We no longer blog here. Because of the increased discussion around this review, I have reposted it over on my current blog. I'm happy to have a civil discussion with anyone there.
As I set out to write about the documentary Cowspiracy, two problems are obvious. The first is that, as someone who raises cows and sells their meat, I am not by any stretch objective. The second is that it’s called Cowspiracy, which makes me want to think of all the dumb cow-related puns I can (Cowspiracy is a moo-vie that makes beefy claims about a subject I have a steak in, etc.), and then to make a cup of tea while I think of more dumb cow-related puns (the film employs no hoof measures in its stampede to a reductive conclusion, and it repeatedly milks the same points in an effort to steer the conversation away from any topic that would actually encourage viewers to ruminate).
Like most people, I have a kneejerk conviction that things I believe are right for the simple reason that I believe them. When I look out my window and see the herd of cows I just moved grazing a fresh break of pasture after having someone announce over social media that my raising them is some sort of ecological catastrophe, I want to get mildly incensed, knock down a few straw men in my mind, and then dismiss it to go about my day with an extra lift in my step. But, I tell myself, it’s good to make an effort, however compromised, at critical examination of topics I have strong feelings on.
Also, other than the whole dismissal of raising any livestock thing, I agree with some critiques of the sort made in Cowspiracy. What people choose to eat does have an impact on what kind of farming is done, and some types of farming are worse for land and animals than others. All of the various organizations that advise people on how to use less water or emit less greenhouse gases or destroy less jungle are being silly or disingenuous - or cowspiratorial - if they don’t discuss the roles food choice and the resulting agricultural practices play in various environmental issues.
The difficulty in discussing these or any other topics raised by Cowspiracy is that, though it certainly takes strong stances on both, it is neither fish nor fowl. It’s at once an investigative documentary, a personal journey, and most of all an argument for a vegan lifestyle. While the film does try to make good on its title by suggesting (though not nearly proving) that prominent environmental organizations are beholden to the livestock industry, it also takes time to dismiss the possibility of responsibly harvesting any fish, to visit a backyard duck farm, to liberate a chicken, and to establish that vegan diets are healthy, all while following filmmaker/protagonist/narrator Kip Anderson’s not entirely convincing arc from concerned but uninformed citizen to empowered herbivore. Responding to a polemic that plays as fast and loose with facts as this film could easily devolve into a line by line response, which would be even more boring to read than it would be to write. Instead, I’ll focus on a few of the main topics, beginning with how cows drink, burp, fart, and most of all poop, which - not to brag - I have some experience with.
The drought that has scorched California for going on three years now makes water use an understandable priority for Anderson, since it is where the film is set and presumably where he lives. So when he finds that it takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef, he is chagrined. Unfortunately, he does not explain how he arrives at this number either in the film or on the film’s website. It strikes me as a bit high, so let’s see if we can figure out where all that water goes. Assuming a steer drinks on average 1.5 gallons of water per hundred weight daily, and supposing the steer is born at 50 pounds and slaughtered at 950 after two years of steady growth to yield 350 pounds of saleable meat, his average weight would be a little more than 450 pounds over the course of his life. Putting all these numbers together gives us expected direct consumption of about 5000 gallons of water. This is at best an approximation, since growth rate is variable, water consumption depends both on the ambient temperature and the water content of forage consumed, and we actually raise our cows to 27 months. Also, for the sake of fairness, a share of the water the steer’s mother drinks during his first year should be considered in the cost of raising him. Even if we assume my numbers above are low on every count and double his lifetime consumption to 10,000 gallons, it’s safe to say some water needs to be accounted for if we’re going to get to the number quoted by Anderson, since 2,500 gallons per saleable pound would lead us to expect a lifetime consumption of 875,000 gallons, a mere 865,000 more than our high estimate.
This raises the idea of embedded water - that a cow somehow uses all the water required to raise its feed. If I do more boring math I can actually get in the neighborhood of the larger number by counting all the water that falls in the growing season on the grass that the steer eats. An acre inch of rain is about 27,000 gallons, and we generally get a decent amount. But pretending that a cow munching away on perennial pasture somehow disrupts the natural water cycle such that we need to call this a cost of production is self-evidently absurd. No water is destroyed in the making of a cow, and rain falls and grass grows whether there’s a herd there to eat it or not. However, this measure becomes meaningful in a place like California, where huge amounts of forage are grown for beef and dairy on irrigated pasture. I am still skeptical of the 2,500 gallons per pound number, but I agree that raising alfalfa on irrigated land in the desert is horrifically short-sighted. Anderson interviews Manucher Alemi and Kamyar Guivetchi at the California Department of Water Resources, and when they uncomfortably dance around why they don’t recommend reducing meat consumption, he sees a conspiracy of silence; I see state employees who don’t want to be caught on film telling Californians that they can help the drought by buying meat and cheese produced in less arid parts of the country or by finding California producers who rely on precipitation rather than irrigation to grow forage.
Methane is a more vexed question, since cows indisputably belch and fart. In the film Anderson implies that cows are the main source of methane and that reducing their numbers is the fastest way to reverse global warming. After too much time poking around in search of definitive numbers on methane emissions, I decided to use those provided on a NASA website, even though a number of reputable sources arrive at different conclusions, particularly concerning the amount of methane released by wetlands, listed at 22% in the data I am quoting. By these numbers, ruminant livestock directly account for 16% of global methane emissions, and the (mis)management of all livestock manure accounts for another 5%. Human sewage treatment is 5%, biomass burning is 8%, fossil fuels production is 19%, and, surprisingly, rice cultivation is 12%. Various other manmade and natural sources fill out the remainder. While 21% of total methane is certainly significant, the idea that the elimination of livestock would clearly lead to a reversal of global warming trends is both an overstatement and an oversimplification, without getting into matters of methane’s half-life relative to carbon’s.
Here’s another way to look at it. There are about 88 million beef cows in America and just over 9 million dairy cows. In 1800 there were 60 million buffalo, and though the film claims that grassfed beef is more damaging than feedlot beef, I’m confident those buffalo weren’t routinely wandering into CAFOs in an effort to reduce their methane emissions. But I doubt Anderson would accept a target of 60 million grassfed cows as ecologically sustainable, even though keeping them on pasture, besides making them healthier and happier, would mostly eliminate the 5% of methane emission that are a result of manure fermenting in lagoons and piles.
The film fails to address, misrepresents, or glosses over any number of interesting points. At the backyard duck farm Anderson does some math and decides that it has a 100 to 1 feed to meat ratio, which is so obviously impossible that it suggests he simply doesn’t consider the roughly 500 eggs the duck likely produced during its life to be food. He says that 45% of the earth’s land is used for livestock production, even though the best information I can find puts the global total at about 40% for all agriculture. He dismisses any discussion of Allan Savory’s claims about managed grazing both improving degraded land and sequestering carbon by getting off a pithy line about the silliness of using livestock to reverse damage caused by livestock and an expression of horror at the range management practices Savory endorsed in the 1950’s. He doesn’t acknowledge that Savory himself is outspoken about the mistakes he made as a younger man and that in part due to them he now advises land managers to constantly evaluate every practice against its eventual goal. He’s outraged that the BLM rounds up wild horses and burros to make way for cattle, despite the fact that all three are European imports. He blames livestock production for the continued existence of hunger but doesn’t discuss the surplus of calories already produced or the systemic factors that prevent food from going where it is most needed.
But, at least to my mind, he shows the least nuance when discussing poop. He tells us that 16,000 pounds of manure are produced every second in the U.S., enough to cover a number of major cities as well as several states, a statistic that I would find more interesting if he mentioned the depth of the coating. Later he says livestock produce 130 times the excrement of humans, without the benefit of waste treatment. He implies that his revulsion at this is natural and correct, which makes me feel a little weird, since one of my goals is to have an even layer of poop spread over my pasture land every grazing season. Historically, animal manure has been recognized as the very best fertilizer, and many of the early efforts to improve rather than degrade land both in America and England revolved around managing it. Manure only becomes a problem rather than something to celebrate when it piles up unused outside of factory pig and chicken operations or stews in anaerobic lagoons. When an appropriate number of animals are kept on an appropriate amount of land and managed with attention to both, their activities - there feet and hooves, their grazing, pecking, scratching and rooting, and most of all their manure - sustain, renew and even improve the ground that feeds them.
The great weakness of Cowspiracy, other than its title, is its single minded determination to prove that veganism is the only reasonable approach to feeding people, a proof it pursues without regard for facts or nuance. That’s not to say it’s worthless, for there are ideas for several good films within it. I would love to watch a truly investigative examination of any links between the industrial agriculture sector and large environmental non-profits, rather than one that infers connections from the vague responses of uncomfortable PR people. A devastating documentary could be made about the insanity of beef and dairy production in California, and I am all for consumers voting against them and other parts of the industrial food system with their dietary choices. I even think a fair examination of the ways small farms are not inherently better for land and livestock would be wonderful. Instead of any of these there is a failed effort to prove that one lifestyle choice can solve every environmental and agricultural problem.
This failure is not just a result of misleading and erroneous data, but even more so of superficiality. Though I watched carefully and took copious notes, I do not have a clear idea what Anderson’s vegan world would look like. Would excess land be converted to wilderness? Should the hills and fields of my farm return to forest and scrub like so much of the nearby land that used to be grass? Why is a monoculture of wheat preferable to a polyculture of pasture? Should we humans be connected to and reliant on the land around us and should these connections take different forms in response to local conditions? Yesterday, while out hunting turkey, I came across the remains of a deer, one of ten or so my brother and I have found this year. All of them starved or froze to death in the clutches of last winter. Now they are piles of mossy bones marking where living things curled up and never stood again. Why is this preferable to raising cows as I do, particularly when there’s room here for both?
I am willing to say that true wilderness and unmanaged land have intrinsic value. I think of the sense of awe a still forest raises in me or the way a rough-legged hawk hanging in the air on a stark, white morning pushes all thought from my mind, and I know that the trees and birds and animals going about their lives have value even when I am in no way the beneficiary of them. I recognize that this claim is metaphysical rather than utilitarian, and it is critical to how I understand my role in the world, because I think farmed land shares this inherent worth. To borrow a thought from Wendell Berry, the land stretching out from the Adirondacks is deserving of the same reverence as the mountains themselves. The destructiveness of so many modern agricultural practices rests on a view of livestock as exclusively means to an end, rather than as beings in a world, intricate beyond our comprehension, to which we also belong.
I have a difficult time articulating this view, and I doubt I could make a good documentary about it, particularly since even made up statistics don’t have much to say about such matters. But to be meaningful, any discussion of agriculture and eating needs to engage with questions of our values and the specific forms those values should take. Cowspiracy provides a facile solution, dressed up with shoddy numbers, and in its effort to push a predetermined agenda it doesn’t begin to answer the questions a person should ask when deciding what to eat.
Here’s another way to look at it. There are about 88 million beef cows in America and just over 9 million dairy cows. In 1800 there were 60 million buffalo, and though the film claims that grassfed beef is more damaging than feedlot beef, I’m confident those buffalo weren’t routinely wandering into CAFOs in an effort to reduce their methane emissions. But I doubt Anderson would accept a target of 60 million grassfed cows as ecologically sustainable, even though keeping them on pasture, besides making them healthier and happier, would mostly eliminate the 5% of methane emission that are a result of manure fermenting in lagoons and piles.
The film fails to address, misrepresents, or glosses over any number of interesting points. At the backyard duck farm Anderson does some math and decides that it has a 100 to 1 feed to meat ratio, which is so obviously impossible that it suggests he simply doesn’t consider the roughly 500 eggs the duck likely produced during its life to be food. He says that 45% of the earth’s land is used for livestock production, even though the best information I can find puts the global total at about 40% for all agriculture. He dismisses any discussion of Allan Savory’s claims about managed grazing both improving degraded land and sequestering carbon by getting off a pithy line about the silliness of using livestock to reverse damage caused by livestock and an expression of horror at the range management practices Savory endorsed in the 1950’s. He doesn’t acknowledge that Savory himself is outspoken about the mistakes he made as a younger man and that in part due to them he now advises land managers to constantly evaluate every practice against its eventual goal. He’s outraged that the BLM rounds up wild horses and burros to make way for cattle, despite the fact that all three are European imports. He blames livestock production for the continued existence of hunger but doesn’t discuss the surplus of calories already produced or the systemic factors that prevent food from going where it is most needed.
But, at least to my mind, he shows the least nuance when discussing poop. He tells us that 16,000 pounds of manure are produced every second in the U.S., enough to cover a number of major cities as well as several states, a statistic that I would find more interesting if he mentioned the depth of the coating. Later he says livestock produce 130 times the excrement of humans, without the benefit of waste treatment. He implies that his revulsion at this is natural and correct, which makes me feel a little weird, since one of my goals is to have an even layer of poop spread over my pasture land every grazing season. Historically, animal manure has been recognized as the very best fertilizer, and many of the early efforts to improve rather than degrade land both in America and England revolved around managing it. Manure only becomes a problem rather than something to celebrate when it piles up unused outside of factory pig and chicken operations or stews in anaerobic lagoons. When an appropriate number of animals are kept on an appropriate amount of land and managed with attention to both, their activities - there feet and hooves, their grazing, pecking, scratching and rooting, and most of all their manure - sustain, renew and even improve the ground that feeds them.
The great weakness of Cowspiracy, other than its title, is its single minded determination to prove that veganism is the only reasonable approach to feeding people, a proof it pursues without regard for facts or nuance. That’s not to say it’s worthless, for there are ideas for several good films within it. I would love to watch a truly investigative examination of any links between the industrial agriculture sector and large environmental non-profits, rather than one that infers connections from the vague responses of uncomfortable PR people. A devastating documentary could be made about the insanity of beef and dairy production in California, and I am all for consumers voting against them and other parts of the industrial food system with their dietary choices. I even think a fair examination of the ways small farms are not inherently better for land and livestock would be wonderful. Instead of any of these there is a failed effort to prove that one lifestyle choice can solve every environmental and agricultural problem.
This failure is not just a result of misleading and erroneous data, but even more so of superficiality. Though I watched carefully and took copious notes, I do not have a clear idea what Anderson’s vegan world would look like. Would excess land be converted to wilderness? Should the hills and fields of my farm return to forest and scrub like so much of the nearby land that used to be grass? Why is a monoculture of wheat preferable to a polyculture of pasture? Should we humans be connected to and reliant on the land around us and should these connections take different forms in response to local conditions? Yesterday, while out hunting turkey, I came across the remains of a deer, one of ten or so my brother and I have found this year. All of them starved or froze to death in the clutches of last winter. Now they are piles of mossy bones marking where living things curled up and never stood again. Why is this preferable to raising cows as I do, particularly when there’s room here for both?
I am willing to say that true wilderness and unmanaged land have intrinsic value. I think of the sense of awe a still forest raises in me or the way a rough-legged hawk hanging in the air on a stark, white morning pushes all thought from my mind, and I know that the trees and birds and animals going about their lives have value even when I am in no way the beneficiary of them. I recognize that this claim is metaphysical rather than utilitarian, and it is critical to how I understand my role in the world, because I think farmed land shares this inherent worth. To borrow a thought from Wendell Berry, the land stretching out from the Adirondacks is deserving of the same reverence as the mountains themselves. The destructiveness of so many modern agricultural practices rests on a view of livestock as exclusively means to an end, rather than as beings in a world, intricate beyond our comprehension, to which we also belong.
I have a difficult time articulating this view, and I doubt I could make a good documentary about it, particularly since even made up statistics don’t have much to say about such matters. But to be meaningful, any discussion of agriculture and eating needs to engage with questions of our values and the specific forms those values should take. Cowspiracy provides a facile solution, dressed up with shoddy numbers, and in its effort to push a predetermined agenda it doesn’t begin to answer the questions a person should ask when deciding what to eat.
-Garth
As a final note to anyone interested in a comprehensive treatment of all these and other matters, the book Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie is incredible. Don’t let the dippy cover fool you. As an even final-er final note, I’ll mention that he indirectly gives a detailed answer to Anderson’s closing question to Michael Pollan about how much meat and dairy per person a truly sustainable agricultural system could provide. Fairlie arrives at just over 83 pounds of total meat each year, with dairy consumption at current levels. This is for the UK, and with the lower population to arable land ratio in America, they would likely be a bit higher here.
National Geographic cites Water Foot Print Network on 1799 gallons of water per pound of beef here, http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/green-guide/quizzes/organic-food/. It does not say how Water Foot Print got there. Wow.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate your candid admission of bias. I knew Cowspiracy would set off a statistics-war - counter-stats, counter-counter-stats, on and on... Even if they are off by a factor of 2 or 3 - so what? But you have nothing to fear from the movie - factory farming, yes, but not the movie. We Americans will not lift a finger to save ourselves. Given the state of the economy, we won't be buying much grass-fed beef either.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comments. I'm not clear why statistics being off by a factor of 2 or 3 - and some in the movie are off by far more than that - would not be important when attempting to address the huge environmental issues facing the world. I'm opposed to factory farming, as I imagine you are. I am also for practical, ecologically sensible agriculture, and I wish the movie had something to say about it.
ReplyDelete-Garth
Thank you for the thoughtful counterpoint Garth. I too was troubled by the self-serving tone of the movie, which I don't believe will convert many people to veganism. No mention is made of the fact that herbivores have been living on this planet for many millions of years before we came along, and if they were the cause of planetary destruction would have died out long ago. Factory farms simply don't allow these herd animals to live the way they would in the "natural" world- eating grass and migrating across vast stretches of land- but force feed them grain and keep them confined in pens they can barely move about in instead. This is why I'm a huge fan of the "Buffalo Commons" idea, which would bring back these magnificent animals to a place they are well adapted to, which cattle are not. Of course in order to do so we would have to create preserves that are currently used to raise domestic cattle (subsidized by tax dollars), who often die on the arid, blizzard-prone Great Plains. I'm also a fan of sustainable agriculture practices, that try to mimic the natural world as much as possible, allowing the animals to eat what they've evolved to eat (grass) and roam about somewhat, if not exactly migrate. Vegans so often conflate small, family farming practices (e.g. the Amish) with those of industrial agriculture, as if they both were equally bad. It's difficult for me to take them seriously when they do this.
ReplyDeleteAs a fifth generation cattle ranching family member (with the 6th generation coming on), first I want to agree with much of what you've written here, Goldmund....however, a couple things need clearing up. First, beef cattle are NOT raised on 'factory farms'. The only 'factory farming' done with beef cattle is in the last 2-3 months in a feedlot (for those that are sold to feedlots), but the first 12-16 months of life are lived entirely on grass, hay, pasture. They move about freely 24 hours a day, grazing and eating grass.....so, just because someone sees a feedlot, with no other knowledge or experience they then decide cattle are "raised" in that environment. Not true. Grain is provided at that point, yes, to finish them -- but, in truth, cattle (and we raise 100% All Natural, no hormones or antibiotics, etc) are occasionally only supplemented some grain (small amounts) on a ranch when they're weaned, but 98% of their diet is grass, hay, and pasture!!! Compared to any other source, natural beef is the cleanest source of protein....Different for pigs and chickens, of course, but the idea of a factory farm is a falsehood that has persisted ad nauseum..... Secondly, cattle are a bovine species, as are buffalo, and though not naturally suited, as you say, for the cold Plains perhaps, they do co-habitate beautifully with other species and act on the environment in the same way, performing 'carbon sequestration' which is a positive. They are also a natural FIRE retardant, converting all sorts of dry matter (unusable for any other use - eg: almond hulls, woody stuff in the forests, grasslands that dry up) -- the kind of material that has turned the West into a tinderbox -- into a useable and sustainable protein source. They do not destroy habitat when managed effectively. In fact, raising livestock is one of the most sustainable forms of agriculture there is, and, please, FEW domestic cattle ranchers are "subsidized by tax dollars!" What?? Only a fraction of ranchers pay for the right to graze on federal lands (NOT a subsidy) -- and they pay for that right, in addition to paying their own tax dollars that support federal lands....but most ranchers raise their herds on their own lands; believe me, until the last 3 years, it has been a touch and go enterprise for most of us. The "rich rancher" image is another a myth -- only a handful are super-rich and most of any you see today made their money elsewhere -- absentee ranchers, etc....in fact, more farm women work a second job out of necessity than in any other profession in the U.S. Finally, more than 75% of ALL waterfowl are protected by PRIVATE ranch lands -- open lands -- not by the government. Eg: We have a large, 140 year old natural preserve on our ranch and we have maintained it (at our cost) for generations. On it are hundreds of Canadian geese, ducks, eagles, hawks, herons, and all manner of smaller birds, plus mink, beaver, etc. And we are not the atypical ranching family; we are the typical ranching family. And contrary to the myths that abound -- and are perpetuated by those who would dictate we all become vegan or vegetarian -- more than 90% of ALL farms are run by families and family corporations. "Industrial" farming is the minority enterprise. Average farms/ranches in the U.S. are small.
DeleteIn truth, IF Americans want open space, they need to thank their ranchers & farmers. By breaking up ranch lands, we are losing open space that supports waterfowl and wildlife. Sadly, this country has become so far removed from the land, consumers jump on bizarre "environmental" bandwagons, believing anyone they consider a "whistleblower"-- without doing their own research.
considering that it would be nice to separate out factory farms and their practices( monoculture, etc.), arid vs. wet grazing lands( and lands unsuitable for tillage), food forrests and permaculture, Allan Savory type grazing, the re-construction of the loess plateau, the sea water foundation using sea water for farming, and a lot of other things, I have to agree with you that this is a person without substantial experience in agriculture....he should have asked me,,,,,,in California they grow rice with shipped in water, does he think that is ok? What difference if they use water, and it falls from the sky, and will run off if not directed to a pond?...oh, Edmond gave me this link to see, from our ag talk group
ReplyDeleteGoldman, I like your Idea, and have seen our national parks, devoid of people, not looking near as good as the farms near by. I would like to see the kinds of preserves like they have in Brasil, where people live in the parks. Now, as you say, we can herd caribou, bison, and suitable animals....it does sound interesting....there is soo much unused land here in the us, and the animals do add to it so much.......the indians burned the land off, and managed the land so much better than we do....what a shame to see so much waste, so much fixation on ideas holding us back.....
ReplyDeletesorry, Garth, but i dispute these figures, as properly managed manure wont loose so much of its valuable nitrogen( nh4, or methane),,,,in a feedlot, perhaps, but they could do bio-gas, if there werent the gas co. thugs breathing down their necks.....the vegans should all read up on Dr. weston Price.
ReplyDeleteHi all,
ReplyDeleteI recently watched Cowspiracy and enjoyed the discussion in the Soil / Health group and the review and comments here. I'm currently being trained by Consumer Reports on editing Wikipedia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowspiracy should definitely have some references about sustainable ranching. Unfortunately, I can't link to Garth's review here because links to personal blogs aren't allowed on Wikipedia.
The Cowspiracy site lists the studies in their favor, such as "Got Drought? On Thursday, NASA released a study which says that the United States should prepare for the worst drought recorded ..."
So I'm looking for links to studies or articles about the impact and "carbon footprint" of pastured cattle and other farm animals. I live in the desert and our fastest internet connection is around 500k lately, makes it hard to research.
I personally think that Cowspiracy is right on the money in most respects and it really doesn't matter whether it takes 1000 or 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but we really need to distinguish between corn / soy fed and sustainably raised and grass fed farm animals.
Please post any info here or email me directly, thanks!
Hi,
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, the Cowspiracy website has a TED talk by Alan Savory embedded in it's evidence section. I watched the video and thought that this must be what the film was about! Then I read their link to Richard Oppenlander's (The film's number one 'expert') rebuttal of Alan Savory and worked it out pretty quick :-)
The rebuttal was so full of holes and straw men I was really disappointed. I couldn't work out how a researcher and author could make such lame arguments. He accused Savory of killing Elephants in Zimbabwe as if it was a dirty secret but I had just watched Alan Savory front up to that issue right at the start of the TED talk, saying how hard it was to live with and how it had propelled him to find a better way to prevent desertification.
Oppenlander has several really silly sentences in his piece but I'll just mention one. He says: "Savory provided the audience with examples of restored land using his livestock and grazing techniques in Africa, Argentina, and Mexico. Argentina, though, has lost over 66 percent of all its forests over the past seventy-five years."
The sentence seems to imply that Savory's methods are somehow responsible for the loss of forestland in Argentina over a period of time that begins when he is a toddler! But that is too silly. Perhaps if you assume that all livestock grazing methods are created equal this might make sense but Savory's methods do actually work and no where does Oppenlander disprove the fact that he has been successful in rebuilding ecosystems and stopping deforestation. The best he can do is accuse Savory's method of receiving help on one particular experiment because it rained a lot one year. Hilariously, he then tries to have it both ways by telling us that the pasture deteriorated in the following 2 years of normal rainfall. He doesn't say by how much but it's safe to assume it deteriorated back to match the level of rain it was receiving.
Anyway, I was very happy to find your blog which has confirmed my suspicions about the film's reliability.
If anyone wants a good laugh, the rest of Oppenlander's article is here: http://freefromharm.org/agriculture-environment/saving-the-world-with-livestock-the-allan-savory-approach-examined/#sthash.NlZQ9TsN.dpuf
As a fifth generation cattle ranching family member (with the 6th generation coming on), a couple things need clearing up. Too many people have adopted these errors as "facts." First, beef cattle are NOT raised on 'factory farms'. The only 'factory farming' done with beef cattle is in the last 2-3 months in a feedlot (for those that are sold to feedlots), but the first 12-16 months of life are lived entirely on grass, hay, pasture. They move about freely 24 hours a day, grazing and eating grass.....so, just because someone sees a feedlot, with no other knowledge or experience they then decide cattle are "raised" in that environment. Not true. Grain is provided at that point, yes, to finish them -- but, in truth, cattle (and we raise 100% All Natural, no hormones or antibiotics, etc) are occasionally only supplemented some grain (small amounts) on a ranch when they're weaned, but 98% of their diet is grass, hay, and pasture!!! Compared to any other source, natural beef is the cleanest source of protein....Different for pigs and chickens, of course, but the idea of a factory farm is a falsehood that has persisted ad nauseum..... Secondly, cattle are a bovine species, as are buffalo, and though not naturally suited, as you say, for the cold Plains perhaps, they do co-habitate beautifully with other species and act on the environment in the same way, performing 'carbon sequestration' which is a positive. They are also a natural FIRE retardant, converting all sorts of dry matter (unusable for any other use - eg: almond hulls, woody stuff in the forests, grasslands that dry up) -- the kind of material that has turned the West into a tinderbox -- into a useable and sustainable protein source. They do not destroy habitat when managed effectively. In fact, raising livestock is one of the most sustainable forms of agriculture there is, and, please, FEW domestic cattle ranchers are "subsidized by tax dollars!" What?? Only a fraction of ranchers pay for the right to graze on federal lands (NOT a subsidy) -- and they pay for that right, in addition to paying their own tax dollars that support federal lands....but most ranchers raise their herds on their own lands; believe me, until the last 3 years, it has been a touch and go enterprise for most of us. The "rich rancher" image is another a myth -- only a handful are super-rich and most of any you see today made their money elsewhere -- absentee ranchers, etc....in fact, more farm women work a second job out of necessity than in any other profession in the U.S. Finally, more than 75% of ALL waterfowl are protected by PRIVATE ranch lands -- open lands -- not by the government. Eg: We have a large, 140 year old natural preserve on our ranch and we have maintained it (at our cost) for generations. On it are hundreds of Canadian geese, ducks, eagles, hawks, herons, and all manner of smaller birds, plus mink, beaver, etc. And we are not the atypical ranching family; we are the typical ranching family. And contrary to the myths that abound -- and are perpetuated by those who would dictate we all become vegan or vegetarian -- more than 90% of ALL farms are run by families and family corporations. "Industrial" farming is the minority enterprise. Average farms/ranches in the U.S. are small.
ReplyDeleteIn truth, IF Americans want open space, they need to thank their ranchers & farmers. By breaking up ranch lands, we are losing open space that supports waterfowl and wildlife. Sadly, this country has become so far removed from the land, consumers jump on bizarre "environmental" bandwagons, believing anyone they consider a "whistleblower"-- without doing their own research.
You know what ... keep killing and eating carcass's, kill some more and eat more flesh ..... keep killing billions and trillions of everything and when there is nothing left you know you will kill your own and eat them as well. It's your nature, you can't help it. Oh and when illness sets in from all that meat you ingest go to your doctor or hospital because I won't lift a finger for anyone of you sick bastards !!!
ReplyDeleteSpoken like a true zealot. Lets not do the rational thing and discuss ways to mitigate the issue. Lets also ignore the socio-economic issues that DRIVE consumption ( most poor people cannot afford to shop in the produce dept. when processed meat products cost pennies on the dollar compared to perishables) . lets also ignore multi 1000 yr. old sea-based, cultural issues in the east that will not change any time soon, as well as whole economies that run on both livestock and fishing in coastal communities. Lets just make this a black and white "bad versus good" argument. For the record, since we are discussing morality. Plants are JUST as alive, and just as WORTHY of life as any animal.
DeletePlants are not sentient and do not have a nervous system so your comparison of plants to animals is false. While some people may have issues buying produce because of food distribution issues, I call B.S. on your statement that people cannot afford to shop in the produce section of a supermarket. There certainly can be cultural barriers to a vegan lifestyle and diet, but many people consume animal products because of habit and convenience. You say yourself that it is a question of morality so what other morals should we compromise on? Some people participate in meatless Monday. How about wife-beat Wednesday?
DeleteJust a note to say I appreciate your level-headed critique. Everyone has biases, but the people with the most bias are usually the ones who also know the most about the given subject. I like that you recognized yours, and then unemotionally addressed each point and posed your own questions. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteThank you! I'm a vegan and have noticed an influx of new vegans from this movie, but when I watched it- ugh. Terrible, context-less statistics and woefully inappropriate "experts" and shoddily edited interviews. I can't believe so many people seem to have been convinced by it. I too have done a bunch of research into what the truth of some of the numbers should be and while I do think the EPA's estimate is low for a number of reasons, it appears the 51% of greenhouse gas emissions figure is based on some handwaving, guesswork and selective application of basic math.
ReplyDeleteI really haven't felt like typing out an in-depth and more fair look into the stats so I've been trying to find someone else who's done it and I either get rabidly anti-vegan screeds guilty of similar fallacies or nothing. This is the best review I've found so far, so thanks. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Go vegan for ethical reasons and improving your health and the environment are bonuses.
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