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Nature as a Model: The Benefits of Pastured Cattle Farming
In Meditations with Cows, her new memoir about ranch life, Shreve Stockton explores the important role that ethically raised cattle can play in local ecosystems and our environment as a whole. Her narrative centers on Daisy, her first dairy cow, which she purchased while living on the 40-acre property of a cowboy named Mike with whom she had developed a relationship. This excerpt provides an intimate look at the differences between pastured animal farming and industrial livestock production. – Editor’s Note
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I never knew how special a blade of grass really was, before I got Daisy. She nibbled tender tendrils when the grass shot up the first warm week of spring. She wrapped her speckled tongue around the bouquets of rogue grass I pulled from my garden pathways. She lounged upon the cool cushion of pasture grass on hot midsummer days, chewing her cud. She figured out how to open the gate to Mike’s fenced yard and mowed the lawn with her mouth. Watching Daisy gobble great mouthfuls, munching in chlorophyllic ecstasy, made me look at the generic, green growth with new eyes. Turns out, it’s not so generic, after all.
Grasses grow in nearly every climate and terrain around the world. Native grasses are hardy, able to survive flooding and drought, and flourish in all manner of soils. They grow where crops cannot. While the leaves of grass feed numerous species, much of the magic of grass lies beneath the surface of the earth. Native grasses are perennials, which means they grow back year after year without having to be replanted. This longevity allows perennial grasses to expand their root systems over the course of years, decades, centuries. Roots of established perennial grasses can measure over ten feet in length. Their massive root networks serve to anchor the plant, and also anchor the soil, protecting it from erosion. This subterranean tangle of roots support mycorrhizae, fungi dancing in the dark, which have a symbiotic relationship with the root systems of many plants. Mycorrhizae deliver nutrients from the soil to plants in exchange for carbon, which plants draw out of the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Mycorrhizae use that carbon to produce a substance called glomalin, which coats and protects the intricate filaments of mycorrhizae called hyphae. Glomalin improves and stabilizes the structure of soil, making it more porous, allowing water to easily infiltrate the ground. This not only helps soils retain moisture to nourish the plants, but also prevents flooding during heavy rains or sudden snowmelt since carbon-rich soil can soak up water like a sponge.
Mycorrhizae are the unsung heroes of sequestering carbon in soil. In our quest to head off increased global warming, sequestering carbon – removing excess carbon from the atmosphere and stabilizing it elsewhere – is arguably as important as reducing fossil fuel emissions. By cooperating with the root systems of plants and producing glomalin, mycorrhizae secure harmful atmospheric carbon in the soil as stable organic matter. If undisturbed, that carbon can remain sequestered in the soil for thousands of years.
Cattle are demonized for destroying the environment through overgrazing and greenhouse gas emissions. But the truth is far more nuanced, and it’s imperative we understand the truth. Among all the food we eat, the carbon footprint of beef from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) is second only to that of lamb. The familiar statistics regarding the harmful environmental impacts of beef are based on beef from CAFOs, which currently makes up the vast majority of beef available on the market. These statistics are true, but cattle are not the culprit. The fault lies in how those cattle are fed and managed when they reach CAFOs. The method is the madness.
Cattle themselves are not inherently bad for the earth or the environment. On the contrary: by keeping cattle – and sheep, for that matter – exclusively on pasture and managing their grazing thoughtfully, these animals can be a formidable force in sequestering carbon and protecting us all from climate change. Beef from responsibly grazed cattle has been proven to have a net-negative carbon impact. That means cattle help sequester more carbon through grazing than the combined emissions of methane from their burps and the fossil fuels used in ranch work, butchery, and delivery. The stewards at White Oak Pastures in Georgia have determined that, pound for pound, their pastured beef has a carbon footprint 111 percent lower than CAFO beef and sequesters nearly twice the amount of carbon than that released in the production of soy. Bovines are one of the most promising and effective allies we have to help heal the devastating mistakes we’ve made since the dawn of the industrial age.
Mike and I leased a pasture that had previously been used solely for hay crops. Grazing animals were never kept on this particular pasture. The landowner grew a mix of grass and alfalfa, which he treated with synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, and when it was tall enough, he cut and baled it. It was an adequate pasture. When we took over the lease, we asked that the fertilizer and pesticide regimen no longer be used, and we trailed some of our cattle to the pasture to graze it for the summer and fall. When it snowed, we fed hay in the pasture, unrolling giant round bales in a stripe down the length of the pasture. Each day, we unrolled hay just to the left of where we’d fed the previous day, eventually crossing the pasture lengthwise before we brought the cows home to calve. The next spring, the pasture grew in thicker than it had the year before, the grass and alfalfa a deep emerald green. The year after that, the soil was nearly impossible to see when we walked the pasture. Grass had filled in the bare patches and reached our thighs, and the earth was spongy beneath our feet. This improvement in the land – in the soil and the amount of water it held, in the flourishing growth of the grass – didn’t take place because Mike and I are particularly special. It happened naturally, because that’s how nature works when it’s allowed to.
Grazing animals and plants and the universe of microscopic life beneath the surface of the soil coexist in harmony, give unto each other, receive from one another, and in this relationship, each part becomes stronger and healthier. The whole becomes stronger and healthier. As they grazed, our cattle dispersed their natural fertilizer evenly across the pasture in the form of their manure. They trampled old plant matter into mulch, which protected the surface of the soil, slowing the evaporation of moisture, and composted over the seasons, further fortifying the soil. The surface area of Daisy’s four hooves- where her mass meets the ground – is nearly identical to the surface area of my two feet, and she weighs ten times as much as I do. All that weight, distributed onto four cloven hooves, works to aerate the soil and tamp grass seeds into the earth. The very act of grazing stimulated the grass to grow, just as mowing a lawn will do, which made the pasture more productive and resistant to weeds.
After three years, the pasture was so lush, the landowner kicked us off because he wanted the hay crop. We watched from afar as the pasture declined in the years to come, after cattle were removed from that patch of land. Without grazing animals depositing dynamic, bioavailable fertilizer and controlling weeds by eating them before they went to seed; without their hooves aerating the soil; without the light mulch of hay left over from feeding cattle across the pasture in the winter, the vitality of the living organism of the pasture itself deteriorated. Without cattle on the land, returning nutrients to the soil with their manure, the landowner had to resume his use of synthetic fertilizer and pesticides, which degraded the soil ecology, and both the vibrancy and the yield of the pasture steadily declined.
We all know that animals eat plants. But what many people don’t realize – I didn’t, myself, until I was in my thirties – is that plants eat animals. Plants need more than sunlight and water – they also need food, nutrients to survive and thrive, and animals provide these nutrients to plants with their manure, their blood, their bones. Cover crops, compost, and worm castings also supply nutrients to the soil, but in modern agriculture, the most widely used method for providing nutrients to plants is through synthetic fertilizers.
Creating synthetic fertilizers begins with mining for minerals and drilling for natural gas. The measures involved in extracting and processing phosphate and natural gas make synthetic fertilizers one of the biggest contributors to the carbon footprint of food. Industrially farmed monocrops – enormous swaths of land planted in a single crop – depend on synthetic fertilizers to return nutrients to the soil to feed the plants. In the United States, the vast majority of corn, soybeans, nut trees, fruit trees, and grains are farmed as monocrops.
Just as there is a chain of interlinking actions and reactions between grazing animals, grasses, mycorrhizae, soil, and water, the use of synthetic fertilizers sets off an equally impactful, yet significantly different, chain of events. Synthetic fertilizers flood the soil with nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium – the macronutrients plants need to grow. Plants absorb these nutrients directly from their roots and abandon their relationship with mycorrhizae. No longer receiving carbon from the plants in exchange for nutrients from the soil, the mycorrhizae suffer, cease weaving their glomalin-wrapped webs of hyphae. Without glomalin aggregating the soil, the soil becomes compacted, losing its capacity to absorb water. This leaves the land vulnerable to flooding, and more irrigation from rivers and aquifers is required to water the plants. Irrigation from aquifers deposits mineral salts into the soil; when they accumulate, the soil becomes too saline to grow crops. And without their relationship with mycorrhizae, plants do not receive micronutrients not present in synthetic fertilizers. Nutrients not available to the plant means nutrients not present on our plates.
Annual crops, such as corn and soy, must be planted every year. Annual monocrops require herbicides to kill competitive plants when the crops are young, and enormous swaths of land planted with a single crop are particularly vulnerable to damage from insects, requiring insecticides. Pesticides – herbicides and insecticides – are made from petroleum. And while perennial pastures are covered in grasses year-round, monocropped fields leave the earth bare for months out of the year. Even when crops are in the ground, naked earth surrounds each plant in a monocropped field, each tree in a monocropped orchard. It takes effort, be it mechanical or chemical, to keep plants from growing in bare earth. The soil wants to hold and be held by roots.
Without these roots, wind and water carry away the topsoil. Topsoil, essential for growing crops, is being lost at an alarming rate from tilling and erosion. The topsoil beneath the prairie grasslands that once covered the Midwest was six feet deep when European colonizers took control of the land. Scientists estimate that, at the current rate of erosion, our topsoil could be completely gone in sixty years. Laden with synthetic chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides, the runoff from monocropped fields pollutes waterways and has formed a dead zone larger than Rhode Island at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Rates of cancer soar along its banks. Honeybees and pollinators die en masse from exposure to pesticides, while the insects that threaten crops develop resistance to these poisons. Phosphate mines in Florida are surrounded by man-made mountains of radioactive waste material – a by-product of the manufacture of phosphorous fertilizer – for there is no way to dispose of it safely. Twice, sinkholes have funneled this waste into the aquifer that provides drinking water into neighboring communities. Fracking for natural gas, the base of nitrogen fertilizer, has been shown to pollute groundwater supplies and leave surrounding areas prone to earthquakes. Debates rage over drilling in the Arctic and in national monuments. Pipelines expand. The earth heats up. Biotech companies scramble to develop and patent drought-tolerant crop varieties as climate change threatens current yields.
When I rode my Vespa across the country, I took secondary highways across Iowa – long, flat, perfectly straight roads that cut through monocrops of corn extending to every horizon. That leg of my ride was distinct in its monotony. I remember how eerie it felt to be surrounded by plants – stalks of corn in orderly rows like soldiers – yet nothing felt alive. As I held a steady line between the cornfields, I noticed an absence of birds, no cottontails scampering across the road ahead of me, no butterflies flirting in the air around me. It was the only stretch of my six-thousand-mile ride where I didn’t see roadkill. I never enjoyed riding past animals that had been hit on the road, and sent out a telepathic prayer whenever I did. But the total absence of roadkill brought a greater sorrow – it was visceral proof that no wildlife survived in this land of monocrops, a graveyard to everything but corn.
Can we really use the term agriculture when it comes to monocrops? “Agribusiness,” certainly. “Agrinsanity”? I think so. But it’s not agriculture. A culture is defined as a symbiotic living system, derived from the Latin colere, which means to tend to the earth and is linked to the concept of nurturing, of actively fostering growth. Monocrops are not ecosystems. Very little but the intended crop survives on monocropped land. Incapable of supporting a multitude of healthy relationships – from the microorganisms in the soil to the atmosphere of the planet – monocrops depend on extraction, require destruction in order to exist.
Monocropped corn and soy are cheap to buy. They are easy to store and ship. And so, industrial agriculture takes animals off the land and confines them in CAFOs where they are fed that corn and soy. Early in my cross-country Vespa trip, I rode past a cattle CAFO in the Central Valley of California. An unbearable stench nearly knocked me off my scooter as I approached the tragic wasteland. I accelerated as fast as I dared and took short, shallow breaths as I zoomed past; the olfactory assault a marker, escapable only by distance, of the misguided mismanagement inherent to this system. Pastures of grazing cattle don’t stink. Manure is dispersed by the cattle and immediately begins to decompose with the help of beetles, earthworms, and microorganisms in the soil. But instead of being integrated into a holistic ecosystem as a beneficial resource that fertilizes the soil, the manure of animals in CAFOs piles up or is held in gigantic manure lagoons, off-gassing methane as it sits. In the United States, methane emissions from “manure management” have risen nearly 70 percent since 1990, while emissions from enteric methane (bovine burps) have increased by just 8 percent. Grazing and foraging animals don’t create manure management problems – CAFOs do. CAFO manure repositories emit other toxic pollutants – ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, particulates carried on the breeze – which directly impact neighboring communities. Reports commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show “repeated exposure to CAFO emissions can increase the likelihood of respiratory diseases,” particularly in children.
Enteric methane – the methane emissions for which cattle are responsible – is the result of grasses biodegrading through a microbial process in the animal’s rumen. If the same grass were to remain uneaten, a similar amount of methane would be released when that grass decomposed in anaerobic conditions without the cow, as in wetlands. Enteric methane from cattle – from all ruminants – is simply part of the natural carbon cycle. And unlike carbon dioxide emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere where they can remain for thousands of years, atmospheric methane only lasts for twelve years. If the cattle population remains stable over decades or centuries, the amount of methane in the atmosphere from enteric emissions also remains stable – to put it very simply, as new methane is added, old methane is dispersing. Enteric methane emissions in the United States have remained notably steady for the past thirty years, corresponding with the stability of the cattle population. I’d venture to guess our enteric methane emissions are not much higher than they were for this region five hundred years ago. Before European settlers massacred the buffalo population to near extinction and wiped out much of the elk, it’s estimated that as many as seventy million large ruminants roamed what is now the continental United States. Today, our cattle population is around ninety million, and nearly half that number are calves. Meanwhile, atmospheric methane levels have risen sharply since 2008. Blaming global warming on enteric methane emissions from cattle is not only incorrect and misguided, it is dangerous. Doing so deflects attention from the actual causes of increased atmospheric methane, and shifts the blame from where it truly lies.
In 2008, journalist Michael Pollan warned that our conventional food system couldn’t last. He predicted the price of fossil fuels would rise enough to render our current model of industrialized agriculture economically unfeasible. Turns out, the disaster we’re facing isn’t the price of fuel, but the effects of unhindered extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. While I understand a personal choice to not eat meat, I don’t understand those who disbelieve in ethical animal agriculture. It is in our collective best interests to shatter the myth that animal agriculture is inherently bad for the planet and growing crops is inherently good. One cannot oppose animal agriculture and also oppose pipelines, fracking, and the expansion of fossil fuel extraction. The soil must be replenished with nutrients in order for plants to grow, and this can come through keeping animals on the land or through the use of synthetic fertilizers. One or the other is required to feed plants on a large scale. The most expedient way to fertilize great expanses of land while decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels is to integrate animals onto the land, to allow them to fertilize it themselves, and to recognize that we need animals to help us if we are to minimize the carbon footprint of our food.
Just as cattle are not inherently bad for the environment, corn and soybeans and almond trees are not inherently harmful, either. It’s the way in which they are grown that determines their impact. A mycelial network of stewards across the country are farming and ranching – often, integrating both – using sustainable and regenerative techniques, their methods as individual as each plot of land, each microclimate, each budget. What they all have in common is a commitment to nurturing the health and longevity of the Earth and her resources, recognizing their roles as partners with the land and water, the plants and animals, the soil and mycorrhizae, as they provide food for their communities.
When we think about restructuring our agricultural systems, as we must, we can look to nature as a model. Nature is an exquisite demonstration of cooperation at the micro and macro levels – incalculable species working together for the health and prosperity of the whole. In the summer, I watch the sun rise over the pond below Mike’s house. The pond is home to frogs, who serenade us at night. A blue heron arrives each morning and wades in the shallows at the edge of the pond. Beak flashing in the sun, the heron strikes through the surface of the water, spearing frogs for breakfast. I love the frogs, and I love the heron. If you had to choose, would you choose the frog’s life, or the heron’s? Watching nature shows as a kid, I never could pick a side – as soon as I began rooting, in my mind and heart, for the antelope, I knew I was cursing the lion. And so I’d switch my allegiance to the lion and, in the next moment, realizing this meant death for the antelope, switch back. I wanted both to win, I wanted both to survive. And the thing that seems challenging for many of us to realize and accept is that when nature is in balance, both the antelope and the lion do win. They survive, overall, in perpetuity, precisely because individuals do not. Nature isn’t personal.
A neighbor’s cow died in a remote area of the BLM where I hike. Her body was left where it lay, and I watched her become part of the land. Coyotes and golden eagles ate her flesh. Her bones bleached out from sun and time. Two years after she died, a luminous sweep of dense, lush grass stopped me in my tracks. The circle of emerald filled a radius of several feet from where her body had lain. Her skull was barely visible in the tall, thick grass. The vitality of the decadent growth, nature’s shrine to the cow, glowed in startling contrast to the patchy, sparsely vegetated high-desert landscape of the BLM. Plants want our bodies. They want our blood and bones. And this is far from gruesome – it’s the truest beauty, the circle and cycle of life. Perhaps it’s the very meaning of life: to live in a way that enhances lives beyond our own, and to contribute to life even after we die.
If the human experiment is to succeed, we must watch and learn. Nature gives us a master class: billions of years of practical experience to our ten thousand years of agriculture and seventy years of industrial agriculture. Nature shows us that strength is found through cooperation. That success is achieved through a network of supporting relationships. Nature shows us that death is unavoidable, but that death can, and should, nourish life. Nature shows us that nothing exists in a vacuum, that every action has a reaction. And that every single one of us – a fraction of a billionth of the population – has power and our actions matter, our choices matter.
Reprinted from: “Chapter 5: Nature as a Model” from MEDITATIONS WITH COWS: What I’ve Learned from Daisy, the Dairy Cow Who Changed My Life by Shreve Stockton, copyright© 2020 by Shreve Stockton. Used by permission of Tarcher, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Shreve Stockton is an award-winning photographer and author of Eating Gluten Free; The Daily Coyote, a memoir of raising an orphaned coyote; and The Daily Coyote: Ten Years in Photographs. She is the founder of Star Brand Beef, devoted to prioritizing the humane treatment of animals and ethical stewardship of the land. Shreve lives in Wyoming with her Farmily – cows, bulls, cats, dogs, horses, honeybees, chickens, a coyote, and a cowboy. She can be found online at shrevestockton.com.
Published in the Price-Pottenger Journal of Health & Healing
Fall 2021 | Volume 45, Number 3
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