Meat is Dead, Long Live Meat
Even if we don’t keep animals in our diets, we need to keep them on American rangelands.
Some of the most exciting food- and agtech startups on the menu today are selling a meatless future. Whether you favor Hampton Creek’s eggless mayo or Impossible Food’s meatless burger, there is a lot being said about taking animals completely out of the American Food System equation (a great primer on the argument can be found in Josh Tetrik’s TED talk). With agriculture being the second highest carbon emitter in the US, cheap and abundant animal products pushing out waistlines and causing a spike in heart disease, and feedlots destroying air quality and weighing a little too heavily on our conscience, a more enlightened species might put consumption of animal products behind them.
But then again, bacon.
Though I won’t take a stand on the morality of omnivorousness, there’s a much more important point here, and it has nothing to do with morality and everything to do science. If we don’t want the states between Nebraska and California to turn into a desert wasteland, America needs beef.
Admittedly, it doesn’t have to be beef. It could be any cloven-hoofed ruminant that travels in huge herds, eats grass, and can survive harsh, long winters, hot, dry summers, and a broad range of altitudes. Goats, deer, and elk are ruminants, though not grazers by nature (they are actually browsers by choice, and prefer forested areas to grasslands). Horses are happy to graze, but their hooves lack the pointed edges that aerate soil, nor do they travel in significant herds.
Sheep are a possible alternative, though they tend to be picky eaters and will often eat select plants to death while leaving others to dominate. The obvious non-cattle alternative is the native species that filled this role in the American West, the American Bison, but alas, there are only about 340,000 bison in the US today, down from a height of around 60 million (that’s 0.56% of the historic population). The Great Plains evolved over millennia to support this gigantic roving herds of ruminants, and in their absence, much has changed.
Much of the American West is now at considerable risk for desertification. This isn’t just a little drought or a few cracks in the dirt, the risk here is at least Dust Bowl-esque in proportions. If something isn’t done about soil health in the West soon, our squarer states (Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Texas, Idaho, and Montana) will become the sand dune-iest as well.
The best of us thought, for decades even, that desertification was a result of over-grazing. And to be fair, sometimes, it is. But as a rule, we’ve come to terms with the fact that healthy ecosystems don’t just accommodate grazing ruminants, they rely on them. Grazers play a role in soil health, and if we hope to restore our soils (and maybe even turn them into the phenomenal carbon sinks they could be), grazers have an important role to play. How important a role? I’ll let Mr. Allan Savory, grassland ecosystem pioneer, enlighten you.
So we need cattle. We need sheep. We need poultry (and water fowl). These animals fill important niches in their native environments as well as domesticated ones, they have immensely valuable contributions to make to soil and ecological diversity, with hoof and beak and claw. Whether or not we consume them (or their milk/eggs/etc.), other animals are important part of the Earth we inhabit, so even if we succeed in extracting them from our diet, it would be a grave error to do away with them altogether.
Rather than focus solely on meatless options, we should look for alternative ways to raise animals that minimize the aforementioned woes. An example- mixed farming. Farmers are in a unique space now, with a high premiums on value-added food products (be that organic, grass-fed, non-GMO, etc.) to explore adding livestock back into their crop mix, even if it’s just for home consumption. Even something as simple as having a few head of sheep grazing a cover crop (or weeds) in the off-season can be meaningful. Technologies that support this kind of transition among existing farmers are tremendously important, as opposed to those that focus solely on building holistic farms from the ground up. Technologies that allow farms to retrofit, to take gradual steps towards fundamental change, will undoubtedly be leaders.
Look out for companies like PastureMap, who’s looking to create a software to assist with management intensive grazing, or PastureScout, who’s connecting people with cattle with people with pasture to optimize efficient use of the land. Also look for more cattle (and other livestock) wearables like those from Silent Herdsmen, or software like Tambero and Farmeron, that can use data to help farmers find the most effective ways to transition towards optimal practices. Making mixed and holistic farming methods economically viable and managerially simple for farmers will go a long way towards more mindful meat.
Am I saying it’s more environmentally ethical to be a mindful omnivore that favors grass fed meat over dogmatic vegetarianism? No. (But wouldn’t that be nice.) I think it’s important to be cautious when confronted with ideas we think are wrong, because often “wrong” is really just “inconveniently right.” If we all fall madly in love with the alternative foods of the future, we can populate the Great Plains with any kind of roaming herd we like, tear down all the fences (that aren’t for human safety), and see what happens. We wax doom-and-gloom about our kids not being able to see the polar bears, but who knows, maybe our children will get to see the re-emergence of the American Bison, 2 million two ton animals, surging across the high plains of Wyoming, while they watch from their drones, or hover crafts, or Mars. The amazing thing is, that’s possible.
