Eliot Coleman: Irresponsible Farming Is the Problem, Not the Meat
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Recently, Chelsea Green, partnering with YourDailyThread, launched a Web campaign urging readers to go “Meatless in May.” The post drew the following response from Chelsea Green author Eliot Coleman.
Dear Chelsea Green,
I am dismayed that my publishers have been so easily fooled on the meat and CO2 issue. Ever since I read the UN report condemning meat eating vis a vis CO2, I have been puzzled by their conclusion. The culprit is not meat eating but rather the excesses of corporate industrial agriculture. The UN report shows either great ignorance of that fact or possibly the influence of the fossil fuel lobby with intent of confusing the public. It is obviously to someone’s benefit to make meat eating and livestock raising an easily attacked straw man (with the enthusiastic help of vegetarian groups) in order to cover up the singular contribution of the only new sources of carbon—burning the stored carbon in fossil fuels and to a very small extent making cement (both of which release carbon from long term storage)—as the reason for increased CO2 in the modern era. (Just for ridiculous comparison, human beings, each exhaling about 1kg of CO2 per day, are responsible for 33% more CO2 per year than fossil fuel transportation. Maybe we should get rid of us.)
If I butcher a steer for my food, and that steer has been raised on grass on my farm, I am not responsible for any increased CO2. The pasture-raised animal eating grass in my field is NOT producing CO2, merely recycling it (short term carbon cycle) as grazing animals have since they evolved. Hell, there were over 60 million buffalo in North America before the first European arrived not to mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain lions, etc. It is not meat eating that is responsible for increased CO2; it is the corn/ soybean/ feedlot/ transportation system under which industrial animals are raised. When I think about the challenge of feeding northern New England, where I live, from our own resources, I cannot imagine being able to do that successfully without ruminant livestock able to convert the grasses into food. It would not be either easy or wise to grow arable crops on the stony and/or sloped land that has served us for so long as productive pasture. By comparison with my grass fed steer, the soybeans cultivated for a vegetarian’s dinner, if done with motorized equipment, are responsible for increased CO2.
But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess flatulence is also a function of the unnatural feedlot diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural diet were a problem then those 60 million buffalo and their friends would have caused heat to be trapped hundreds of years ago. Or could there be other contributing factors today, factors that change natural processes, which are not being taken into account? Could not the artificial nitrogen fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure? Might not the increased use of phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have modified digestibility? I am just speculating here but the fact is clear. It is not the livestock; it is the way they are raised. But what about clearing the Brazilian rain forest? Well, the bulk of that is for soybeans and if we stopped feeding grain to cattle much of the acreage presently growing grain in the Midwest could become pasture again and we wouldn’t need Brazilian land. (US livestock presently consume 5 times as much grain as the US population does directly.) And long term pasture, like the Great Plains once was, stores an enormous amount of carbon in the soil. But what about the increased demand for meat causing there to be far more livestock on the planet than ever before? Again that is not the animals’ fault but rather the problem of human population explosion. But even then, if the animals were grass fed, they would just be recycling not producing CO2.
If those people concerned about rising levels of CO2, instead of condemning meat eating, were condemning the enormous output of CO2 due to fossil fuel use by a greedy and biologically irresponsible agriculture, I would cheer that as a truthful statement even if they weren’t perceptive enough to continue on and mention that the only “new” carbon, the carbon that is responsible for rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere, is not biogenic from livestock but rather anthropogenic from our releasing the carbon in long term storage (coal, oil, natural gas.) . Would we even be having this discussion if humans were not burning fossil fuels? Targeting livestock as a smoke screen in the climate change controversy is a very mistaken path to take since it results in hiding our inability to deal with the real causes. When people are fooled into ignorantly condemning the straw man of meat eating, who I suspect has been set up for them by the fossil fuel industry, I am appalled by how easily human beings allow themselves to be deluded by their corporate masters.
Sincerely,
Eliot Coleman
Harborside, Maine
May 4, 2009
May 5th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Eliot Coleman is partly convincing here but not entirely so. First of all, the previous post that Coleman is complaining about does specifically say “So, in the interest of raising awareness about the huge impact the industrialized meat production has on our health and environment, we’ve decided to put our veggies where our mouth is and cut industrialized meat out of our collective diet for the month of May.” [emphasis added] So while it’s almost always a good idea to provide more information and explain the nuances of reality instead of glossing over the details, I don’t think it’s fair of Coleman to say that his publishers were duped on the issue. Maybe they were. It’s just that the evidence isn’t there to know one way or the other. Since jsmcdougall’s original post only really says to cut out “industrialized meat” and since Coleman also seems to be arguing against the eating of industrialized meat, it sounds like they are in more agreement than maybe they realize.
It is great to see Coleman lay out an explanation of the difference between pastured beef and grain fed beef, so we can see why the pastured beef isn’t necessarily contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, or only slightly so (as a net measurement of the lifecycle results) whereas grain-fed beef is.
But still — how many people actually have access to 100% pasture and grass fed beef? What fraction of beef sold in the US fits that bill? The statistics I found probably aren’t definitive, and are a little out of date, but this report from the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service says that 5% of the US market for meat, in 2006, was for “pasture-finished, natural, or organic” products. It also says that “demand … outstrips supply in most U.S. markets” for these meats. And that 5% figure is too generous by definition, since animals that are slaughtered and whose meat is sold as “natural” usually are fed grain at least for the last 6 or more months of their lives (at least for beef cattle; I don’t know about other meats). I’m not sure what the rules are for “organic” meat, whether it must be totally pasture and grass fed or not.
Anyhow, whatever the exact numbers, the total amount of climate-friendly meat available to American eaters is clearly pretty small relatively speaking. So even if people ignore what jsmcdougall said about avoiding “industrial meat” in May and avoid all meat for the month, the vast majority of what they’ll be avoiding, de facto, will be the same “irresponsible farming” meat that Coleman decries. In other words, given the availability of pastured meats at the current time, the average American can do more to protect the atmosphere by eating (more) vegetarian than by trying to buy the pastured meats that are already selling out at demand>supply prices.
In the longer term, Coleman sounds right that vegetarianism isn’t necessary to have a climate-friendly diet. But that depends on the availability of “responsibly farmed” meats that don’t entail the industrial, chemical-intensive production of commodity grains. But converting America’s meat industry to all-pasture and grass will take longer than one month, and the occasional boycott of meat might in fact be a great tool for grassroots food/environment activism that helps push it in that direction. On the one hand, responsible pasture farmers might suffer a little bit of collateral damage from a temporary meat boycott. On the other hand, to the extent that it helps raise the issue of meat production as an issue that people are concerned about, those responsible farmers could well be better off (and more numerous) as time wears on since they’ll be in a position to explain just why their product is different and better.
May 12th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
“how many people actually have access to 100% pasture and grass fed beef? What fraction of beef sold in the US fits that bill?”
That’s one of the points we need to understand. We need to switch to getting our meat from farmers like Coleman. Meat can be raised as part of a farm ecosystem that reuses everything from the cow manure to the chicken droppings to the plant cuttings. That’s how it was done for millennia till after WWII when ammunition plants were converted to fertilizer plants Feed lots came about due to Nixon’s changing our farm insurance program to one of farm subsidizes.
What we “save” in $$ with factory farming, costs us more in environmental and health damage. We end up paying for damage factory farms create so the corporations that own them can maximize their profits by off loading costs.
And, just as important, we have no right to treat other beings with behavior that’s tantamount to torture. Every living creature (except maybe the mosquito :) deserves respect and a good, happy life as defined by their own standards.
May 13th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Eliot Coleman’s meat is OK, everyone else’s is bad.
There is no way that everyone can eat as much meat as they do today without the intensive methods and rainforest clearing that is the problem. Up in Maine, Coleman can graze his steer on grass because the forest clearance was already done. How many acres are necessary to support that steer (including hay and/or other feed in the winter)? Multiply that by a few billion, and the absurdity and selfishness of his argument is clear.
May 14th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Irresponsible Farming is the problem and so is the meat and so are the humans, and so on.
Cattle raised on pasture produce more methane than feedlot animals, on a per-cow basis. The land on which the animals graze still must often be irrigated, using up our dwindling water resources. Cattle raised on pasture actually produce more methane than feedlot animals. Plus there is a tremendous toll grazing cattle takes on the land itself. Eating meat creates a demand, which causes an environmental impact, polluted water, eroded topsoil, displacing wildlife, and destroying vegetation.
Also, “there is some evidence to suggest that the human digestive system was not designed for meat consumption and processing, which could help explain why there is such high incidence of heart disease, hypertension, and colon and other cancers.” - http://www.emagazine.com/view/?142
“I think the evidence is pretty clear. If you look at various characteristics of carnivores versus herbivores, it doesn’t take a genius to see where humans line up,” says Roberts, editor in chief of The American Journal of Cardiology and medical director of the Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute at Baylor University Medical Center - http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Body+of+evidence:+were+humans+meant+to+eat+meat%3F-a082352627
Cutting back on meat will be extremely helpful in protecting our environment and your health, and so is cutting back on soy and procreation. Any life doesn’t deserve to be born only for the main purpose of being eaten.
Eat locally and organic! Plant your own garden. Even if you have an apartment - plant some herbs and lettuce in doors. There are so many options to have a lighter impact on the environment.
http://www.healthyat100.org/display.asp?catid=3&pageid=11
May 14th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
People scarfing down a Western Diet consisting of 12 or more ounces of meat/DAY when 12oz a WEEK of (real) meat is what our body arguably requires, as opposed to the nutritionalized food-like material passed off as meat or in Tyson’s terms, “protein” is A HUGE part of the problem….
Encouraged and marketed and sold by agri-business and HEAVILY funded by our gov’t with their huge subsidies of garbage corn/soy which is fed to these poor animals and along with all the meds needed to keep them standing up long enough to kill, ends up in the guts of increasingly fat and sick Westerners, along with all the by-product hfcs they can eat.
We are what we eat and we are what we eat eats too.
Mr. Coleman is right.
Somewhere along the line we need to relearn the concept of quality over quantity.
I won’t hold my breath.
May 14th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Mr. Coleman is right. It’s true that grass-fed beef has a lower carbon footprint than factory-farmed meat.
But what he does not address is the fact that without factory farming, there will not be enough meat to feed our population in the manner to which it has become accustomed. That does not mean that I agree with our current eating habits. We’d have healthier bodies, healthier ecosystems, and a more humane relationship with animals if we would consider meat as a garnish or a special treat rather than as a staple of our diets. Right now consumers are living “high off the hog” whilst sweeping under the carpet the horrible realities of the meat industry, and their complicity the dark practices it involves.
May 28th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I apologize for this late comment, but on catching up here I could not leave unanswered LennyP’s statement, in defense of Mr. Coleman’s beef, that “Every living creature … deserves respect and a good, happy life as defined by their own standards.”
The standards of a cow are to have its life brutally cut short so that Eliot Coleman can enjoy a “steak”?!
If you recognize that animals have a right to avoid the imperative of factory farming, then you must also recognize that animals have a right to avoid the imperative of being kept in any manner just to be eaten by humans.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Thank you, Eliot Coleman, for an excellent letter! To anyone (Mr. Coleman included) who wants to read a fantastic book that explores these issues deeply and beautifully, I heartily recommend Lierre Keith’s just published The Vegetarian Myth. Keith, a former vegan of twenty or so years, ultimately had to admit to herself that she had ruined her body in pursuit of noble goals based on fundamentally flawed information and analysis. She lays out in detail what Mr. Coleman alludes to briefly in this letter, namely that pasture-fed ruminants, wild or domesticated, help build topsoil while providing extremely healthy food for humans. Conversely, grain and soy are almost exclusively produced in a manner that is grossly destructive of topsoil and biodiversity, while also being very fossil fuel intensive. It should be clear that Ms. Keith, like Mr. Coleman, like me, values sustainability, justice, and biodiversity to the utmost, as do so many vegans and vegetarians. It is a question of analysis and biology.
I’m glad to see that the responses to Mr. Coleman’s letter are mostly favorable. Those that are not fall into two predictable, and equally problematic, categories. The first is that ethical and sustainable practices are an elite luxury and cannot support the present human population. The second is that it is inherently cruel and/or unsustainable to eat meat (or, in the less extreme version, to eat more than a little meat).
The first critique is true insofar as it goes. It contains a dangerous premise, though, namely that the present human population is desirable or sustainable under any conditions. It should be clear that even if we all changed our habits enormously, gave up on industrial technology and fossil fuels, and so on, the remaining global topsoil, fresh water, biodiversity, and so on cannot support six-seven billion people in the long term. It probably cannot sustain even one billion humans living responsibly without sustaining further damage. We are catastrophically far into population overshoot, and the population will be coming down sharply, like it or not. Since the alternatives to family planning are decidedly less savory (war, genocide, famine, plague, toxification), we ought to be talking far more seriously about sharply limiting procreation than almost anyone currently is (meanwhile, my “green” liberal friends continue to pop ‘em out). To continue practices of industrial agriculture (including but not limited to industrial meat production) to support a grossly unsustainable human population will only further ravage the planet and leave it all the more uninhabitable for future generations of humans and non-humans.
The second critique does not even hold up logically if one sets aside its faulty premises. It is merely an article of faith, and it is not surprising that Eric, the proponent of this critique, launches immediately into a vitriolic, ad hominem attack on Mr. Coleman, a common tactic among true believers. It is demonstrably true that rotational grazing of ruminant animals and birds on pasture land can build up topsoil as rapidly as one inch per year (hundreds of times faster than an intact forest–though this does not mean it is more desirable than intact forests–it simply sequesters the carbon and nitrogen as topsoil rather than as trees–intact forests are also absolutely necessary, and we should note that Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm, the guru of rotational grazing, has restored 4/5’s of his land to forest), while raising grain and soy under any circumstances, let alone those of industrial agriculture (including industrial scale “organics”) demonstrably draws down topsoil and aquifers, and does so dramatically. The fact that nearly all grain and soy consumed in the US comes from the Great Plains should not be lost on the vegans and vegetarians (or omnivores, of course!) of New England, particularly those who eschew eating pasture raised meat, dairy, and eggs from their neighbors. And that soy and grain did not wind up in your local Hannaford (or its dumpster) by flying in a bee-line. The fifteen hundred or so miles to the farm says nothing about the meandering route to storage facilities, processing centers, distribution centers, and so on, ultimately probably doubling or tripling the milage, most of it on trucks (which don’t run on fairy dust). The argument also ignores our physiology and our evolutionary history. Our teeth, our intestines, and our brains are uniquely adapted for, and require for proper development and functioning, a diet high in flesh, fat soluble vitamins, cholesterol, and saturated fat. If you don’t like it, too bad; that’s who we are. Your brain and the rest of your nervous system is largely made of saturated fat and cholesterol, neither of which your body can synthesize (unlike glucose, which it synthesizes readily… from saturated fat). This is why several vegan parents have been rightly convicted of manslaughter when their babies died of acute malnourishment. How many others survive, but do so in hideously malnourished and maldeveloped form? Now, to address the issue of cruelty, I think indigenous people would likely take issue with the notion that it is inherently cruel to kill in order to eat, given that every living creature does it, and all carnivores, including humans (and including every indigenous culture) kill animals (or scavenge those killed by others). Are we to assume that a parsnip values its life less than a clam, a soy plant less than a chicken? Are we to assume that apple trees care less for their babies (seeds) than sheep care for lambs? Vegetarians and vegans tragically fall into one of the classic pathologies of civilization: anthropocentrism. A central tenet of anthropocentrism is that the life of a being matters in direct proportion to how much it resembles a human. But veganism and vegetarianism do not forgo death, of course, and nor do they forgo the deaths of animals. To give one example, clearing land for agriculture is biocide in the most extreme form, while pasture land retains a polyculture of perennial plants and habitat for innumerable species, mostly wild. To give another example, tilling absolutely massacres burrowing animals (who begin re-establishing in the cleared land after each catastrophe), such that vultures often fly behind tractors. Taste the blood on that tofu? Perhaps it complements the petroleum. Death is a fact of life, and without death there can be no life. The goal of an ethical being cannot be to eliminate death, which is a radical denial of life. The goal of each being, notably humans in this case, must be to take responsibility for how our prey (animals, plants, fungus, bacteria, etc.) die. In the case of domestication, we must also take responsibility for how they live. We must not kill wantonly. No wild animal killed wantonly, including wild humans. Wanton killing is a civilized crime. Sadly, it is one in which vegans and vegetarians are unwittingly complicit, though as with most civilized crimes, particularly in the industrial era, we perpetrators are so alienated from our victims that we do not even admit they exist, let alone that they suffer and die. When we kill a chanterelle, a salmon, a calf, an apple seed, a carrot, or a lobster, it is our duty to give profound thanks to the being whose life is ending so that we may eat and live, and it is our duty to protect and defend the others of its community. It is our duty to protect the community of life. Duh. That is where we go so hideously wrong as a culture, not by eating steak instead of a potato. Oh, and regarding the version of this argument that we should eat very little meat, I can only wonder why indigenous people eat so much of it, and exhibit such phenomenal health (see: http://www.westonaprice.org/traditional_diets/native_americans.html). For the flexitarians, please make sure that you are getting your non-meat foods as ethically and sustainably as your meats!
Thanks Mr. Coleman.
Cheers,
David
November 4th, 2009 at 2:22 am
[…] Week’s Popular News Eliot Coleman: Irresponsible Farming Is the Problem, Not the Meat Richard Wiswall: GMOs Are A Dark Cloud For Organic Farmers 700 French Men and Women Pose Nude to […]
November 6th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
In this article, Coleman’s main argument is that the environmental debate’s recent focus on meat is a red herring introduced by the vested interests of fossil fuel corporations. He believes red meat, and cattle especially, is being used as a scapegoat to distract people from what he believes to be the actual cause; corporate industrial agriculture and the release of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Coleman tries to encourage people to opt for organic pasture fed beef and to instead shift the blame of global warming to large scale corporations in agribusiness and anthropogenic carbon production.
With the recent urgency emerging around the climate change debate, many different opinions on the causes have been offered by many different people, many experts in their field. There are strong arguments supported by recent studies that livestock production as well as the ensuing processing and transportation is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. This response to Coleman will argue that there is indeed a cause for the worldwide calls to reduce meat consumption, and that this reduction is an efficient and viable short term action that should be undertaken promptly, with the long term goal of a de-industrialization of agriculture in sight. These two solutions need not be mutually exclusive. To endlessly debate the validities of both, as well as the many other solutions being brought to the table, is to waste precious time and convolute an already complex problem.
Much of Coleman’s focus is placed on soy, corn, and grains, which are all common fodder for industrially produced beef, rather than focusing on the cattle themselves. This approach though, is problematic. As Mark Bittman tells us in his Ted Talk addressing the same issues, the world population has doubled over the last fifty years, with meat demand increasing five fold. Ten billion cattle are currently butchered a year, and this is projected to double in the next two decades. With such massive demand, it is simply unrealistic to state that pasture raising will stop the consequences of this. Jacobson (2008) states that 70% of brazil’s rainforest is already being used for grain AND pasture land, and more demand will mean more land clearing.
I’ll add to this argument by bringing in some information that Bijal Trivedi points out in his 2008 article, “Dinners Dirty Secret.” Trivedi demonstrates the inefficiency of meat production by telling us that in order to make a kilo of beef for human food consumption, the cow needs to eat 13kg of grain PLUS 30 kg of forage. He also counters Coleman’s statement that pasture raised beef is environmentally sound by bringing up a viewpoint that grass fed beef produce less milk and less meat than grain fed cows, and therefore more cows are required to produce the same amount of beef. So the result is still a very inefficient energy investment and emissions of greenhouse gases comparable to grain fed cows.
In another of Coleman’s points, he asserts that there is simply too many people to feed without meat, but as you can see from the points above, if we invested all of the energy that we are currently investing into livestock (with minimal return), we could be producing more alternative vegetarian sources of protein such as nuts, seeds and legumes and feeding more people more efficiently.
If we had begun thinking about these issues decades ago, we may have had the luxury of spending time debating the pros and cons of these sort of arguments, bringing in the many variables that Coleman has such as different feed types effects on methane emissions (in my subsequent research in this area I have found studies supporting both sides of the argument), fertilizers, and the mechanics of grain harvesting. Unfortunately, we now find ourselves in this urgent situation where we must act quickly and target realistic arenas which will show results, not letting our personal biases get in the way of important legislation.
My intention here is not to state that industrial production of cattle, their feed, and all other foods is not a massive contributor to greenhouse gas and environmental degradation. There is certainly literature showing the impacts of fossil fuels and agribusiness on climate change. I am simply trying to state the bottom line, which I hope that Mr. Coleman would agree with. We need change, and we need to be smart about it. In the short term, educating people about the overconsumption of meat will begin the process. Long term, we keep our eyes to the horizon, and tackle the task of de-industrializing agriculture.
November 8th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Good arguments Nikki, a very complex problem given the demands to feed an ever growing population and the continued industrialization of agriculture to meet those demands. I think a balanced smart approach is appropriate given all the complicating factors and the reality of the situation. Shifting consumption away from meat to alternative vegetarian sources of protein would be far a more efficient use of the agricultural plant products. Constructive education is the key, the pros and cons, and the environmental and health benefits associated with shifting demand and consumption away from meat products. I am not a vegetarion but I do believe we do overconsume meat products as you stated. We do need to change and education has proven to be very effective in changing behaviours over time, maybe not as quickly as we would like but required in order to affect global supply and demand of food products.
November 15th, 2009 at 3:28 am
According to Foodwatch, a meat diet per capita adds CO2 equivalent to driving 4,758 km at 119 g CO2/km. An organic meat diet adds 92% of that, compared with 13% by a vegan diet and 6% (281 km) by an organic vegan diet.
So, yes, obviously, Eliot Coleman’s meat is better for the planet’s atmosphere, but not much. And it’s certainly not better for the animals (nor for humans).
http://www.change.org/photos/wordpress_copies/foodwatch-chart.jpg
November 16th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Put another way, Coleman’s organic meat diet has almost 16 times the climate impact of an organic vegan’s diet, compared with almost 17 times for a nonorganic meat diet.