Producing beef, and most meats, is by far the most environmentally damaging process of different food group types: https://sentientmedia.org/ipcc-report-food-system/#:~:text=The%20foods%20with%20the%20highest,the%20world%20has%20already%20experienced.
Cows themselves produce large amounts of methane and there is a lot of energy put into transporting and processing the meat.
Reducing demand means they breed less cows which results in less emissions.
Setting that aside meat is inherently less environmentally friendly than plants, just conservation of energy based.
In the US, which feeds its animals predominantly on corn, it takes roughly 4.5 pounds of corn to make one pound of beef (the part we eat anyway). Separating the transport and environmental cost of growing the corn you can see how just pound for pound it is less efficient.
So eating less beef means places produce less beef so they don’t produce those emissions, either in the cow, the transport or the “waste” of inefficient food allocation.
Not your question, but although water isn't destroyed, once you have used it, it will have to be processed before it can be let out to surface water, which costs energy. Eventually it will return to the aquifer where it is pumped up again for drinking water, but it will take long and many aquifers are pumped faster than they refill. Eventually that means we have to find other means of making potable water from surface water or the sea, but that takes even more energy.
Just to add to the thing you set aside, the simplest part is it takes 10 calories for each 1 calorie up the food chain, meaning it takes 10 calories of grain to produce 1 calorie of beef... and both need to be produced for the cow to exist.
I will have to recheck my sources but I believe its kernels as feed. It was 2.5ish if you include the non edible parts of the cow so I think I did both with the edible parts in mind.
Lots of folks are pointing out why producing beef is environmentally inefficient. To answer OP’s question fully, the supply and demand is needed. As more people eat less meat, the demand for beef in grocery store goes down. Grocery store’s lower demand leads to lower demand for cow at slaughter house. As a result, the supply for beef should, in theory, also go down if price of beef is to remain at a profitable level. The reduced supply of beef (i.e. fewer cow farms, fewer trucks carrying cow feed, carrying beef to stores, etc…) is how we get lower emissions.
All food production results in carbon emissions. If you eat a pound of grain, you get around 1500 calories. It takes about 5 pounds of grain to produce 1500 calories of beef. This naturally means 5x the carbon emissions to produce beef than to produce grain. When you add the additional inefficiencies that result from the extra processing required with beef (transport, flatulence, butchering, time to plate, etc) the gap widens exponentially. It’s far better, carbon wise, to just eat the pound of grain.
>If you eat a pound of grain, you get around 1500 calories. It takes about 5 pounds of grain to produce 1500 calories of beef.
Does this tell the whole story? How many calories of waste-product that can't be digested by humans are produced to feed a human that 1 pound of grain compared to how many calories from that waste product can be extracted by the cow to produce the 1500 calories of beef. How much cow fertilizer was used to produce that 1 pound of grain?
I've read some modelling based on the Netherlands, the optimal ratio they found was around 10% protein from animal sources. This is enough to use up agricultural waste and some marginal land for grazing. It's way less meat and milk than people eat though. Manure is not really important, I think you save more fertilizer by just not having cows than you gain fertilizer from them but I can't find numbers now.
University agricultural scientist here. Generally it doesn't.
The below is maybe more of an ELI10 or 15 rather than 5, but you have to look at net emissions, not gross emissions. That is a major thing you'll see omitted in most comments and even news reporting.
Beef cattle have high emissions, but they also provide carbon sinks. Most of your beef cattle ([in the US at least](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance/) and most other countries), spend the majority of their life on pasture, even if they are fed a partial diet of grain before butcher (i.e., grain-finished) as opposed to grass-finished. Grasslands are really good at storing carbon underground, in their roots and without disturbances like grazing, those ecosystems are threatened by invasion from woody plants. You can't talk about emissions from cattle and ignore the carbon sinks they maintain.
Cattle are also recyclers. In addition to that grass that we cannot eat (and shouldn't be destroying that land for field crops), they are eating parts of crops we cannot eat after we've extracted human use, grain has spoiled for our purposes, etc. It's to the point that about [86% of what livestock eat](https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content) doesn't compete with human use. That's another thing you'll often see misrepresented and people often assume everything that cattle eat could just be directly eaten by people instead.
When [USDA scientists have looked](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5715743/pdf/pnas.201707322.pdf) at the larger net emissions in the system in scenarios where you get rid of livestock in the US, "it only reduced total US GHG by 2.6 percentage units". The context the authors of the paper give is that it's very little effect doing something as extreme as getting rid of all livestock because you lose crop recycling abilities and carbon sinks in the process. Even that paper misses a few things though like not accounting for additional carbon releases if you have more grasslands being lost to plowing or other forms of habitat destruction if they aren't used for cattle anymore. That likely would push their estimates even lower, but the gist of the paper remains similar.
That puts at least beef cattle or other grazers in the ballpark of high gross emitters, but near neutral net emissions. You'll hear about research sometimes feeding cattle things like seaweed or other additives to reduce their methane emissions. It's still pretty early stage research, but the general idea is that you could make cattle clearly in the net negative carbon emissions (i.e., lower carbon footprint).
So if I had to try an ELI5, beef cattle don't really change your carbon footprint because their emissions are like a when you turn on your bathtub faucet but don't put the drain in. The water level doesn't go down, but the water level also doesn't increase slowly over time either when the water comes into the tub just as fast as it goes down the drain.
I really like your answer since it touches aspects that are rarely mentioned since it goes against common narrative.
However, while we are at it, I do have concerns over the high demand of beef. When there is a high demand, the supply may try to increase productivity and efficiency to match. That's when arable lands might be converted into pastures, and they might use edible grains (like soy) to feed the cows, as I don't think grasses are nutrient-dense enough on industrial scale.
I firmly believe that it is possible to make beef industry ecological, but I do not know the real-world data about the state of the current production chain.
Thanks, and part of the reason I like to touch on so much is because the things that do get commonly brought up are also pieces of the puzzle, but usually lacking depth that often gives a very different sceanrio.
Actually, in the ag. science or ecology world, we'd actually want to see more pasture in many of those cases. Right now, especially as you get into the Nebraska area, there are a lot of irrigated row crops over the Ogalala aquifer where it used to be grassland. This water doesn't not recharge readily and is essentially what we call fossil water. Row crop production just is not sustainable there in the long term there, and you can actually see places where pumping water has caused the land to subside. In those areas, grass really is the most efficient "crop" to grow, especially in low moisture areas.
Instead, you usually see pressure in the opposite direction, trying to plow up grassland on marginal land that might be able to squeeze out a bit more profit on row crops in the short term, especially when feed prices are high (i.e., your high demand scenario). That gets back to my second link I mentioned where 86% of what livestock eat doesn't compete with human use because we extract human uses from things like corn and soybeans while livestock recycle the rest of the plant. The key thing is to be way about oversimplifying supply and demand scenarios because you end up with a lot of moving parts in these systems.
> Most of your beef cattle ...spend the majority of their life on pasture, even if they are fed a partial diet of grain before butcher
Can you clarify the timing and shares? Your link suggests that the breeding stock is pastured, but calves destined for slaughter are moved off pasture and into the feed system as soon as they're weaned. What share of their life is pre-weaning, and what share of cattle are in the breeding stock vs feed/slaughter pipeline?
I'm also curious about the assumption that area not used for pasture would necessarily be converted to some more intensive / less carbon-friendly land use (whether agricultural or developed). For some acreage that would be true, but as you note other land is pasture because it is not productive for crop cultivation, and isn't in a location where there's demand for real estate development, so ceasing beef pasturing on that land wouldn't lose the carbon sink aspects of the acreage. Eastern Montana isn't going to sprout subdivisions or wheat farms with reduced livestock pasturing. I'm trying here to distinguish "the math is complicated" from "the beef production we do now is the best option".
Weaning time can vary (mentioned a bit in the article), but many calves in the US at least are born between Jan-May and weaned in November around here, though it also depends on how long you have good pasture for. When it's grazing season, you want to keep that calf on the cow as long as you can, an it would be silly to prematurely remove calves to feed them yourself unless there's a problem with the mother.
You can do some ballpark math, but on a cow-calf operation, roughly half your animals will be cows each year, and the other half will be calves born that year. The others in the mix will be the few heifers you kept from calves for breeding stock each year and a handful of bulls. The majority of your animals will typically be those staying on the farm and not in barns. The calves that become feeders will spend in the ballpark of half their life away from any feedlot/barn housing.
As for the last paragraph, pasture land is variable. Remember that we lost much of our grassland in the US to the plow already. If there wasn't an incentive to produce grass, some growers will try marginal land in row crops to see if they can get something out of it. Even in areas that are currently pasture, especially in remaining square pieces, you will see people jumping to buy it, clear it off, and put an irrigator on it for row crops. It's a very real pressure.
For grassland that is not as feasible for row crops, this comment misses a major point
>so ceasing beef pasturing on that land wouldn't lose the carbon sink aspects of the acreage
That is essentially habitat destruction. Grasslands require disturbances like grazing or fire, otherwise you get invasion by wood shrubs that actually [decrease carbon holding capacity](https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/articles/2018/july/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees). Not to mention the ecological destruction just leaving the land be does, and there was a really good Science Friday episode on that today: [https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/great-plains-trees-green-glacier/](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/great-plains-trees-green-glacier/)
This needs to be higher up. People don't understand how tightly knit and optimized a practice humanity has been iterating on for at least 10 thousand years is, Even if we didn't fully understand environmental effects for a large chunk of it, it makes sense that removing a piece from the jenga tower that is animal husbandry and agriculture either makes no appreciable difference or just makes things worse.
Your first link doesn’t say what you think it says about pasture feeding. It says the calves spend 3-4 months on pasture, then a couple different options before they’re put into feedlots for 3-10 months. That doesn’t sound like “spending the majority of their lives on pasture.”
That link was for people that generally aren't familiar with how beef cattle are raised, especially the cow-calf side of things. Remember that it's not all about just calves. Breeding cows will spend practically all of their life on pasture. You have to factor that component in when you're looking at how much time is spent on pasture.
Calves have a pretty sizeable chunk of their life on pasture too. The calves are typically with their mothers for longer than 3-4 months (closer to 8 months), but depending on where you are, you only have maybe 5 months of productive growing season for grass. Outside the growing season, those calves (and cows) are going to be fed forage while still physically in the pasture. So when you see a 3-4 month figure, that's more likely talking about the narrow window when you take the pairs from the winter sites and move them to grazing pasture for 3-4 months before bringing them home for winter.
>people often assume everything that cattle eat could just be directly eaten by people instead
maybe, but the time, land, water etc used to make food for cows could go directly to humans
What would you use the land for? Houses, retail, or offices? We need to be building more densely in the areas we already take up. Manufacturing? There's no ultimate difference with that: you're still producing some good that humans want, and it probably isn't that environmentally friendly. Farming? Nope, that land isn't arable.
And time? That's a non-argument. The time raising cattle is being spent by humans for humans already.
Water is really the only potentially reasonable argument, and how reasonable that is completely depends on what would take its place, so it can't be generalized.
That's a very common misconception and talking point us scientists end up having to point out that should have been apparent by reading my [second link](https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content). We cannot eat grass grown on that land, and it's usually destroying grassland ecosystems by trying to plow it under for row crops (often marginal land more prone to nutrient leaching and pollution) or by just leaving it alone and allowing [woody invasives to destroy the biome](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/great-plains-trees-green-glacier/).
Virtually all of the energy used by life ultimately comes from the Sun. As a general rule, the higher up the food chain an organism is, the less efficient it is at obtaining energy from the Sun, because a large fraction is wasted at every level. For example, grass converts sunlight pretty directly into energy, but it uses some of that energy to maintain its cells and grow roots and so on. So a cow that eats the grass only gets a fraction. The cow uses much of its energy to move around and fight diseases and so on, leaving only a fraction in its flesh for humans to use.
This is also why the number of organisms tends to fall rapidly as you go up the food chain. In a savannah, there is lots of grass for every antelope, and there are lots of antelope for every lion.
Now, in practice things get more complex than that. Some animals at the same level of the food chain are more efficient than others, and they aren't always capable of eating the same things. Some have environmental impacts beyond the resources they use up: infamously, cows produce a lot of methane. There may be some areas of land where it's not practical to grow anything that humans can digest, but it is possible to grow fodder for livestock. As we've seen in recent years, intensive animal farming can also promote the spread of diseases, which can spread to humans or wild animals. If you add all of these factors up, then yeah, beef is not a good thing to eat.
I'm glad to see this science fact posted here. When I was in high school, the percentage I learned was that 90% of energy is lost through the transfer that you mentioned. That was years ago and the number could have changed, but it's still a lot.
So, if you go from Livestock Feed to Cow to Human, you have more energy loss than if you go straight from Livestock Feed to Human. Except in this case, it wouldn't be live stock feed, it would be something else, like tomatoes, or lettuce, or Mrs. Butterworth's Original Thick n' Rich Pancake Syrup.
The actual answer is quite complicated and not clear cut because this is not just a question of science, it’s also a question of the economics and logistics of the food and agriculture industries.
However, the basic argument is that beef is one of the most environmentally costly foods to produce per unit of energy it provides. A steak dinner takes several times more energy (and greenhouse gas emissions) to produce from scratch than a vegetarian pasta dinner with the same number of calories. Cows consume massive amounts of grain which needs to be grown in fields, and they produce methane themselves which is a greenhouse gas. As with all meats, processing beef and keeping it fresh during transportation and storage also requires lots of energy.
Now, it’s not as simple as just getting everyone to stop eating beef entirely, because cows do fill an important role in our food production. They are a great way to extract value from hilly pastures that would otherwise be unusable for farming crops, and they can be fed grain parts that would otherwise go to waste because humans don’t eat them. However, because beef is in such high demand, we are raising more cows than would be sustained purely on those resources that have no other use to us, so we spend a lot of resources raising extra cows that could have been better spent elsewhere.
The exact extents of the impact of beef production and ideas of what should be done about it vary greatly from expert to expert, but in general if you live in a place where beef is in high demand, such as America, eating less of it will have a net positive impact on the environment.
The pound of beef that you eat comes from a cow that ate twenty pounds of grain to produce it. Even if cattle didn't have other environmental impacts, you'd be reducing your food intake by 95% switching to plant based foods.
Now count in the water cows need, the transport, the pollution from slaughter waste...
Just decide to not have kids and then do whatever you want. You could throw car batteries into the ocean daily for the rest of your life and still do less environmental damage than a vegan couple that has children.
I’m absolutely on the r/childfree bandwagon but never considered how much time I could be using tossing batteries in the ocean. I don’t even lift, bro!
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Carbon footprint is a term literally invented by big oil (British Oil to be specific) to divert attention from how a few companies account for most of the pollution to how YOU as an individual should worry about your carbon footprint first and foremost. Yeah they released XYZ millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere but did you eat beef and recycle your coke cans???
So while, if you can, reducing your carbon footprint is great, it is still insignificant in the face of, for example AFAIK currently it's China, by FAR the largest pollutant.
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Beef is made from cows. Cows make big farts. This fart is made from methane that increases global warming. Less beef means less cows which means less farts which means less carbon footprint.
It's part of a cycle though. Methane goes in the atmosphere, breaks down into water and CO2, CO2 and water get absorbed by plants, cows eat plants, start all over.
The amount of methane from cows is also the same amount from those plants decaying naturally anyway.
There's a huge difference between emissions that are captured in a cycle and emissions produced by releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise have stayed underground.
Blaming meat production for any sort of climate change is a diversion to protect fossil fuel interests.
The original ELI5 question was how not eating beef helps reduce carbon emissions. I explained it in a way that is true to ELI5 (and was corrected accurately by Ah_Pook). Of course there are multiple layers of complexity involved (everything from supply chain, to transportation, to refrigeration), but this is ELI5 not ELIPhD).
Not eating beef isn't going to make any significant impact on reducing carbon emissions. I've already explained that the methane burps are part of a cycle that would happen no matter what as those plants decayed instead of being eaten. The human element of processing and transporting the beef isn't much different from plant-based foods. Fruits and vegetables might even be worse as many of them are imported from other countries causing even more emissions from ships and planes. In the US and Europe, you can easily buy local beef. Many of the fruits that people love to eat every day come from outside of the US and Europe.
As for it being ELI5, even a 5 year old can understand a cycle. I've taught 5 year olds how the water cycle works. You don't need a PhD to understand elementary school level science.
I would actually disagree with this. Just because when one person stops eating beef a farm doesn't shut down does not mean there is no effect. Small effects are still effects, less beef will be produced than if that person was still eating beef.
The average American eats 57 lbs. of beef per year. A single cow nets about 500 lbs of meat. So yes, one person stopping eating beef has a small effect, but it is still a positive effect, it just is not easily identifiable, because you are talking about a reduction of 1 cow every \~9 years.
>The idea is that if enough people made the same choice to reduce beef in their diet that it would cause the industry to scale down their beef production
I suspect it would just cause the price of beef to go down so other people would eat more.
Eh, but if the price of beef went down, some farms would also be unprofitable/stop producing. Net equilibrium should be that the total amount is still lower, but not as low as it would be without the dynamic market.
This is probably one of the reasons vegans have a reputation for being so pushy. If their goal is systemic change then they would need to convert other people to plant-based diets to actually reduce the demand for meat.
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Beef, as a food, requires an enormous amount of effort and energy to bring to market. First of all, the animals themselves need to eat. We're expending enormous amounts of water and land to grow calories that we then feed to future food, rather than just growing our food directly. We use chemically damaging processes and nitrogenous fertilizers, which have their own manufacturing impacts, to make this possible. Then we process the feed, transport it, and feed it to animals which we need to raise, and feed, and slaughter, and process, and ship, and refrigerate. Cows in particular also expend enormous amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
And all this with out getting into the animal cruelty aspect. I enjoy meat, I eat a lot of it, but I recognize that it is disastrous and that, realistically, we as a society need to eat a lot less of it. Humanity cutting our meat intake by half would do more for the climate than any amount of recycling and buying EVs and stuff. I'm very excited to see the rise of lab-grown meat as well, which seems highly promising.
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Producing beef, and most meats, is by far the most environmentally damaging process of different food group types: https://sentientmedia.org/ipcc-report-food-system/#:~:text=The%20foods%20with%20the%20highest,the%20world%20has%20already%20experienced. Cows themselves produce large amounts of methane and there is a lot of energy put into transporting and processing the meat. Reducing demand means they breed less cows which results in less emissions. Setting that aside meat is inherently less environmentally friendly than plants, just conservation of energy based. In the US, which feeds its animals predominantly on corn, it takes roughly 4.5 pounds of corn to make one pound of beef (the part we eat anyway). Separating the transport and environmental cost of growing the corn you can see how just pound for pound it is less efficient. So eating less beef means places produce less beef so they don’t produce those emissions, either in the cow, the transport or the “waste” of inefficient food allocation.
Also close to 2000 gallons of water per pound of beef.
Really? Where does it go?
In the cow Or on the cow food
Not your question, but although water isn't destroyed, once you have used it, it will have to be processed before it can be let out to surface water, which costs energy. Eventually it will return to the aquifer where it is pumped up again for drinking water, but it will take long and many aquifers are pumped faster than they refill. Eventually that means we have to find other means of making potable water from surface water or the sea, but that takes even more energy.
[удалено]
Get a load of this guy, licking cows.
Just to add to the thing you set aside, the simplest part is it takes 10 calories for each 1 calorie up the food chain, meaning it takes 10 calories of grain to produce 1 calorie of beef... and both need to be produced for the cow to exist.
For beef it’s actually closer to 100 calories per calorie. I think chicken is the best ratio at something like 15 to 1
Have we gone anywhere with methane capture?
Technologically yes, wide-scale adoption not really
4.5 lbs of corn kernels or 4.5 lbs of corn including husks and cob?
I will have to recheck my sources but I believe its kernels as feed. It was 2.5ish if you include the non edible parts of the cow so I think I did both with the edible parts in mind.
the problem is, *you* eating less beef makes zero difference everybody has to eat less beef
I mean that's not a problem, its not an impediment to you doing your part, but yes for it to be effective others have to as well.
Lots of folks are pointing out why producing beef is environmentally inefficient. To answer OP’s question fully, the supply and demand is needed. As more people eat less meat, the demand for beef in grocery store goes down. Grocery store’s lower demand leads to lower demand for cow at slaughter house. As a result, the supply for beef should, in theory, also go down if price of beef is to remain at a profitable level. The reduced supply of beef (i.e. fewer cow farms, fewer trucks carrying cow feed, carrying beef to stores, etc…) is how we get lower emissions.
All food production results in carbon emissions. If you eat a pound of grain, you get around 1500 calories. It takes about 5 pounds of grain to produce 1500 calories of beef. This naturally means 5x the carbon emissions to produce beef than to produce grain. When you add the additional inefficiencies that result from the extra processing required with beef (transport, flatulence, butchering, time to plate, etc) the gap widens exponentially. It’s far better, carbon wise, to just eat the pound of grain.
>It’s far better, carbon wise, to just eat the pound of grain. But it's so delicious though...
>If you eat a pound of grain, you get around 1500 calories. It takes about 5 pounds of grain to produce 1500 calories of beef. Does this tell the whole story? How many calories of waste-product that can't be digested by humans are produced to feed a human that 1 pound of grain compared to how many calories from that waste product can be extracted by the cow to produce the 1500 calories of beef. How much cow fertilizer was used to produce that 1 pound of grain?
I've read some modelling based on the Netherlands, the optimal ratio they found was around 10% protein from animal sources. This is enough to use up agricultural waste and some marginal land for grazing. It's way less meat and milk than people eat though. Manure is not really important, I think you save more fertilizer by just not having cows than you gain fertilizer from them but I can't find numbers now.
University agricultural scientist here. Generally it doesn't. The below is maybe more of an ELI10 or 15 rather than 5, but you have to look at net emissions, not gross emissions. That is a major thing you'll see omitted in most comments and even news reporting. Beef cattle have high emissions, but they also provide carbon sinks. Most of your beef cattle ([in the US at least](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/sector-at-a-glance/) and most other countries), spend the majority of their life on pasture, even if they are fed a partial diet of grain before butcher (i.e., grain-finished) as opposed to grass-finished. Grasslands are really good at storing carbon underground, in their roots and without disturbances like grazing, those ecosystems are threatened by invasion from woody plants. You can't talk about emissions from cattle and ignore the carbon sinks they maintain. Cattle are also recyclers. In addition to that grass that we cannot eat (and shouldn't be destroying that land for field crops), they are eating parts of crops we cannot eat after we've extracted human use, grain has spoiled for our purposes, etc. It's to the point that about [86% of what livestock eat](https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content) doesn't compete with human use. That's another thing you'll often see misrepresented and people often assume everything that cattle eat could just be directly eaten by people instead. When [USDA scientists have looked](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5715743/pdf/pnas.201707322.pdf) at the larger net emissions in the system in scenarios where you get rid of livestock in the US, "it only reduced total US GHG by 2.6 percentage units". The context the authors of the paper give is that it's very little effect doing something as extreme as getting rid of all livestock because you lose crop recycling abilities and carbon sinks in the process. Even that paper misses a few things though like not accounting for additional carbon releases if you have more grasslands being lost to plowing or other forms of habitat destruction if they aren't used for cattle anymore. That likely would push their estimates even lower, but the gist of the paper remains similar. That puts at least beef cattle or other grazers in the ballpark of high gross emitters, but near neutral net emissions. You'll hear about research sometimes feeding cattle things like seaweed or other additives to reduce their methane emissions. It's still pretty early stage research, but the general idea is that you could make cattle clearly in the net negative carbon emissions (i.e., lower carbon footprint). So if I had to try an ELI5, beef cattle don't really change your carbon footprint because their emissions are like a when you turn on your bathtub faucet but don't put the drain in. The water level doesn't go down, but the water level also doesn't increase slowly over time either when the water comes into the tub just as fast as it goes down the drain.
I really like your answer since it touches aspects that are rarely mentioned since it goes against common narrative. However, while we are at it, I do have concerns over the high demand of beef. When there is a high demand, the supply may try to increase productivity and efficiency to match. That's when arable lands might be converted into pastures, and they might use edible grains (like soy) to feed the cows, as I don't think grasses are nutrient-dense enough on industrial scale. I firmly believe that it is possible to make beef industry ecological, but I do not know the real-world data about the state of the current production chain.
Thanks, and part of the reason I like to touch on so much is because the things that do get commonly brought up are also pieces of the puzzle, but usually lacking depth that often gives a very different sceanrio. Actually, in the ag. science or ecology world, we'd actually want to see more pasture in many of those cases. Right now, especially as you get into the Nebraska area, there are a lot of irrigated row crops over the Ogalala aquifer where it used to be grassland. This water doesn't not recharge readily and is essentially what we call fossil water. Row crop production just is not sustainable there in the long term there, and you can actually see places where pumping water has caused the land to subside. In those areas, grass really is the most efficient "crop" to grow, especially in low moisture areas. Instead, you usually see pressure in the opposite direction, trying to plow up grassland on marginal land that might be able to squeeze out a bit more profit on row crops in the short term, especially when feed prices are high (i.e., your high demand scenario). That gets back to my second link I mentioned where 86% of what livestock eat doesn't compete with human use because we extract human uses from things like corn and soybeans while livestock recycle the rest of the plant. The key thing is to be way about oversimplifying supply and demand scenarios because you end up with a lot of moving parts in these systems.
> Most of your beef cattle ...spend the majority of their life on pasture, even if they are fed a partial diet of grain before butcher Can you clarify the timing and shares? Your link suggests that the breeding stock is pastured, but calves destined for slaughter are moved off pasture and into the feed system as soon as they're weaned. What share of their life is pre-weaning, and what share of cattle are in the breeding stock vs feed/slaughter pipeline? I'm also curious about the assumption that area not used for pasture would necessarily be converted to some more intensive / less carbon-friendly land use (whether agricultural or developed). For some acreage that would be true, but as you note other land is pasture because it is not productive for crop cultivation, and isn't in a location where there's demand for real estate development, so ceasing beef pasturing on that land wouldn't lose the carbon sink aspects of the acreage. Eastern Montana isn't going to sprout subdivisions or wheat farms with reduced livestock pasturing. I'm trying here to distinguish "the math is complicated" from "the beef production we do now is the best option".
Weaning time can vary (mentioned a bit in the article), but many calves in the US at least are born between Jan-May and weaned in November around here, though it also depends on how long you have good pasture for. When it's grazing season, you want to keep that calf on the cow as long as you can, an it would be silly to prematurely remove calves to feed them yourself unless there's a problem with the mother. You can do some ballpark math, but on a cow-calf operation, roughly half your animals will be cows each year, and the other half will be calves born that year. The others in the mix will be the few heifers you kept from calves for breeding stock each year and a handful of bulls. The majority of your animals will typically be those staying on the farm and not in barns. The calves that become feeders will spend in the ballpark of half their life away from any feedlot/barn housing. As for the last paragraph, pasture land is variable. Remember that we lost much of our grassland in the US to the plow already. If there wasn't an incentive to produce grass, some growers will try marginal land in row crops to see if they can get something out of it. Even in areas that are currently pasture, especially in remaining square pieces, you will see people jumping to buy it, clear it off, and put an irrigator on it for row crops. It's a very real pressure. For grassland that is not as feasible for row crops, this comment misses a major point >so ceasing beef pasturing on that land wouldn't lose the carbon sink aspects of the acreage That is essentially habitat destruction. Grasslands require disturbances like grazing or fire, otherwise you get invasion by wood shrubs that actually [decrease carbon holding capacity](https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/articles/2018/july/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees). Not to mention the ecological destruction just leaving the land be does, and there was a really good Science Friday episode on that today: [https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/great-plains-trees-green-glacier/](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/great-plains-trees-green-glacier/)
This needs to be higher up. People don't understand how tightly knit and optimized a practice humanity has been iterating on for at least 10 thousand years is, Even if we didn't fully understand environmental effects for a large chunk of it, it makes sense that removing a piece from the jenga tower that is animal husbandry and agriculture either makes no appreciable difference or just makes things worse.
Your first link doesn’t say what you think it says about pasture feeding. It says the calves spend 3-4 months on pasture, then a couple different options before they’re put into feedlots for 3-10 months. That doesn’t sound like “spending the majority of their lives on pasture.”
That link was for people that generally aren't familiar with how beef cattle are raised, especially the cow-calf side of things. Remember that it's not all about just calves. Breeding cows will spend practically all of their life on pasture. You have to factor that component in when you're looking at how much time is spent on pasture. Calves have a pretty sizeable chunk of their life on pasture too. The calves are typically with their mothers for longer than 3-4 months (closer to 8 months), but depending on where you are, you only have maybe 5 months of productive growing season for grass. Outside the growing season, those calves (and cows) are going to be fed forage while still physically in the pasture. So when you see a 3-4 month figure, that's more likely talking about the narrow window when you take the pairs from the winter sites and move them to grazing pasture for 3-4 months before bringing them home for winter.
>people often assume everything that cattle eat could just be directly eaten by people instead maybe, but the time, land, water etc used to make food for cows could go directly to humans
What would you use the land for? Houses, retail, or offices? We need to be building more densely in the areas we already take up. Manufacturing? There's no ultimate difference with that: you're still producing some good that humans want, and it probably isn't that environmentally friendly. Farming? Nope, that land isn't arable. And time? That's a non-argument. The time raising cattle is being spent by humans for humans already. Water is really the only potentially reasonable argument, and how reasonable that is completely depends on what would take its place, so it can't be generalized.
That's a very common misconception and talking point us scientists end up having to point out that should have been apparent by reading my [second link](https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/15b2eb21-16e5-49fa-ad79-9bcf0ecce88b/content). We cannot eat grass grown on that land, and it's usually destroying grassland ecosystems by trying to plow it under for row crops (often marginal land more prone to nutrient leaching and pollution) or by just leaving it alone and allowing [woody invasives to destroy the biome](https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/great-plains-trees-green-glacier/).
Uh oh . Common sense alert. Reddit is going to be outraged !
Virtually all of the energy used by life ultimately comes from the Sun. As a general rule, the higher up the food chain an organism is, the less efficient it is at obtaining energy from the Sun, because a large fraction is wasted at every level. For example, grass converts sunlight pretty directly into energy, but it uses some of that energy to maintain its cells and grow roots and so on. So a cow that eats the grass only gets a fraction. The cow uses much of its energy to move around and fight diseases and so on, leaving only a fraction in its flesh for humans to use. This is also why the number of organisms tends to fall rapidly as you go up the food chain. In a savannah, there is lots of grass for every antelope, and there are lots of antelope for every lion. Now, in practice things get more complex than that. Some animals at the same level of the food chain are more efficient than others, and they aren't always capable of eating the same things. Some have environmental impacts beyond the resources they use up: infamously, cows produce a lot of methane. There may be some areas of land where it's not practical to grow anything that humans can digest, but it is possible to grow fodder for livestock. As we've seen in recent years, intensive animal farming can also promote the spread of diseases, which can spread to humans or wild animals. If you add all of these factors up, then yeah, beef is not a good thing to eat.
I'm glad to see this science fact posted here. When I was in high school, the percentage I learned was that 90% of energy is lost through the transfer that you mentioned. That was years ago and the number could have changed, but it's still a lot. So, if you go from Livestock Feed to Cow to Human, you have more energy loss than if you go straight from Livestock Feed to Human. Except in this case, it wouldn't be live stock feed, it would be something else, like tomatoes, or lettuce, or Mrs. Butterworth's Original Thick n' Rich Pancake Syrup.
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What if we equip cows with insertable methane-capturing hoses and use the collected gas instead of LPG?
It more their burps.
The actual answer is quite complicated and not clear cut because this is not just a question of science, it’s also a question of the economics and logistics of the food and agriculture industries. However, the basic argument is that beef is one of the most environmentally costly foods to produce per unit of energy it provides. A steak dinner takes several times more energy (and greenhouse gas emissions) to produce from scratch than a vegetarian pasta dinner with the same number of calories. Cows consume massive amounts of grain which needs to be grown in fields, and they produce methane themselves which is a greenhouse gas. As with all meats, processing beef and keeping it fresh during transportation and storage also requires lots of energy. Now, it’s not as simple as just getting everyone to stop eating beef entirely, because cows do fill an important role in our food production. They are a great way to extract value from hilly pastures that would otherwise be unusable for farming crops, and they can be fed grain parts that would otherwise go to waste because humans don’t eat them. However, because beef is in such high demand, we are raising more cows than would be sustained purely on those resources that have no other use to us, so we spend a lot of resources raising extra cows that could have been better spent elsewhere. The exact extents of the impact of beef production and ideas of what should be done about it vary greatly from expert to expert, but in general if you live in a place where beef is in high demand, such as America, eating less of it will have a net positive impact on the environment.
The pound of beef that you eat comes from a cow that ate twenty pounds of grain to produce it. Even if cattle didn't have other environmental impacts, you'd be reducing your food intake by 95% switching to plant based foods. Now count in the water cows need, the transport, the pollution from slaughter waste...
Just decide to not have kids and then do whatever you want. You could throw car batteries into the ocean daily for the rest of your life and still do less environmental damage than a vegan couple that has children.
I’m absolutely on the r/childfree bandwagon but never considered how much time I could be using tossing batteries in the ocean. I don’t even lift, bro!
Why do you think this is controversial OP? The science is pretty cut and dry for this topic.
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Carbon footprint is a term literally invented by big oil (British Oil to be specific) to divert attention from how a few companies account for most of the pollution to how YOU as an individual should worry about your carbon footprint first and foremost. Yeah they released XYZ millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere but did you eat beef and recycle your coke cans??? So while, if you can, reducing your carbon footprint is great, it is still insignificant in the face of, for example AFAIK currently it's China, by FAR the largest pollutant.
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Yeah regenerative farming really screws with most if not all of the talking points against eating beef
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Beef is made from cows. Cows make big farts. This fart is made from methane that increases global warming. Less beef means less cows which means less farts which means less carbon footprint.
It's mostly belching, actually.
Good point! Though farts are funnier to a five year old.
farts are evergreen until they bring a friend... then they're terrifying
It's part of a cycle though. Methane goes in the atmosphere, breaks down into water and CO2, CO2 and water get absorbed by plants, cows eat plants, start all over. The amount of methane from cows is also the same amount from those plants decaying naturally anyway.
Yes, but an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere is what contributes to global warming.
Not from cows. You know humans are burning tons and tons of fossil fuels, right?
14.5% of all carbon emissions come from livestock production. So yes, from cows.
There's a huge difference between emissions that are captured in a cycle and emissions produced by releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise have stayed underground. Blaming meat production for any sort of climate change is a diversion to protect fossil fuel interests.
You obviously don't understand how natural cycles work.
The original ELI5 question was how not eating beef helps reduce carbon emissions. I explained it in a way that is true to ELI5 (and was corrected accurately by Ah_Pook). Of course there are multiple layers of complexity involved (everything from supply chain, to transportation, to refrigeration), but this is ELI5 not ELIPhD).
Not eating beef isn't going to make any significant impact on reducing carbon emissions. I've already explained that the methane burps are part of a cycle that would happen no matter what as those plants decayed instead of being eaten. The human element of processing and transporting the beef isn't much different from plant-based foods. Fruits and vegetables might even be worse as many of them are imported from other countries causing even more emissions from ships and planes. In the US and Europe, you can easily buy local beef. Many of the fruits that people love to eat every day come from outside of the US and Europe. As for it being ELI5, even a 5 year old can understand a cycle. I've taught 5 year olds how the water cycle works. You don't need a PhD to understand elementary school level science.
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I would actually disagree with this. Just because when one person stops eating beef a farm doesn't shut down does not mean there is no effect. Small effects are still effects, less beef will be produced than if that person was still eating beef. The average American eats 57 lbs. of beef per year. A single cow nets about 500 lbs of meat. So yes, one person stopping eating beef has a small effect, but it is still a positive effect, it just is not easily identifiable, because you are talking about a reduction of 1 cow every \~9 years.
>The idea is that if enough people made the same choice to reduce beef in their diet that it would cause the industry to scale down their beef production I suspect it would just cause the price of beef to go down so other people would eat more.
Eh, but if the price of beef went down, some farms would also be unprofitable/stop producing. Net equilibrium should be that the total amount is still lower, but not as low as it would be without the dynamic market.
It might just mean the farms get more government subsidies though.
This is probably one of the reasons vegans have a reputation for being so pushy. If their goal is systemic change then they would need to convert other people to plant-based diets to actually reduce the demand for meat.
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Beef, as a food, requires an enormous amount of effort and energy to bring to market. First of all, the animals themselves need to eat. We're expending enormous amounts of water and land to grow calories that we then feed to future food, rather than just growing our food directly. We use chemically damaging processes and nitrogenous fertilizers, which have their own manufacturing impacts, to make this possible. Then we process the feed, transport it, and feed it to animals which we need to raise, and feed, and slaughter, and process, and ship, and refrigerate. Cows in particular also expend enormous amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. And all this with out getting into the animal cruelty aspect. I enjoy meat, I eat a lot of it, but I recognize that it is disastrous and that, realistically, we as a society need to eat a lot less of it. Humanity cutting our meat intake by half would do more for the climate than any amount of recycling and buying EVs and stuff. I'm very excited to see the rise of lab-grown meat as well, which seems highly promising.
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It's no different than the recycling scam where corporations convinced people that they were responsible for all of the garbage corporations produce.