The Environment and Free-Range, Organic, and Local Meat

The Environment and Free-Range, Organic, and Local Meat Meat and other animal products are a serious environmental issue, leading the Atlantic chapter of the Sierra Club to call animal products, a Hummer on a plate. However, free-range, organic, or local meats are not the solution. Free-Range, Cage-Free, Pasture-Raised Meat, Eggs, and Dairy Factory farmers are not animal-hating sadists who confine the animals for fun. Factory farming started because scientists in the 1960s were looking for a way to meet the meat demands of an exploding human population. The only way the U.S. can feed animal products to hundreds of millions of people is to grow grain as an intense monoculture, turn that grain into animal feed, and then give that feed to intensively confined animals. There isn’t enough available land on earth to raise all livestock free-range or cage-free. The United Nations reports that livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land used to produce feed for livestock. Free-range, pasture-fed animals would require even more land on which to feed. They require even more food and water than factory farmed animals, because they are exercising more. To meet the increasing demand for grass-fed beef, South American rainforests are being cleared to produce more pasture for organic, grass-fed beef to be exported. Only 3 percent of the beef produced in the U.S. is grass-fed, and already, thousands of wild horses are displaced by this relatively small number of cattle. The U.S. alone has 94.5 million beef cattle. One farmer estimates that it takes 2.5 to 35 acres of pasture, depending on the quality of the pasture, to raise a grass-fed cow. Using the more conservative figure of 2.5 acres of pasture, this means we need approximately 250 million acres to create grazing pastures for every cow in the U.S. Thats over 390,000 square miles, which is more than 10 percent of all the land in the U.S. Organic Meat Raising animals organically does not reduce the amount of food or water required to produce meat, and the animals will produce just as much waste. Under the National Organic Program administered by the USDA, organic certification for animal products has certain minimum care requirements under 7 C.F.R. 205, such as access to the outdoors, shade, shelter, exercise areas, fresh air, and direct sunlight (7 C.F.R. 205.239). Manure must also be managed in a manner that does not contribute to contamination of crops, soil, or water by plant nutrients, heavy metals, or pathogenic organisms and optimizes recycling of nutrients (7. C.F.R. 205.203) Organic livestock must also be fed organically produced feed and cannot be given growth hormones (7 C.F.R. 205.237). While organic meat does offer some environmental and health benefits over factory farming in terms of residue, waste management, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, the livestock do not consume less resources or produce less manure. Animals raised organically are still slaughtered, and organic meat is just as wasteful, if not more wasteful, than factory farmed meat. Local Meat We hear that one way to be eco-friendly is to eat locally, to reduce the amount of resources required to deliver food to our table. Locavores strive to build their diet around food produced within a certain distance from their home. While eating locally might reduce your impact on the environment, the reduction is not as great as some might believe and other factors are more important. According to CNN, an Oxfam report titled, Fair Miles - Recharting the Food Miles Map, found that the way in which food is produced is more important than how far that food is transported. The amount of energy, fertilizer, and other resources used on the farm may have more environmental significance than the transportation of the final product. Food miles are not always a good yardstick. Buying from a small, local conventional farm may have a greater carbon footprint than buying from a large, organic farm thousands of miles away. Organic or not, the larger farm also has the economy of scale on its side. And as a 2008 article in The Guardian points out, buying fresh produce from halfway around the world has a lower carbon footprint than buying local apples out of season that have been in cold storage for ten months. In The Locavore Myth, James E. McWilliams writes: One analysis, by Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, showed that transportation accounts for only 11% of foods carbon footprint. A fourth of the energy required to produce food is expended in the consumers kitchen. Still more energy is consumed per meal in a restaurant, since restaurants throw away most of their leftovers... The average American eats 273 pounds of meat a year. Give up red meat once a week and youll save as much energy as if the only food miles in your diet were the distance to the nearest truck farmer. If you want to make a statement, ride your bike to the farmers market. If you want to reduce greenhouse gases, become a vegetarian. While buying locally produced meat will reduce the amount of fuel needed to transport your food, it does not change the fact that animal agriculture requires an inordinate amount of resources and produces a great deal of waste and pollution. Tara Garnett of the Food Climate Research Network stated: There is only one way of being sure that you cut down on your carbon emissions when buying food: stop eating meat, milk, butter and cheese... These come from ruminants- sheep and cattle- that produce a great deal of harmful methane. In other words, it is not the source of the food that matters but the kind of food you eat. All things being equal, eating locally is better than eating food that has to be transported thousands of miles, but the environmental advantages of locavorism pale in comparison with those of going vegan. Lastly, one can choose to be an organic, vegan locavore to reap the environmental benefits of all three concepts. They are not mutually exclusive.