a trust fund.
Opponents of industrialized agriculture have been declaring for over a
decade that how humans produce animal products is one of the most important
environmental questions we face. We need a bolder declaration. After all, it’s
not how we produce animal products that ultimately matters. It’s whether we
produce them at all.
James E.
McWilliams is the author of “Just Food: Where Locavores Get
It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.”
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