By Mark Hyman, MD

You’ve probably heard that meat is bad for the climate (and your health) and that we should adopt plant-based diets to lower our carbon footprint and prevent disease. The idea goes that if we all become vegan, or close to it, we can save the planet and ourselves.

Meatless Mondays, cow farts, lab meat, and Impossible-brand plant-based GMO soy burgers are all buzzwords swirling around these days. I’m all for eating a wide array of colorful vegetables and fruits, nuts, seeds, real whole grains, and beans.

In fact, I have spent most of my career as a functional medical doctor telling people to do just that.

We should all be eating a plant-rich diet for our health. And there’s no argument that feedlots are anything other than an unmitigated disaster for cattle, human health, and the planet. Case closed, right? Not exactly.

Feedlot Versus Regeneratively-Raised Cows

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock are responsible for fourteen and a half percent of human greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—more than all transportation emissions. Eighty percent of these emissions come from ruminants (e.g. sheep, cows, goats).

The feed required for these conventional operations is typically grown with the worst agricultural practices: annual tilling combined with pesticides and fertilizers, often accompanied by deforestation and use of native grasslands to grow feed for the animals.

Native grasslands are being lost faster than our forests, with dire consequences for the environment.

According to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade policy, the world’s top five meat and dairy producers combined—Tyson Foods, Cargill, Dairy Farmers of America, JBS, and Fonterra—emit more GHGs than oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP.

Based on current projections, if the top meat and dairy companies continue their current practices, by 2050 they will be responsible for eighty-one percent of global emissions. That should end. Period. Full agreement on all sides.

So, the logical answer, it would seem, is to all become vegan, right? Not so fast.

Nicolette Hahn Niman, an environmental advocate and cattle rancher who wrote Defending Beef, put it this way: “It’s not the cow; it’s the how”—a catch phrase she borrowed from Soil Carbon Cowboy Russ Conser.

In other words, not all farms and ranches are the same, nor are all cows. Grass-fed beef, managed the right way, is good for animals, humans, the environment,
and climate.

Research into Holistic Livestock Management

Holistic management, also known as adaptive multi-paddock grazing, restores the land and supports livestock and all forms of wildlife—a beautiful ecological cycle.

When cattle are managed through techniques such as mob grazing—a practice that mimics the behavior of natural herd animals—they forage on portions of the grassland and then are moved, giving the pasture a chance to regenerate and retain root mass.

This regeneration draws down carbon through photosynthesis and pushes it through the grass’s roots to enrich soil biology.

A recent study examining carbon cycles over four years in the Midwest found that adaptive multi-paddock grazing—where livestock are rotated through multiple paddocks to prevent overgrazing and support plant growth—sequesters more carbon in the soil (where it benefits the ecosystem) than it releases into the atmosphere (where it contributes to climate change).

Another recent study investigated regenerative land management methods at White Oak Pastures, a 156-year-old family farm spanning six generations in Georgia. The study found a net carbon sequestration, meaning their farming practices are actually reversing climate change.

The Marin Carbon Project, a consortium of independent agricultural institutions, explores “carbon farming” and climate-friendly agriculture practices on rangeland, farm, and forest soils.

Through meticulous research on California’s grasslands, the organization has demonstrated that properly managed grasslands can effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere.

In another robust study comparing feedlot beef to adaptive multi-paddock-raised cattle, the grass-fed operations reduced net carbon by 170 percent while the feedlots increased net carbon emissions.

Indeed, if these types of regenerative operations can net-sequester carbon, this is a far better climate strategy than replacing cows with monocrop soy used to create the plant-based Impossible Burgers.

Ultimately, while some studies have shown that regenerative agriculture doesn’t produce a net benefit, they tend to be flawed because they examined only conventional (over)grazing and assumed fifty percent of the land was irrigated.

True holistic management, however, doesn’t require irrigation and builds more soil that holds more carbon.

In fact, comparative analysis of true regenerative practices (from White Oak Pastures) compared to those used to grow GMO monocrop soy for Impossible
Burgers found that you would have to eat one 100 percent grass-fed burger to offset the GHG emissions produced by one Impossible Burger.

We should be cautious of anyone trying to sell a simplified, one-size-fits-all food solution that either broadly condemns cows or imposes a vegan diet.

The suggestion to completely cut out meat also means we’d be cutting out essential amino acids, high-quality protein, and highly bioavailable nutrients such as pre-formed vitamins A1, K2, D3, and B12, from our diet.

The Economics of Holistic Livestock Management

It is often pointed out that grass-fed meats are expensive, elitist, and cannot be scaled. But they can, and then some.

Allen Williams, PhD, crunched the numbers. There are 29 million grain-fed cows consumed from factory farms in America every year.

By using idle grasslands—including existing USDA Conservation Reserve Program land unsuitable for farming but good for grazing—we could produce 52.9 million grass-fed head of cattle per year. This is almost double what’s produced in feedlots today.

Those grass-fed cattle would help revitalize rural communities, reverse climate change, increase biodiversity, reduce water use, and improve soil health. Similar approaches can be used globally.

While we don’t need that much meat, the argument that this is simply an elitist, limited strategy is clearly false.

I respect the moral choice of being a vegan, but the idea that it is saving animals and the planet and even improving our health is unfortunately not true. Turns out a cornfield is much more destructive than a grass-fed beef regenerative farm or ranch.

______________________________________

Mark Hyman, MD, is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a fifteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine.

He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy. He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts The Doctor’s Farmacy with 200+ million downloads. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, and Good Morning America.

Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from Food Fix by Mark Hyman, MD. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Hyman, MD. Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from author.