Beef: Environment - Greenhouse Gas Emissions
What Happens When Cows are Fed
Once a cow gets to the feedlot, it eats about 25 pounds of corn-based feed each day. As mentioned earlier, cows evolved to eat grass over millions of years and have been eating a corn-based diet for only about 50 years. Evolution hasn’t caught up with the industrialization of the beef industry, meaning that cows have a very difficult time processing the corn, causing particular damage to their digestive and immune systems.
The effects of corn-based feed to a cow’s digestive system is more obviously detrimental to the environment. To be blunt, all cows burp and fart, and those emissions release significant amounts of methane. What corn does is take a cow’s digestive system from neutral to unnaturally acidic. The more upset a cow’s stomach is, the more it emits, and the more toxic its emissions are (particularly its burps). Changing a cow’s diet to one that is more natural to its needs can significantly reduce the amount of methane it releases.1 (Other methods have also been developed. German scientists have developed a pill to cut down on bovine burping.)2
To assist in protecting their immunity, large quantities of prophylactic antibiotics are mixed in with their feed—so much so that the beef and cow-based dairy industry is responsible for 50 percent of the U.S. usage of antibiotics.3 While these antibiotics are preventing many illnesses that would inevitably arise in the unhealthy feedlot environments, they are also having an unintended opposing effect: all these antibiotics are contributing to a rise in drug-resistant “superbugs.”4
Learn about how the beef industry impacts land use.
Footnotes
1. David Adam. “Move to Cut Methane Emissions By Changing Cows’ Diet.” The Guardian. 10 July 2007.
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. 119-120.
Michael Pollan. “Power Steer.” New York Times Magazine. 31 March 2002.
Michele Levy, “Cow Burps and Climate Change?” New Dream Blog. Center for a New American Dream. 22 Jan 2008.
2. Kate Connolly. “Pill Stops Cow Burps and Helps Save the Planet.” The Guardian. 23 March 2007.
3.Michael Pollan. “When a Crop Becomes King.” New York Times. 19 July 2002.
The majority of writing on the topic of antibiotics in feed attribute the amount to 50 percent of U.S. overall use of antibiotics, though the National Resources Defense Council asserts the percentage to be 70 percent.