eliot coleman on meat eating

[Guest guest]

I posted the link before but here's the whole essay on Debunking the

meat/climate change myth. (Note, the " myth " part isn't climate change,

it's the supposed contribution of meat eating to climate change.) Read

the whole thing, and don't miss the last paragraph.

I am dismayed that so many people have been so easily fooled on the

meat eating and climate change issue following the UN report. The

culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate/

industrial agriculture. The UN report shows either great ignorance or

possibly the influence of the fossil fuel lobby with the intent of

confusing the public. It is obviously to someone’s benefit to make

meat eating and livestock raising an easily attacked straw man (with

the enthusiastic help of vegetarian groups) in order to cover up the

singular contribution of the only new sources of carbon—burning the

stored carbon in fossil fuels and to a small extent making cement

(both of which release carbon from long term storage)—as the reason

for increased greenhouse gasses in the modern era. (Just for

ridiculous comparison, human beings, each exhaling about 1kg of CO2

per day, are responsible for 33% more CO2 per year than fossil fuel

transportation. Maybe we should get rid of us.)

If I butcher a steer for my food, and that steer has been raised on

grass on my farm, I am not responsible for any increased CO2. The

pasture-raised animal eating grass in my field is notproducing CO2,

merely recycling it (short term carbon cycle) as grazing animals (and

human beings) have since they evolved. It is not meat eating that is

responsible for increased greenhouse gasses; it is the corn/ soybean/

chemical fertilizer/ feedlot/ transportation system under which

industrial animals are raised. When I think about the challenge of

feeding northern New England, where I live, from our own resources, I

cannot imagine being able to do that successfully without ruminant

livestock able to convert the pasture grasses into food. It would not

be either easy or wise to grow arable crops on the stony and/or hilly

land that has served us for so long as productive pasture. By

comparison with my grass fed steer, the soybeans cultivated for a

vegetarian’s dinner, if done with motorized equipment, are responsible

for increased CO2.

But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess

flatulence is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle

flatulence on a natural grazing diet were a problem, heat would have

been trapped a 1000 years ago when, for example, there were 70 million

buffalo in North America not to mention innumerable deer, antelope,

moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating vegetation and in turn being

eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain lions, etc. Did the

methane from their digestion and the nitrous oxide from their manure

cause temperatures to rise then? Or could there be other contributing

factors today resulting from industrial agriculture, factors that

change natural processes, which are not being taken into account? It

has long been known that when grasslands are chemically fertilized

their productivity is increased but their plant diversity is

diminished. A recent study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1,

pp. 45 - 49) documents how that the diminished diversity from sowing

only two or three grasses and legumes in modern pastures results in

diminished availability of numerous secondary nutritional compounds,

for example tannins from the minor pasture forbs, which are known to

greatly reduce methane emissions. Could not the artificial

fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure? Might

not the increased phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural

systems, have modified digestibility? I am sure that future research

will document other contributing factors of industrial agricultural

practices on animal emissions. The fact is clear. It is not the

livestock; it is the way they are raised. But what about clearing the

Brazilian rain forest? Well, the bulk of that is for soybeans and if

we stopped feeding grain to cattle much of the acreage presently

growing grain in the Midwest could become pasture again and we

wouldn’t need Brazilian land. (US livestock presently consume 5 times

as much grain as the US population does directly.) And long term

pasture, like the Great Plains once was, stores an enormous amount of

carbon in the soil.

My interest in this subject comes not just because I am a farmer and a

meat eater, but also because something seems not to make sense here as

if the data from the research has failed to take some other human

mediated influence into account. But even more significantly, if we

humans were not burning fossil fuels and thus not releasing long-term

carbon from storage and if we were not using some 90 megatons of

nitrogen fertilizer per year, would we even be discussing this issue?

If those people concerned about rising levels of greenhouse gasses,

instead of condemning meat eating, were condemning the enormous output

of greenhouse gasses due to fossil fuel and fertilizer use by a greedy

and biologically irresponsible agriculture, I would cheer that as a

truthful statement even if they weren’t perceptive enough to continue

on and mention that the only “new” carbon, the carbon that is

responsible for rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, is not biogenic

from livestock but rather anthropogenic from our releasing the carbon

in long term storage (coal, oil, natural gas.) Targeting livestock as

a smoke screen in the climate change controversy is a very mistaken

path to take since it results in hiding our inability to deal with the

real causes. When people are fooled into ignorantly condemning the

straw man of meat eating, who I suspect has been set up for them by

the fossil fuel industry, I am appalled by how easily human beings

allow themselves to be deluded by their corporate masters.

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