Taking the Cow Path
Did environmentalists lay an egg on cattle?
Note: image credit on social preview photo: Iowa State University.
I can’t shake the idea that climate change warriors and other environmentalists have made a terrible mistake by focusing so much energy on cow farts and other environmental degradation caused by cattle. Their climate change arguments go something like this:
The multi-chambered stomach characteristic of ruminants (cattle, sheep, deer and any even-toed hoofed animal) results in pound-for-pound methane emissions far greater than birds and other mammals.
Methane has about 80 times more warming potential than CO2. You should know, however, that methane persists in the atmosphere for only a decade compared to centuries or millennia for CO2 molecules. This reduces the long-term impact of a methane molecule to 28 times that of a CO2 molecule.
In many agricultural societies, especially those in wealthy countries, cattle now eat mostly annual grains. The production of these crops requires inputs of fossil fuel for machinery and fertilizer resulting in the emission of CO2 and Nitrous Oxide (N2O), the latter of which is 300 times more potent than CO2 and results from fertilization and tillage practices.
It’s a basic fact of physics that the metabolic processes of a large organism are going to consume more energy (again, pound for pound) than those of a small organism. This in a nutshell is the argument for eating insects. And more chicken. And in the latter case, this is what has happened in the U.S. over the last century.
Chickens (Gallus gallus) top all other domesticated species when it comes to making protein. If you assign an arbitrary 10 for a chicken’s meat producing efficiency, then a hog is 3.4 and a cow 1.4, and that pecking order has only widened over the last century as breeding and soy meal have enabled improvements in poultry efficiency that far outpace that for pork and beef. And since 60% of a chicken is edible (53% for a hog and 40% for a cow), a distinct price advantage exists for poultry. Finally, tack on some genius marketing that has sold chicken meat as a healthier choice, and it’s now the first protein choice for many. Skinless chicken breast actually has more cholesterol than lean beef although the beef has more saturated fat.
That word efficiency keeps popping up everywhere these days and if ‘Capitalism’ is the religion of America, then the Book of Efficiency is its gospel. As others have observed (Wendell Berry comes to mind), we’ve sacrificed our dignity and our environment at the Altar of Efficiency, and we seem poised to degrade ourselves further with the emergence of AI. Efficiency, or at least a mirage of it, rules agriculture and our overall food supply with Trumpian clumsiness while imperiling our air, water, wildlife and health.
You often hear farmers complain they’re involuntarily pigeonholed into a dysfunctional system that is maladapted to human nutrition and desired environmental outcomes. Although there certainly is some truth to the pigeonholing, it should not be seen as fait accompli for farming but rather one more manifestation of the political and economic dysfunction serving as the backdrop. Let us not forget that Trump got 78% of the vote in farming-dependent counties, many of which will be among the hardest hit by his interruption of SNAP benefits. (There are 27 ‘farming dependent’ counties in Iowa.)
Sorry about getting on a tangent here, but how about this perversion: Wapello County is home to a pork packing plant run by the Brazilian meat packing behemoth JBS that has boxed more than a billion pounds of pork per year. Wapello County is also the Iowa county with the highest percentage of residents receiving SNAP assistance (13.9%).
My dad never said he was going to take the scenic route when driving. Rather unhurried by life most of the time, instead he’d say he was going to ‘take the cow path.’ I’m going to offer that up here (take the cow path) as a way to think about Iowa’s problems with agriculture and environment.
While Iowa’s beef industry has often been in the top 10 nationwide, it peaked in 1976 and in 2024 beef cattle inventories were the lowest since 1952. Only about 3% of U.S. beef cattle now reside in Iowa. Even still, the number of Iowa farmers raising cattle has not dropped nearly as precipitously over the past 25 years as the number of farmers raising hogs, and the size spectrum of beef operations is much more evenly distributed than hogs and laying chickens where the huge operations predominate.
U.S. beef cattle inventories have also been at or near record lows for various reasons but one is not the price of beef at the grocery store. Beef prices are at record highs and the price of beef has increased about 1.5 times that of inflation since 1997. Drought along with high input costs have been recent factors for declining inventories, but imported beef and consolidation in the packing industry have distorted markets to the packers’ advantage, discouraging farmers that might otherwise want to raise cattle. Four packers control >80% of the market: Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef. JBS donated $5 million to Trump’s inaugural; four months later the Brazilian meat giant won approval from the SEC to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Now Trump says he’ll allow more Argentine beef into the U.S. to combat high prices. The evidence that this will work is non-existent.
I’d like to suggest to you that smartly returning more cattle while reconfiguring how they are raised here in Iowa could improve both our water quality and our rural economy. What is ‘smartly’, you ask? Well, it’s returning at least some cattle production to pasture. Much of our pasture land in Iowa has been lost to corn (because of ethanol) and soybean (to feed animals in confinements). If you’re worried about cow farts, remember that a whole lot of greenhouse gas is released by row crop agriculture. At the same time, there is abundant evidence that livestock raised in pastoral systems can be done in an environmentally benign way, at least compared to corn and soy production. Grazing cattle can commingle with wind and solar power generation and can graze in timber without causing great ecological damage.
Iowa cattle can’t do much grazing in the winter and thus they need something to tide them over. Grass hays and hay from crops like alfalfa and clovers pollute far less than either corn or soy and diversifying a farm with these has a multitude of other ecological benefits. They also require far less fossil fuel to bring to harvest when compared to corn and soy, and their input costs are a fraction of the big two.
USDA and Iowa State guidelines for grazing in Iowa peg an average of 2.5 acres of pasture per cow/calf pair. Using that math, we could reduce row cropped area by 3 million acres (roughly 12%) if we returned cattle inventory to their 1976 peak. Helping Iowa farmers market more sustainably- and humanely-raised beef cattle so they could be raised profitably is something policy makers could and should tackle. And returning marginal cropland to pasture is something that absolutely must happen for cleaner water, and should be incentivized in my view. It makes way more sense than the finger-in-the-dike edge of field nonsense promoted by Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig and Co., which only helps prop up and entrench the polluting corn-soy ogre.
Make no mistake that pastured cattle can do a lot of environmental damage, especially if you give them free rein to access streams. Many Iowa streams were ruined in this fashion over the last century. But there is no reason for this to happen in the present day, as our knowledge and ability to prevent it is well developed and effective.
With a year left before the next big election, I’d advise you to listen closely to what candidates say about ag and environment issues, and if they can summon even a single detailed idea about them. My observation is that it’s rare to listen to people talk about D governor candidate Rob Sand without hearing barely-concealed disgust about his reticence to discuss Iowa’s water. Reportedly he has assembled a committee to help him learn. Sand’s challenger, Julie Stauch, has given the issue more thought than about anybody in Iowa politics. Long shot R governor candidate Eddie Andrews also wants to form a committee of some sort to figure out “why nitrate is in the water.” Yeah, it’s a mystery, Eddie.
My prediction is that the Democratic Party will ultimately coalesce around a soil health narrative for improved water quality. This means incentivizing practices that sequester carbon in the top few inches of soil. People don’t like hearing this when I say it, but here it is: WE CANNOT SOIL HEALTH OUR WAY OUT OF THIS ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARE. Mining and burning fossil fuel to grow corn so we can sequester a little carbon in a thin layer of soil or pipe it from an Iowa ethanol plant to North Dakota bedrock is insanity, at least compared to keeping the petroleum in the ground in the first place.
My advice to environmentalists on cattle is to get over it. The problem isn’t the cattle, which can help manage the energy flows and ecology of a farm better than the smartest ecologist. The problem is how they’re usually raised—in feedlots or other types of confined systems, divorced from biological systems that benefit from the presence of ruminants.
There’s one other small (or large) problem here and that is the demographics of Iowa farmers. The average age of this farmer is pushing 60 and this is not an age bracket physically well suited to handling cattle. The hard truth is that growing corn and beans has been made so easy by GMO technology that some 85 year olds (and older) can do it with relative ease, and then follow the snow geese south where they can watch Fox News and Wheel of Fortune from the comfort of their travel trailer or condo. We as a society should not be propping up that activity with our tax dollars.
We desperately need a changing of the guard in Iowa farming. Doing this while preserving the lifestyle to which the Harolds have become accustomed will not be easy. Getting land into the hands of young, eager, and rugged people that aspire to produce food and not just raw materials will be the challenge. Humanely raised beef while not polluting our water could be one of those foods.
Finally, I can barely scratch the surface on these integrated topics of cattle and climate change and Iowa farming with one little essay. If this topic interests you, the book below will not disappoint.
An important consideration in promoting a transition to grazing is that land previously used for corn and soybeans will not produce abundant forage for cattle in the first years without substantial inputs (depending on soil testing: nitrogen for grasses, potassium for clover, mycorrhizal fungi for soil life, lime for pH). For year-round production and the cost-effective option to have breeding stock, one would also need to bale graze throughput the winter (and freeze-proof water). I speak from experience and from a small farm startup with very little capital to invest in that transition. We practice rotational grazing so we also have water lines and movable stock tanks. If we could handle the labor and water needs for winter bale grazing it’s likely that ten years after introducing cattle we would have a lush drought resistant pasture. Without sufficient and costly inputs, it took us four years to introduce cattle, and then it was a drought so we had to buy hay.
What I love about this piece is that it is SO easily understood by people like me who know next to nothing about farming, soil, and animal husbandry. Thank you for not giving up on us and continuing to help us understand.