Is Plant Based the Answer?

    Eating Meat Sustainably

 

CAFOs Versus Pasture-Raised Animals

    From the 1930s to the 1970s, the amount of farms in the US decreased drastically, while the size of farms increased significantly. This is due to the industrialization of agriculture, which has caused heavy environmental consequences. Industrial farming methods are, in general, more harmful to the environment, for they disrupt cycles within nature that maintain healthy ecosystems and preserve the equilibrium of the carbon cycle. 

    CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are the reason that plant based eating has become so popular. This is due to the fact that CAFOs are enormously harmful to the environment. Although CAFOs are the primary source of meat in the US, it is unfair to say that meat is inherently bad for the environment. The way meat is grown, processed, and produced determines its level of sustainability. The meat itself is not the issue. Humans have been eating meat for thousands of years, but only recently have we encountered issues with its impact on the environment. This issue is particularly prevalent in the US, where meat consumption is extraordinarily high. Industrial production of animal products is the only way to keep up with the enormous demand. 

    According to the CDC, "A CAFO is a specific type of large-scale industrial agricultural facility that raises animals, usually at high-density, for the consumption of meat, eggs, or milk. To be considered a CAFO, a farm must first be categorized as an animal feeding operation (AFO). An AFO is a lot or facility where animals are kept confined and fed or maintained for 45 or more days per year, and crops, vegetation, or forage growth are not sustained over a normal growing period."

    Naturally, plants and animals grown together create a cycle that maintains a healthy ecosystem: plants provide food for animals, while animals excrete waste that fertilizes plants. Industrialized agriculture disconnects this cycle, which has many environmental consequences, explained below. 

 

Animal Waste

    In CAFOs, the high density of animals in a confined area means that massive amounts of animal waste is produced. This waste is dumped into "lagoons," or manmade ponds lined with clay. The waste is untreated, and often contains antibiotic residue and chemicals, which can leak through the clay coating of the lagoons and into the groundwater, eventually polluting bodies of water. This untreated waste from lagoons is also sprayed over fields, causing antibiotic residue and toxic chemicals to contaminate the soil and cause antibiotic resistance in many species. 

    Pasture raised animals maintain a natural cycle in which excreted waste fertilizes soil, which promotes healthy plant growth, and in turn provides food for the animals. 

 

Soil Health

    Simply put, healthy soil stores carbon and water, while disturbed, overtilled, nutrient-deficient soil releases carbon back into the atmosphere and increases water runoff. Chuck Wooster of Sunrise Farm described this beautifully in an interview with me, saying that "if you picture a really nice slice of bread, it kind of holds together, it's big, when you've got a lot of carbon in the soil it's kind of like that. It's got air, space, it holds water. If you took a piece of bread and just smashed it down into a teeny ball, that's like bad soil: it doesn't hold water, it doesn't hold carbon, there are no places for the roots." 

    No-till farming is a method of maintaining fields that can greatly improve soil health. Instead of tilling, or turning over the soil, the soil is left undisturbed, or a cover crop is planted, which "can be utilized for grazing beef cattle, controlling weed growth, reducing erosion, and enhancing soil organic matter." Beef cattle that graze on cover crops can help to maintain the cover crops, and therefore improve the overall health of pastures. 

 

Land Use

    One of the big arguments used to claim that eating meat is harmful to the environment is that it uses a significant amount of land. While this is true, it is not inherently bad for the environment. The concern should not be how much land is being used, but rather how it is being used. During my conversation with Chuck Wooster, he explained that when a farm shuts down, its land often turns into housing developments, which emit greenhouse gasses, create heat islands (areas with high amounts of dark pavement that absorb the sun's heat and increase the area's temperatures), and disrupt pre existing ecosystems. Farms that take care of their land benefit the surrounding ecosystems. Therefore, the focus should be shifted to ensuring that farms are using sustainable methods to preserve their land, instead minimizing land use by prioritizing industrial agriculture that pays no attention to using sustainable farming practices. 

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Eating Plants Sustainably 

 

    With all of this push towards plant based eating, the world has seemed to overlook the fact that industrially grown plants are incredibly harmful to the environment. Eating tofu or plant based meat products made of highly processed monocrops is certainly not the answer to mitigating climate change. However, just as correctly raised animals can benefit the environment, so can properly grown plants.

 

Monocrop Versus Regenerative Farming 

    With the onset of the Green Revolution, small farms began to be replaced by industrialized agriculture. These farms were designed to prioritize maximum agricultural production. Monocrop farming, use of pesticides and herbicides, genetically modified plant species, and mechanized farm equipment were all cornerstones of this effort. Although in the short term, these farming methods were successful, they have enormous environmental consequences. 

 

Biodiversity and Climate Change Resilience

    Monocropping, planting the same crop in the same soil every year, is a huge threat to biodiversity. When an entire farm produces a singular plant species, it is very susceptible to natural disasters and diseases. "In a biodiverse ecosystem, a threat to one crop may not be a threat to others. An infestation of stem borers can destroy summer squash but may leave eggplant untouched. An unexpected hail may crush corn and not bother beets." The Irish potato famine was a result of little species diversity. All of the potatoes were affected by a specific type of mold, and all of them could not be eaten. If there had been a variety of potatoes with different genes, some may have been resistant to the mold, and there wouldn't have been such devastation in Ireland. 

    Small farms that grow a variety of plant species have better resilience to climate change related natural disasters and diseases. 

 

Fertilizer, Pesticides, and Herbicides

    Monocrop and non-organic farms use many harmful pesticides and fertilizers, such as untreated animal waste and other pesticides that seep into groundwater, run into bodies of water, and cause algae blooms. 

Organic farms do not use harmful herbicides or pesticides, and thus prevent water contamination and support soil health. 

 

Soil Health

    Industrial agriculture is very harmful to soil health. This is caused by the over-tilling of soil (when soil is turned over every year to reduce weed growth), which disrupts the microbes and other organisms within the soil that improve soil and plant health. Unhealthy soil that is more susceptible to erosion, and thus, less susceptible to the increase in heavy rain due to climate change. Eroded soil also pollutes water, disrupting aquatic ecosystems. 

    No-till and organic farming methods greatly improve soil health, because the soil remains undisrupted, allowing healthy bacterial communities to survive. As local farmer Chuck Wooster puts it, "if you really don't take care of your soil, it loses its structure and then it washes away in the rain, or gets compacted so things can't live in it," and "the healthier [your soil] is, the more it's able to grow vegetables, for sure, but also withstand heavy rainfall and you can grow a lot more vegetables or trees or sheep per acre because the soil becomes more productive." No-till farmers often use cover crops in between growing seasons, which helps preserve the soil by restoring nutrients and preventing erosion. 

✦✦✦

    Eating sustainably is not as simple as the food industry had made it seem. Companies selling plant-based products have demonized all animal products. While industrially raised animals are incredibly harmful to soil health, water health, and emit significant amounts of greenhouse gasses, so do industrially grown plants. Sustainable eating is all about how food is grown. Unfortunately, shopping in grocery stores makes it difficult to know what products are truly sustainable. See my Food Label Guide for information on finding these products in grocery stores. If possible, sourcing food from CSAs, meat shares, and farmer's markets are wonderful ways to source food sustainably as well, because they allow you to truly know where your food is coming from. If you need some recipe recommendations, check out the ones I have created with sustainability in mind. Eating sustainably is a difficult task, and there is no perfect solution. But starting somewhere is better than doing nothing at all. 

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Bibliography

 

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (n.d.). Understanding concentrated animal feeding operations and their impact on communities. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved April 29, 2023, from https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/59792.

Raising animals in an industrial system. FoodPrint. (2020, December 10). Retrieved April 29, 2023, from https://foodprint.org/issues/raising-animals-industrial-system/.

What happens to animal waste? FoodPrint. (2021, September 15). Retrieved April 29, 2023, from https://foodprint.org/issues/what-happens-to-animal-waste/.

Ashley Broocks, Emily Andreini, Sara Place, and Megan Rolf. Tough Questions About Beef Sustainability: How Does Carbon Sequestration Affect the Sustainability of Beef? Beef Research. Retrieved April 29, 2023, from https://www.beefresearch.org/resources/beef-sustainability/fact-sheets/carbon-sequestration#:~:text=Beef%20cattle%20play%20an%20important,no%2Dtill%E2%80%9D%20cropping%20systems.

Foodrevolutionnetwork. (2022, March 17). Monocropping: A disastrous agricultural system. Food Revolution Network. Retrieved April 29, 2023, from https://foodrevolution.org/blog/monocropping-monoculture/#:~:text=Decreased%20Soil%20Biodiversity&text=Monocropping%20reduces%20organic%20matter%20in,humans%20who%20eat%20the%20plants.