Beef: Environment - Land Use
Cows account for approximately 24 percent of Earth’s (ice-free) land surface and other livestock account for another six percent. These percentages take into account both the land used to grow feed as well as the forests cleared for grazing.1 A study conducted by soil and crop scientist Christian Peters analyzing the land use by various diets found that beef requires 31 times the amount of land area as an equivalent quantity by calorie of grain—taking into account that the majority of the land required for beef was used to grow the feed for the cows.2 Beef requires two primary types of land: grazing land and croplands. In this section, deforestation for the purpose of expanding pastures and croplands will be reviewed.
Deforestation, the destruction of vegetative cover, is the leading cause of biodiversity loss. Destroying trees and other plants, in addition to changing soil patterns, directly leads to carbon release-- a primary contributor to global warming. Moreover, deforestation negatively affects water cycles, helping lead to even greater scarcity of fresh water.3 The primary area of deforestation in support of beef production is in Latin America, where 70 percent of the forests have been cleared for cattle grazing.4 In fact, this deforestation is considered the main driver in both plant and animal extinctions in Central and South America. These are just some of the known effects of this deforestation. Because this practice is relatively new and rapidly expanding, we don’t yet know the full extent of its effect on our planet.5
Moreover, the cow pastures themselves are in bad shape. Twenty percent of pastures worldwide are considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction, and erosion.6 Pasture degradation is “related to a mismatch between livestock density and the capacity of the pasture to be grazed and trampled.” Pasture degradation leads to soil erosion and the degradation of vegetation, both of which lead to increased carbon release and nutrient removal, in addition to reduced biodiversity and water availability.7 Ideally, grazing patterns would be established so that the animals can be moved from area to area to avoid overgrazing and pasture degradation. However, in areas that are deforested for the sole purpose of grazing, the sad fact is that as one area becomes overgrazed, another is cleared.
In recent decades, other parts of the world have been following the U.S. model of Confined Animal Feeding operations (CAFOs), which, while employing a “landless” model, are considered by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” From the energy used to heat, cool, and ventilate the facilities, to the fossil fuels used to produced the feed for the cows, to the significant amount of water used to hydrate the animals and clean the facilities, to the incredible amount of waste produced and stored, and beyond, CAFOs may be “efficient” in the short term in terms of maximizing production, but extremely inefficient in terms of resource use and environmental degradation.
Learn about deforestation is expanding croplands.
Footnotes
1. “Livestock a Major Threat to the Environment.” FAO Newsroom. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. 29 Nov 2006.
Jeremy Rifkin. Beyond Beef. New York: Penguin Group, 1992. 1.
2. Christian J. Peters, Jennifer L. Wilkins, and Gary W. Fick. “Testing A Complete-Diet Model for Estimating the Land Resource Requirements of Food Consumption and Agricultural Carrying Capacity: The New York State Example.” Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems: 22(2), 2007. 149.
3. 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. 65.