I wrote this essay almost two years ago now, but the facts are all still relevant and the links work. There are more studies that have since come out that reaffirm and support all of my arguments here, but I do not have the time to add them in and I don’t think they’re needed really. Since I wrote this piece, another film in the same vein by the makers of Kiss the Ground, the film and fallout from which inspired me to write this essay, has been made and released. I may write about it someday but I may not. I won’t bore you with the details, as there are plenty below, but my researching and writing this piece resulted in the loss of friendships (notably the one mentioned in it) and gainful employment, hence the two-year delay in my posting it here. All I will say is that people have very strong emotional attachments to eating meat, and do not react kindly to real tangible evidence that if they care at all about climate breakdown or climate justice and live in a position of relative global privilege, they should really just stop eating it. If you can stomach that, read on.

I had another unfortunate climate kerfuffle a few weeks ago, also with a friend, but this time with a slightly different flavour of denial than flat-out conspirituality. Some climate activists and scientists argue that real climate denial is only about disavowal that the climate is changing at all, or that it is due to human activity. But others (myself included) maintain that a denial of the empirically-supported strategies needed to stop climate breakdown from progressing further is another shade of it. This shade of denial (a pinky red-brown?) is showing up in many forms, and in this case, it materialized as a popular ‘documentary’ film that my friend decided to host a supportive public viewing of, against my protestations and empirically-based explanations.

With the world literally on fire around us, it is getting much harder for people who don’t like how the actual ‘solutions’ to our climate and ecological crises will affect their privilege, or their world view, to deny that climate is changing unnaturally, so they deny what needs to happen to stop it instead. Like dramatically reducing meat consumption, especially beef. Some even fervently assert that we actually need to consume more ruminant animals in order to stop and even reverse climate breakdown. It is an incredible claim, highlighted uncritically in said film, that requires incredible supporting evidence, and warrants further investigation.

Fortunately, there has been a lot of empirically-based research into the relationships between meat consumption and the different ways of producing it, and climate breakdown and ecological destruction. There is so much research out there on this topic, and so many lines of reasoning (greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, environmental impact, Etc.) that could be used to refute the claim that more livestock, “done right”, will ‘save the planet’ that it seems strange that we’re still talking about this. But here we are. The film also claims that regenerative agriculture will “completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, [and] restore lost ecosystems” without defining it, or supporting that assertion with math, or examining the systemic implications of such a switch on how people’s diets would have to change, namely, eating a lot fewer animals. This is a propaganda own-goal, camouflaged with Hollywood cinematic skills and celebrity voice-overs.

There is no doubt in the scientific literature that wealthy humans need to dramatically reduce the amount of meat they eat (up to 90% less beef in the US and UK) in order to keep global heating to below Earth-system-destroying limits. World governments have dithered and delayed meaningful action to transition off of fossil fuels and stop ecosystem destruction for so long that humanity has no wiggle room whatsoever now if we want to avoid passing tipping points in Earth’s natural systems (and trust me, we really want to avoid that). We also need to be very cognisant of the other seven planetary boundaries that human activity has already pushed across, almost all of those transgressions fueled by modern agriculture. Global livestock and the grain they consume uses 83% of global farmland, but provides only 18% of food calories. Nearly 60% of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production, yet beef accounts for less than 2% of the calories that are consumed throughout the world. Hard to see how that math adds up to ‘we need to eat more cows’.

The (Flawed) Argument for more beef

But proponents of the just add-more-beef strategy claim that these many studies overlook their assertion that ruminants can help to sequester carbon from the atmosphere in soils to the extent that we could reach pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels in decades. They claim that high-stocking-rates (number of animals per acre) of large ruminants like cows add carbon to the soil by working their excrement into it with their hooves, which promotes soil health and the growth of long-rooted grasses once the cattle are moved to a different pasture. They claim that this mimics nature, and that native grasslands held large amounts of soil organic carbon in North America and Africa due to high numbers of large grazing animals like bison and elephants, before Europeans showed up.

It is a nice story. A vision of the descendants of colonialists righting the wrongs of our ancestors and saving the world from climate and ecological breakdown while eating grass-fed cheeseburgers. But it is not supported by scientific evidence. Fossil evidence even suggests that high numbers of pre-contact grazing animals on grasslands, the very premise for the holistic grazing model, was actually due to the culling of their natural predators by earlier human populations. It is likely that ruminant manure has never been deposited on grasslands at present agricultural rates, let alone those proposed by an actual colonialist and mass elephant killer in a cameo in the popular ‘documentary’ film that my friend adored.

The crux of the argument for holistic planned grazing, as well as flavors of less-extreme managed grazing practices as a climate mitigator, is the cow-enhancement of the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. This happens through the photosynthesis of plants, then locking it in the ground as soil organic carbon (SOC), explained above. This is often pitched with the slogan: “It’s not the cow, it’s the how.” Here’s a breakdown of the scientific evidence:

  • Sometimes, maybe; mostly not: In some practices, like silvopasture, grazing can sequester carbon to a certain extent, and even offset most CO2 emissions from the grazing animals themselves, but only in very specific circumstances and low stocking rates, which amounts to about 2% of global ‘improved’ beef operations. A global review study of over 300 papers concluded that in the rare, best-case scenario, the maximum amount of emissions from cows that can be sequestered in soils through some kind of managed grazing is 60%.

‘Holistic’ grazing, touted in the film, prescribes very high stocking rates, and is shown to consistently do more harm than good. One recent global study found that “heavy grazing significantly increased soil compaction and reduced SOC, NO3–, and soil moisture.” Another found that as herds become more dense, methane and nitrous oxide emissions, two GHGs from ruminant farming that are much more powerful than CO2 (27 and 273 times, respectively) from the animals quickly overrides any potential climate benefits.

  • It’s hard to tell: Even these conclusions are hampered by the fact that the measurement of carbon in soils is not standardized, is very difficult to do well, and the amounts can vary dramatically over just one pasture and from year to year. So farms that offer carbon offset credits for sale, or claim to be carbon-negative, estimate their SOC numbers based on computer models or extrapolation. But models are only as good as the data and assumptions used to build them, which in this case, aren’t good.
  • We’re not counting everything: Another problem is the carbon opportunity cost (COC) of raising animals and the feed for them (grain or grass) on land that would otherwise have been a natural ecosystem, which is more efficient at taking in carbon and keeping it in the ground. A recent global study of beef operations showed that the average COC is 130% larger than production emissions (the only thing measured by most studies) across all animal raising methods, meaning that we are missing a huge part of the carbon picture by focusing solely on farm emissions. We must crucially also consider that farmland left to regenerate to nature would more than double the carbon sequestration value of it. This research is a game-changer in the debate about diet and climate.
  • It can’t wash its own face: A study published in November 2023 demonstrated that it is “not feasible” for animal farming to even cancel its own greenhouse gas emissions by sequestering carbon through any grazing method on a global scale. Interestingly, this research considered the fact that methane and nitrous oxide behave very differently in the atmosphere than CO2, and took that into account when calculating the effect of animal farm production emissions on global heating. They found that just to break even at present production rates, ruminant animal farmers would have to increase their SOC by 25% to 2000%, depending on the soils and climate of a region, which is an “implausibly large” task.

Worldwide, about 135 gigatons of carbon sequestration is required to offset present-day methane and nitrous oxide emissions from livestock, which is nearly twice the amount of SOC in current managed grasslands. No climate change-reversal happening here. It is also about equal to the amount of carbon released from soils since agriculture began around 12,000 years ago. One of the authors of the study remarked in an interview that claims by livestock farmers that they are doing “a climate-positive job” are “just bullshit.”

  • It needs more land: The shade of regenerative agriculture that incorporates rotational grazing requires more land- from 2.5 to 20 times more – than conventional spray-and-pray grain production and feedlot livestock, not only for the pastures for grazing but also for the crop rotation, because it requires land to rest, sometimes for several years, in between plantings and grazing. Resting land means no production, which commonly means lower yields, which means less food produced per acre, so more land is required to meet needs. Many practitioners still use pesticides and herbicides as well. Holistic high-stocking-density grazing, promoted in the film, claims to avoid these negative impacts on soil by moving cattle through grasslands quickly, but that has been disproved many times over.

More land for farming is the last thing that we can afford- from both a climate and ecological perspective. The carbon production footprint of grass-finished (grazed) cows is typically 20% higher than grain-finished, but when the COC of land use is taken into account, it is 42% higher than intensive beef. To maintain the same consumption levels of just beef in the USA under holistic grazing, we’d need to raise 30% more cows and find up to 270% more farmland (including land saved from growing animal feed) for grazing, which amounts to almost half of the land in the country. It inevitably would have to be converted from natural ecosystems, which are worth more in net economic benefits to humans left intact, and are already at risk of tipping. This would be a death sentence, even if managed grazing was able to work perfectly and sequester carbon in the soil at the rates it’s proponents claim (which it cannot).

  • SOC sequestration is finite and temporary: Perhaps the simplest and most glaring fault in the argument for livestock- enabled soil carbon sequestration is that the soil organic carbon reservoir is finite and temporary. For any kind of SOC sequestration strategy to work, the land must be protected from future land use change such as a switch back to conventional farming, human settlement or industry, or climate change that increases rates of soil respiration or wildfires, forever. Any change in land use other than ecosystem regeneration, any change in climate, will release all that stored carbon right back to the atmosphere. And SOC reservoirs fill up in about 20-30 years, with their ability to sequester atmospheric carbon tapering off toward the end. Think of the space carbon can occupy in the soil as a bucket – once it’s full, it’s full. Any GHGs produced on the land afterwards overflow straight into the sky.

To top that off, a paradigm shift in soil science began about ten years ago, with the discovery that humus particles, once thought to be stable forms of soil carbon that remained that way indefinitely, did ultimately decompose and release their carbon to the atmosphere. Although the theory of forever-stable humus is still taught in most soil science textbooks, the consensus now is that soil and carbon pass like ships in the night of the geologic-scale carbon cycle.

I tried explaining all of this to my friend, certainly not in so many words, but nearly with this many references to peer-reviewed papers. Perhaps it was a bit daunting. Afterall, they only wanted to show a movie at the community center. In one email, I sent a link to researcher’s at Oxford’s FCRN eight-minute cartoon video summarizing the ins and outs that I detailed above. I suggested that they could show it after the film. They declined, saying that it was “too technical.”

Why the ick about numbers and facts? Or green denialism

There is a subtle tenor amongst practitioners and advocates of certain shades of regenerative agriculture and flavors of managed grazing that is anti-establishment for the sake of it. The practices are seen as something ‘outside the mainstream’ and therefore more appealing, more valid, and deliberately silenced by ‘junk scientists’. This framing fits a certain world view, and parallels conspiracy fantasies like anti-vax and even wellness-climate-denial. They eschew Big Ag and Big Chem, but are active capitalists who’s farms are enclosed, and look to profit off of carbon credits and/or climate branding with their empirically unsupported, unverifiable, and at best temporary soil carbon sequestration. Ironically, and unsurprisingly, the cow-as-climate saviour fairy tale has been enthusiastically embraced by the Big Beef industry.

Numerous blog and alt-media rebuttals by some of these Alt-Ag folks of peer-reviewed scientific studies and well-researched, popularized equivalents, appear at first glance to be of similar high quality and therefore worthy of consideration. But closer inspection reveals their beef bias through ad hominem attacks, name calling, red herrings, and a general disregard for scientific rigor and even disdain for empirical evidence (“the scientific method never discovered anything”). They pit ‘small farmers’ (hard working honest folks!) against ‘experts’ (out of touch intellectuals!) and invoke the same “class war” language as far-right pundits. It appears as though diagonalism has reached the alternative agriculture community. It could also be that sticking to their beliefs and connections to their like-minded community simply offer more comfort than numbers and well-researched facts.

It is also common to hear in these circles that eating as much meat as we wealthy do now is normal and natural, even though history and archeological evidence suggests otherwise. Some others attempt to fight fire with fire, and compare apples to oranges and cite picked cherries from scientific studies that they clearly didn’t read carefully or don’t understand, in order to refute the consensus that privileged people simply must eat a lot less meat, and urgently. This technique too, has echoes of popular conspiracy theories. Also ironically, more-cows-to-save-the-planet-naturally! is a form of techno-optimism, as it promotes the idea that we can ‘solve’ climate change with human ingenuity and exceptionalism without having to sacrifice.

I do think that these science-and-numbers-shy proponents of certain alternative-animal-farming flavours mean well (with a few exceptions), and I completely understand and support a distrust of established industrial farming and the urgent need to build a different food system. I understand feeling cut off from nature and from what keeps us alive, and wanting to re-establish those connections. More people should want to do that. I count my friend among these well-meaners, albeit misguided.

But by attempting to re-do the farming of animals without an actual holistic accounting of the planetary boundary and human-system costs of their methods that lie firmly within a growth capitalist system, they do much more harm than good. Their myopic vision of a nostalgia-rich, bucolic, small-farm with happy cows future is predicated on the unacknowledged untimely deaths of billions of less-fortunate people (and ruminants) through chaotic multiple- system collapse. This gigantic blind spot comes down to privileged white people in wealthy nations (how many times have I written that phrase in an essay?) not seeing or examining their privilege in a world in which our actions and choices affect billions of other humans and more-than-humans in existential ways. Of course science, math, and accounting are not the only valid ways to construct knowledge. But when it comes to understanding physical realities, they kinda are.

Climate Justice

This might be a good time to remind ourselves of the fact that us humans all live on the same planet together, and that the existential problems that we are facing are global. I understand the impulse to ‘do something’ locally to address the immense disfunction of the global food system, and we absolutely must. But in doing so it is crucial that we are also mindful of how the decisions we make in our own communities affect poorer and marginalized people around the world who bear little to no responsibility for these crises and have little ability to address them. As Dr. Simplice Nouala, Senior Livestock Expert in Agriculture and Food Security at the African Union Commission writes:

“Viewing livestock and its climate impact in developing countries through the same lens as livestock in the Global North is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, actively harmful… many of these countries’ livestock sectors can help them endure this change in the short term and transition fairly in the long run. This is because livestock across the Global South is not simply the packaged meat, milk, and eggs Western audiences are familiar with; it is a complex production system that anchors whole economies, societies and ecosystems.”

Africa accounts for only 3-6% of historic greenhouse gas emissions, and is already being disproportionately impacted by climate breakdown and ecological destruction. It is a similar story in most global south nations. If there is going to be any meat raising and consumption on Earth at all, these folks need to be prioritized.

So if the world needs to dramatically reduce its consumption of animals (which it does), and if we want to do this from a climate justice perspective (which we must), privileged people like you and me need not only to look at how some animals for meat can be raised but also where, and who gets to eat them. Proponents of holistic, managed, rotational, or whatever shade of grazing of ruminant animals, must examine their privilege as mostly white, financially comfortable global north consumers. This is the real “class war” in agriculture systems. It isn’t only a moral issue; reducing meat consumption in rich countries is a highly effective climate mitigation strategy. No matter how you raise it – small farm, ‘regenerative’, or not –  as a globally-privileged meat-eating person you are consuming more than your fair share of Earth’s dwindling carbon budget. Even if you could ‘do meat right’, in the context of climate justice, you shouldn’t do it at all.

I’ve encountered many, many caring, intelligent people who justify their high-by-global-standards meat consumption with “it’s grass-fed,” “humanely killed,” “organic,” or “local.” But most grass-fed beef labeled as a product of the US is imported from Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South America, and it carries higher climate and environmental costs, detailed above. Local does not automatically mean good, or humane, or organic, or ‘climate-friendly’. I’ve also heard “I know it’s bad but I own it,” whatever that means, and I doubt that they do. Most just buy any expensive ham sandwich or cuts of beef at the food co-op and think no more of it. Nobody thinks about how that sandwich or beef is paid for with the loss of cultures, traditions, sustenance, and ultimately, lives of people, usually of colour, on the other side of the world.

Privileged white people, mostly in the global north, need to stop eating meat, especially cows, so that those who did not cause this mess can have a better chance at survival in the future we have ordained, and to have the best possible chance that that future is livable for all. This includes me, this includes my friend, and it includes the entire little community who watched an ill-researched film and believed it’s pinky red-brown shade of green denialism.