From our old vegetarian information file archives. (Please note that web links inside this document may be broken.)
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From wheeler@super.org Wed Feb 24 17:39:42 1993
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 92 10:29:02 EDT
From: wheeler@super.org (Ferrell S. Wheeler)
To: tms@cs.umd.edu
Subject: Fat of the Land
[The following article is reprinted from the July issue of World Watch
magazine. It gives an overview of the environmental consequences of
a meat-centered diet. For a detailed, referenced, account of the
global picture, see Worldwatch Institute Report #103 entitled
"Taking Stock." Long post: 350 lines]
Fat of the Land
by
Alan B. Durning
Senior Researcher
Worldwatch Institute
1776 Massachusetts Ave.
Washington, DC 20036
When most Americans sit down to dinner, they're only a bite away from
unwittingly worsening the environment. The overlooked offender is
tonight's steak, pork chop, or chicken breast. The unpaid ecological
price of that meat is so hefty that Americans could end up eating
themselves out of planetary house and home.
Putting half a pound of red meat and poultry on the table each day
for every American citizen rings up quite a tab. The industry that
supplies the world's leading nation of meat-eaters is associated with
environmental ills ranging from depleted and contaminated underground
water to an atmosphere pumped full of greenhouse gases. Even modern egg
production participates in the ecological wrongdoing.
There's nothing anti-ecological about cows, pigs, and chickens
themselves. Rather American-style animal farms burden nature because
they have outgrown their niche. In the U.S., livestock stand at the
center of agriculture, absorbing much of the country's crop harvest
along with vast quantities of energy and water. Elsewhere, most
livestock are raised as they've always been: as a sideline to crops. In
some circumstances, they turn plants people cannot eat into food they
can.
Every nation in the world that's wealthy enough, nonetheless, is
taking notes from the United States and is starting to shower resources
on raising animals for meat; U.S.-style animal farms seem to be the wave
of the futrue. If the American diet alone does not pose a mortal threat
to the natural estate, its adoption around the world certainly would.
the prospect of 5 billion people eating the way Americans do is an
ecological impossibility, requiring more grain than the world can grow
and more energy, water, and land than the world can supply.
%% The American diet %%
Some shifts in American dining are already apparent. Fresh fruit and
vegetable sales are climbing. Many restaurants feature meatless
selections, and there's a booming trade in vegetarian and low-meat
cookbooks. Also, airlines report growing numbers of requests for
vegetarian meals. But Americans are not yet fat-shunning herbivores.
While beef consumption per person has declined slowly since 1976 and
per-capita egg consumption peaked decades ago, poultry has more than
taken up the slack.
Americans have been jumping from one animal product to another,
eating fewer burgers and more chicken nuggets, fewer eggs and more
turkey. Annual consumption of red meat and poultry together is at an
all-time high of 178 pounds per person, up from about 137 pounds in
1955. Last year, Americans each ate about 65 pounds of beef and veal,
63 pounds of poultry, and 49 pounds of pork, plus 139 eggs and dairy
products made from 70 gallons of milk. For a family of four, that works
out to half a steer, a whole pig, and a hundred chickens a year.
Churning out those quantities of animal products takes all the
ingenuity agriculturalists can muster. Consequently, modern meat and
egg production bears little resemblance to the family farm idyll that
still colors the imagination of most Americans. In the U.S., animal
foods are produced in concentrated agroindustries, not cow barns or
chicken coops.
In fact, animal farms are as much factories as farms. Of all farm
animals in industrial countries, only cattle spend most of their lives
in daylight. Broiler chickens live exclusively in gigantic, darkened
sheds where thousands of birds are fed carefully measured rations of
grain. Eggs come from similar installations, where hens are crowded
into stacked cages, eating from one conveyor belt and laying onto
another. Pork comes from warehouse-size sheds built over sewage canals
that sluice away manure.
Beef cattle graze a year before ranchers truck them to vast outdoor
feedlots to be "finished" for slaughter. Their last months are spent
gorging on rich rations of corn, sorghum, and soybean meal that fatten
them for slaughter. Dairy cows, unlike other farm animals, continue to
live something not unlike the old-fashioned farm life, often grazing
outdoors part of each day. However, they, too, are sent to slaughter
when their milk production falls off, and their male offspring --
useless in the milk business, except for a few breeding bulls -- usually
become veal calves or "baby beef."
Regardless of animal type, though, modern meat production involves
intensive use -- and often misuse -- of grain crops, water resources,
energy, and grazing areas. In addition, animal agriculture produces
surprisingly large amounts of air and water pollution. Taken as a
whole, livestock rearing is the most ecologically damaging part of
American agriculture.
%% Staff of livestock life %%
Animal farms use mountains of grain. Nearly 40 percent of the
world's total, and more than 70 percent of U.S. production, is fed to
livestock, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. Last year,
162 million tons of grain, mostly corn but also sorghum, barley, oats,
and wheat, were consumed by livestock. Millions of tons of protein-rich
soybean meal rounded out the diet. No other country in the world can
afford to feed so much grain to animals.
Were all of that grain consumed directly by humans, it would nourish
five times as many people as it does after being converted into meat,
milk, and eggs, according to the Iowa-based Council for Agricultural
Science and Technology, a nonprofit research group.
Such calculations don't mean that if Americans ate less meat, hungry
people would be fed. Worldwide, 630 million people are hungry today --
because they're too poor to buy food, not because food is in short
supply. Even if feed grains were given as food aid, hunger might
persist because handouts can flood agricultural markets and discourage
Third World farmers from planting crops.
The more immediate problem with raising animals on grain is the wate
of resources. The effectiveness with which animals turns grains such as corn
into food products varies enormously. Nearly seven pounds of corn and
soy are needed to put one pound of boneless, trimmed pork on the table
in the U.S. Cattle require less -- 4.8 pounds of grain
and soy per pound of meat -- because unlike pigs, they eat grass most of
their lives. American chickens eat 2.8 pounds of feed per pound of
meat, and egg layers do better at 2.6 pounds. Dairy cows are the most
efficient, using just 0.1 pounds of grain and soybean meal to provide a
pound (about a pint) of milk, because most of their nutrition comes from
grass.
%% Counting kilocalories %%
American feed takes so much energy to grow -- counting fuel for farm
machinery and for making fertilizers and pesticides -- that it might as
well be a petroleum byproduct. Cornell University's David Pimentel, a
specialist in agricultural energy use, estimated that 14,000
kilocalories are required to produce a pound of pork in the U.S. --
equivalent to the energy in nearly half a gallon of gasoline.
Pimentel's data show that energy use, like grain consumption,
declines from pork to beef, chicken, and eggs. Dairy farms are
exceptionally frugal with energy, using scarcely the equivalent of
one-fortieth of a gallon of gasoline per pound of milk.
Almost half of the energy used in American agriculture goes into
livestock production, the majority of it for meat. Producing the red
meat and poultry eaten each year by a typical American takes energy
equal to 50 gallons of gasoline. Supplying vegetarians with nourishment
requires one-third less energy on the farm than supplying meat-eaters.
Of course energy used on the farm isn't the whole story in the food
system. Processing, packaging, transporting, selling, storing, and
cooking foods uses almost twice as much energy nationwide as agriculture
does. Yet, meat still leads the league in energy used per pound of
product served. Pork involves more than 15 times as much
energy as fresh fruits and vegetables. Milk, by contrast, uses as
little energy as plant foods.
%% Watering the herd %%
Feed grain guzzles water, too. In California, now the nation's
leading dairy producer, livestock agriculture takes nearly a third --
the largest share -- of irrigation water, according to independent water
analyst Marc Reisner of San Francisco. Animal raising accounts for
similar shares across the western U.S., including areas irrigated with
water from dwindling underground aquifers. The beef feedlot center of
the nation -- Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas panhandle --
relies on crops raised with water pumped out of a depleting undergound
water source called the Ogallala aquifer.
Jim Oltjen, professor of animal science at the University of
California at Davis, estimates that half of the grain and hay fed to
American livestock grows on irrigated land. He calculates that it takes
about 430 gallons of water to produce a pound of pork, 390 gallons for a
pound of beef, and 375 gallons per pound of chicken. Thus the water
used by to supply Americans with meat comes to about 190 gallons per
person per day, or twice what typical Americans use at home for all
purposes.
%% Land lords %%
The livestock industry uses half the territory of the continental
U.S. for feed crops, pasture, and range. On the half of U.S. cropland
growing animal feed and hay, soil continues eroding at a frightful pace
despite recent progress in conservation. For each pound of red meat,
poultry, eggs, and milk, farm fields lose about five pounds of prime
dirt.
The vast majority of land devoted to livestock is not fertile
cropland or pasture but arid public range in the west which the
government leases to ranchers for grazing. Although the 270 million
acres so used -- an area larger than the 14 eastern seaboard states --
supply less than 5 percent of the beef Americans consume, damage to the
land is acute.
The worst harm was done in the great cattle drives of the last
century. An Environmental Protection Agency sponsored study describes
the shameful history: The land was grazed so ruthlessly that "native
perennial grasses were virtually eliminated from vast areas and replaced
by sagebrush, rabbitbrush, mesquite, and juniper." The exposed soil
"was quickly stripped from the land by wind and water...Unchecked flood
flows eroded unprotected streambanks...Water tables lowered. Perennial
streams became intermittent or dry during most of the year."
Harold Dregne, professor of soil science at Texas Tech University,
estimates that 10 percent of the arid west has been turned into desert
by livestock. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which is responsible
along with the U.S. Forest Service for overseeing public rangeland,
reported last year that nearly 70 percent of its expansive holdings in
the west were in unacceptable condition.
With open rangeland overgrazed, cattle concentrate in the narrow
streambank, or "riparian," habitats which are the cornerstone of
arid-land ecology. Trampling and eating vegetation that regulates water
flow, the herds leave the land unable to absorb cloudbursts. Floods
then rampage downstream, carrying away soil and accelerating the process
of ecological decline. Edward Chaney, author of the EPA-sponsored
assessment of rengeland, says: "I've talked to specialists across the
west, and everyone agrees that riparian zones are in worse shape than
ever."
%% South of the border %%
The American appetite for meat has environmental consequences that
extend beyond our national frontiers. The U.S. imports only 0.5 percent
of its beef from Central America, but the effects of producing that meat
are startling.
In Central America, beef exports to the U.S. have played a part in
the tragedy of forest destruction. Costa Rica, for example, was once
almost completely cloaked in tropical forest, holding within its small
confines perhaps 5 percent of all plant and animal species on earth. By
1983, after two decades of explosive growth in the cattle industry, just
17 percent of the original forest remained. Throughout the period,
Costa Rica was exporting between one-third and two-thirds of its beef,
mostly to the U.S., and it continues to export smaller quantities today.
Producing a single Costa Rican hamburger involves the destruction of
55 square feet of rain forest -- an area about the size of a small
kitchen. Such a swath typically contains one tree, 50 saplings and
seedlings of 20 to 30 species, thousands of insects comprising hundreds
of species, and an "almost unimaginable diversity and abundance of
mosses, fungi, and microorganisms," according to biologist Christopher
Uhl of Pennsylvania State University and Geoffrey Parker of the New York
Botanical Garden.
Clearing that single patch of wet, lowland Costa Rican forest would
also release as much as 165 pounds of the carbon it naturally stores
into the atmosphere in the form of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide,
according to Sandra Brown, professor of forestry at the University of
Illinois. That's as much carbon as the typical American car releases in
a 20-day period.
%% Hog wash and hot air %%
With such colossal quantities of food, water, and energy going into
the livestock industry, other things are bound to come out. The most
distinctive is animal waste, which after it's dried amounts to 158
million tons a year. Most of the waste comes from cattle in pastures or
on the range, where waste management simply means letting natural
decomposition take its course. But about one-fourth is from stockyards,
chicken factories, and other feeding facilities. There, disposing of
the waste is a vexing task. It must be moved, stored, and spread
without allowing it into water supplies.
Congress first instructed the EPA to regulate animal wastes in the
Clean Water Act of 1972, but the effectiveness of that regulation is
hotly contested. The agricultural industry claims almost no animal
wastes contaminate water, while critics allege widespread violations and
lax enforcement. The EPA has begun to look into the matter, but so far
has little to show. In the one place where the agency has solid data,
the Chesapeake Bay basin, manure from all livestock contribute about
one-tenth of nitrogen and phosphorus water pollution from all sources.
Nitrogen and phosphorus over-fertilize algae, which grow rapidly and
disturb the balance of aquatic ecosystems.
Fertilizers and agricultural chemicals running off of feed-crop and
pasture fields also deserve an entry in animal products' environmental
ledger. U.S. corn fields alone consume about 40 percent of nitrogen
fertilizer along with more herbicides and insecticides than any other
crop.
Lumping together animal wastes and feed fertilizers, livestock
agriculture probably accounts for 40 percent of the nitrogen and 35
percent of phosphorus released into American rivers, lakes, and streams,
according to a computer model devised by Resources for the Future, an
environmental research center in Washington, D.C.
The water woes of animal production run deep too, extending to
underground water tables. As it percolates through the soil, manure or
its chemical constituents can cause serious damage, especially in the
form of health-threatening nitrates. The EPA has found that roughly
one-fifth of the wells in livestock states such as Iowa, Kansas, and
Nebraska have nitrate levels that exceed safety standards. The EPA
can't prove animal farming is the culprit yet, but manure and feed-crop
fertilizers are leading suspects.
As animal wastes and feed-growing chemicals pollute the water,
animals themselves pollute the air. Cattle and other ruminants such as
goats and sheep emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as they digest
grass and other fibrous plants. Each head of American beef cattle
belches out about a third of a pound of methane per pound of beef
yielded. Add the carbon released from fuels burned in animal farming,
and every pound of steak has the same greenhouse-warming effect as a
25-mile drive in a typical American car.
%% Living off the fat of the land %%
The first line of defense against animal agriculture's ecological
side-effects is individual action: eating less meat, or no meat. The
health benefits alone are compelling: the saturated fats in animal
products increase one's risk of heart disease, stroke, and even certain
types of cancer.
In fact, results of a recent comprehensive study of diet and health
in China suggest that the healthiest range for fat consumption is 10 to
15 percent of calories, about a third of current U.S. fat consumption.
But personal decisions to eat foods lower on the food chain won't
suffice without corresponding changes in governmental codes that allow
the livestock industry to deplete and pollute resources without bearing
the costs. What's needed is enough citizens demanding that lawmakers
take aim at the ecological side-effects of meat production.
There is a lot to do. Overgrazing on public land in the western U.S.
for example, continues largely because the BLM and the Forest Service
subsidize and mismanage cattle grazing. This fact is readily apparent
where fences divide public from private land. On the public side, where
the government charges just $1.90 per head of cattle per month, ranchers
run as many cattle as they can, and the land is in various stages of
becoming desert. On the private side, grazing charges are typically
five times higher, and the land is in far better condition, with denser
and more diverse vegetation.
Revenues the government gets from its bargain-basement prices,
furthermore, cover scarcely one-third the costs of its present
inadequate management. They are far too meager to support such
necessary efforts as vigilant monitoring of range conditions, fencing
off degraded areas, and ensuring that ranchers keep their herds moving
to lighten the burden on the land. The House recently approved
increasing grazing fees to $8.70 per head per month by 1994, but
despite the strong margin of passage, 232-192, the measure faces
stiff opposition in the Senate. [it did not pass]
The federal government also takes the blame for some waste of
irrigation water through what Congress estimates is a $2.2 billion
annual subsidy to western water projects. Between $500 million and
$1 billion of that amount goes to feed and fodder growers. Fortunately,
long-term public water contracts are coming up for review across the
west in the next five years, giving environmentalists a chance to
challenge the pork barrel politics that have prevailed so far.
In the rain forests of Central America, the U.S. government could
exert its influence by pressing local leaders to halt the cattle boom in
the forest. Up and down the isthmus, governments lavish credit,
tax-breaks, and extension services on cattle ranchers while neglecting
small farmers and the landless poor.
From there, environmental reformers might move on to tighten
regulation of the water and atmospheric pollution that flows from animal
and feed farms. Next, they could go after animal farms' excessive
reliance on fossil fuels. If such efforts succeed, the full ecological
cost of meat and egg production will show up clearly in the price of a
pork chop or chicken breast. Then people's pocketbooks will guide them
down the food chain.
A diet centered on plant foods may sound bizarre to Americans, but
for most of the Earth's citizens it's the norm. Worldwide, only about
one in four people eats a meat-centered diet. But that is changing
rapidly as incomes in other nations rise. For example, the Japanese
diet of rice and fish is succumbing to the onslaught of high-fat
fast-food. Per-capita consumption of red meat in Japan has doubled
since 1975. Koreans and Taiwanese are following suit.
The logical extension of this trend -- a world where everyone eats as
much meat as Americans -- is a recipe for ecological disaster.
Supporting just the world's current population of 5.3 billion people on
an American-style diet would require as much energy as the world now
uses for all purposes, along with two-and-a-half times as much grain as
all the world's farmers produce. How many planets would it take to feed
the world's projected future population of 10 billion people on the
American ration of eight ounces of grain-fed meat a day?
If the global food system is not to destroy its ecological base, the
onus will be on rich nations to shift from consumption of
resource-intensive foodstuffs toward modest fare.
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