Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

#RegenesisFact 4. This one will come as a shock to many people. Unless I’ve missed something, there is no major farm product as environmentally damaging as organic, pasture-fed beef.
Here’s the reasoning: 🧵

i. Arguably the most important of all environmental metrics is the amount of land we use. Land used for extractive industries is land that cannot be used for wild ecosystems such as forests, wetlands and savannahs, on which the great majority of terrestrial species depend.

ii. By far the greatest use of land by people is for grazing by livestock – ie pasture. While human habitation occupies 1% of the planet’s surface, and crops occupy 12%, livestock grazing occupies 28%.
This represents a truly massive *ecological opportunity cost*.

iii. Yet the animals fed on pasture alone produce just 1% of the protein we consume. In other words, this is spectacularly profligate way of producing our food.

iv. One study looked at what would happen if the grain-fed cattle in the US were instead raised on pasture, as many foodies and a quite a few environmentalists propose. The land area used to feed them would rise by 270%.

v. In other words, even if the US felled all its forests, drained its wetlands, watered its deserts and annulled its national parks, it would still need to import most of its beef. (Prob from the Amazon, which is already meeting part of the rising demand for “pasture-fed” beef).

vi. The climate costs of all beef are massive: raising a kg of beef protein, on average, releases 113 times more greenhouse gases than a kg of pea protein, and 190 times more than a kg of nut protein. But pastured beef is much worse: 3 or 4 times the emissions of grain-fed beef.

vii. So how about *organic* pasture-fed beef?
Because organically-raised cattle take longer to grow, organic beef production loses twice as much nitrogen per kg of meat as conventional beef: an even greater climate and pollution disaster.

viii. And, because organic pasture-fed beef uses even more land than conventional pasture-fed beef, its *carbon opportunity cost* is even bigger.
This means the carbon that could be stored in wild ecosystems, but can’t be, because they’ve been turned into pasture.

ix. Claims about carbon storage in pasture have been hugely exaggerated and tend to rely on junk science. This study found no case of pasture absorbing more than 60% of the greenhouse gases the livestock produce: the system doesn’t even wash its own face.
oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/repo…

x. Only when livestock numbers are extremely low are they compatible with a rich functional ecosystem: @Kneppwildrange is a good example. But this means tiny amounts of food. If Knepp covered all the farmland in the UK, it would provide each of us with just 75kcal of meat/day.

xi. The only other product whose impacts are comparable is organic pasture-fed lamb. But I'm counting this as a minor farm product, as, worldwide, there's much less of it. Thankfully.

xii. Sources, in order:
Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, September 2019. Land Use. Our World in Data. ourworldindata.org/land-use

Navin Ramankutty et al., 2008. Farming the planet: 1. Geographic distribution of global agricultural lands in the year 2000. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, volume 22, issue 1. doi.org/10.1029/2007GB…

Tara Garnett et al., 2017. Grazed and confused? Ruminating on cattle, grazing systems, methane, nitrous oxide, the soil carbon sequestration question – and what it all means for greenhouse gas emissions. Food Climate Research Network (FCRN). oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/repo…

Matthew N Hayek and Rachael D Garrett, 2018. Nationwide shift to grass-fed beef requires larger cattle population. Environmental Research Letters, volume 13, issue 8. doi.org/10.1088/1748-9…

Our World in Data, 2018. Greenhouse gas emissions per 100 grams of protein. ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-pe…

J. Poore and T. Nemecek, 2018. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers. Science, volume 360, issue 6392, pp. 987-992. doi.org/10.1126/scienc…

William J. Ripple et al., 2013. Ruminants, climate change and climate policy. Nature Climate Change, volume 4, pp. 2–5. doi.org/10.1038/nclima…

Durk Nijdam, Trudy Rood and Henk Westhoek, 2012. The price of protein: Review of land use and carbon footprints from life cycle assessments of animal food products and their substitutes. Food Policy, volume 37, issue 6, pp. 760-770. doi.org/10.1016/j.food…

Laura Cattell Noll et al., 2020. The nitrogen footprint of organic food in the United States. Environmental Research Letters, volume 15, issue 4. doi.org/10.1088/1748-9…

Annisa Chand, 2020. Organic beef lets the system down. Nature Food, volume 1, issue 253. doi.org/10.1038/s43016…

Timothy D. Searchinger et al., 2018. Assessing the efficiency of changes in land use for mitigating climate change. Nature, volume 564, pp. 249–253. doi.org/10.1038/s41586…