Beef: Environment - Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Corn and the Footprint of Feed
Cows evolved over millions of years to digest various types of grass. However, in the 1950s, the “Great Corn Boom” began, which in turn facilitated the evolution of the U.S. beef industry. The beef industry realized that there was a more efficient way than years of eating grass to fatten cows up very quickly: allow the cows to graze on grass until they weigh approximately 650 pounds (about six months old), then expedite their growth by moving them into feedlots where they eat about 25 pounds of fattening corn-based grain mixture a day for about six months and receive anabolic steroid shots in the ear to help them grow another 400 pounds.1
That corn-based grain mixture is one of the most energy-intensive parts of the entire process of beef production. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) asserts that the majority of energy used in producing beef is spent on producing feed, summarizing: “As well as the energy used for fertilizer, important amounts of energy are also spent on seed, herbicides/pesticides, diesel for machinery (for land preparation, harvesting, transport), and electricity (irrigation pumps, drying, heating, etc.).”2 This feed is the reason for which the average beef cow “consumes” approximately 284 gallons of oil over the course of its lifetime, according to Cornell ecologist David Pimental.3 Learn more about corn soon.
But why corn if it’s so energy intensive? The Great Corn Boom of the 1950s, which produced new heartier breeds of corn and more potent pesticides, evolved the beef industry from being significantly farm-based to becoming feedlot-based.4 Michael Pollan points out that “compared with grass or hay, corn is a compact and portable foodstuff, making it possible to feed tens of thousands of animals on small plots of land.”5 Corn-based feed is also high-calorie, allowing cows to gain significant amounts of weight (especially when combined with anabolic steroids) in a very short amount of time; getting a cow to 1,200-1,400 pounds through a primarily grass-based diet can take four to five years, whereas a corn-based diet takes no more than a quarter of the time.6 Moreover, the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the corn industry—to such an extent that we as a nation were growing far more corn than our population could eat. As such, corn-based feed turned into the primary source of food for livestock, including beef,7 and today more than half of all corn grown in the U.S. is fed to livestock.
So how does the feed affect cows’ digestion and the environment?
Footnotes
1. Eric Schlosser. Fast Food Nation. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. 150.
Andrew Rimas and Evan Fraser. Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. 180-181.
2. Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and Cees de Haan. Livestock’s Long Shadow. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome, 2006. 88-89
3. Michael Pollan. “Power Steer.” New York Times Magazine. 31 March 2002.
5. Pollan "Power Steer"