Unfiltered Guest Column

Are Cows Really the Villains?

By PeterHolter, Unfiltered 3-16-07

The recent UN report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,”, suggested that the world’s cattle herds actually emit more carbon and dioxide and greenhouse gases than cars do.

The issue is not really the cows, but how they have been managed in an industrialized food chain.

As best we can tell, the UN study is primarily based on animals that have been raised in an industrialized manner, confined to pens and barns where they are fed a steady slaughterhouse/feedlot diet of synthetic minerals, grains, fodder, and antibiotics. These would make anyone belch and produce unpleasant gas!

Unfortunately, as the UN report makes clear in raising this issue as a global concern, the U.S. has encouraged Africa, Asia and Latin America to replicate the industrialized confinement model.

The study does not take into account animals that are grass-fed out on the open land, managed organically and holistically.

Today, in recognition of the perils of industrialized farming and food production, two million acres of land in the U.S.; over 24 million acres in Australia; seven million acres in Argentina, nearly 3 million acres in Italy, and two million acres in Brazil are being managed organically, according to the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements.

Historically, before “modern” agricultural methods took hold, animals were not confined. On roughly two-thirds of this continent, there were once hundreds of millions of herding, hoofed, grazing/browsing animals and sufficient pack-hunting predators – human and otherwise - to keep them constantly bunched and on the move.

If we think back to the time when the American Bison roamed the Great Plains, the tall grasses were healthy and abundant and able to support both the grazers and the predators. The Bison played a major role in maintaining the health of the grasslands, due to their grazing patterns, hoof action and natural (not synthetic) fertilizing actions.

Why is that important?

According to a recent study from the University of Montana, healthy grasslands actually pull significant amounts of carbon from the air and sink it into their roots by weight and volume. (Some evidence suggests they sink more carbon than trees.) This is carbon that does not enter the atmosphere to cause the problems referenced in the U.N. report.

Over 23 years of working internationally with farming and ranching families, our organization has accumulated abundant evidence that domestic livestock can be managed in a way that replicates the behavior of those wild grazers of yesteryear. When animals are placed out on the land and graze in a controlled, holistically managed way, they release their manure into the soil with more even distribution. During grazing, their hoof action works the soil so that the manure is quickly absorbed. More manure absorption means that the soil’s organic matter is increased, thereby fertilizing it and making it healthier.

When we couple managed grazing with the increasingly popular local “slow food” movements, a growing mainstream demand for organic food products (including beef that is free of disease and artificial feed), and a growing consciousness about the health of humans, land, and animals, we have an approach that is radically different than the one presented by the UN.

It is an approach that regenerates grasslands, soils, wildlife habitats and water resources.

We believe that if agriculturalists, environmentalists, and governments worked together using this approach with domestic livestock, they could produce the following benefits in the US and other regions of the world:

· Public and private funds going into resource regeneration and food production instead of expensive lawsuits.
· A significant reductions in methane emissions
· Fully restored grasslands
· Grassland soils that absorb huge amounts of carbon
· A healthy and diverse habitat – balancing animals, grass, and soil
· Good income for rural families
· A healthy, disease-free protein food product for city-dwellers
· Increased water resources for the dry regions of the world (covered soils retain at least 50% more water than bare ground does)
· Reduced frequency of catastrophic fires (such as happened in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandle and all over Australia, Mexico, Spain and Africa this past year)
· A win-win for urban and rural dwellers – and for agriculture and the environment

Peter Holter is Chief Operating Officer of the Albuquerque-based, non-profit Holistic Management International, which works with stewards of large landscapes to restore land to health and profitability.

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