A new study from Oxford published in the journal Science showed some interesting results about our food and our climate. One bowl of rice can have six times the climate impact of another. More greenhouse gases are emitted to give you a bottle of beer than to give you the same amount of beer from a keg. One cup of coffee's carbon footprint may be fifteen times bigger than one made from a different crop of beans.
The study investigated the complexities of the world's agriculture to determine the broad environmental impacts of food production.
Over 570 million farms produce over 5 billion tons of food a year, providing over 20 trillion calories to Earth’s almost 8 billion people. The process creates over 14 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2eq), over a quarter of human-produced greenhouse gas emissions. Another 3 billion tons of CO2eq are emitted during nonfood agriculture and deforestation.
Today’s agriculture uses a lot of resources, covering 43% of the world’s ice- and desert-free land. Of this land, about 87% is for food and 13% is for biofuels and textile crops, wool and leather. Two-thirds of the planet’s freshwater is used for irrigation, usually during hot times of the year or in water-scarce areas, creating almost 95% of the world’s water scarcity.
But there are ways of reducing agriculture’s environmental impacts. The researchers consolidated data on the multiple environmental impacts of over 38,000 farms producing 40 different agricultural goods around the world in a meta-analysis comparing various ways of producing food.
The upshot of the study is that changing farming practices could achieve a lot, but changing our diets would do a lot more.
Together with replacing all fossil fuels with hydro, nuclear and renewables, changing our diet is about all that could actually wrangle the climate issue in time to do any good. A pound of meat production produces more greenhouse gases, and uses more land, than a pound of all other foodstuffs – combined.
This is not just an interesting sidebar. The Fourth National Climate Assessment reiterated that the effects of global warming are here already, and it poses a profound threat to Americans’ well-being.
About the same time, the Green New Deal appeared and various partisan voices started crying, “They’re coming for your cheeseburgers.”
That’s both foolish and correct at the same time.
Never mind that the medical community has been saying for decades that we really need to eat less meat. Any successful Green New Deal must reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible, as well as from every other sector.
According to the U.S. EPA, farming is responsible for a bout 10% of America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Almost half of that comes from animal agriculture. Two-thirds of the animal sector’s emissions are from animal farts and burps, and cows fart and burp the most, by far.
This isn’t just a problem in the U.S. More than two-thirds of global emissions from the livestock industry are due to cows—not just their gassiness, but their endless eating. Cows consume immense amounts of grain, which requires a lot of fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas.
There are two paths forward that address this problem in different ways:
1) make fake meat that actually tastes and feels like real beef
2) change cow and sheep grazing to be “regenerative”, meaning mostly net zero carbon
These are often viewed as competing for the same customers, but that is a false comparison. Lowering the amount of actual meat consumed but raising it sustainably, while also consuming plant-based materials like a veggie burger as good as anything from a burger joint, are mutually-compatible futures that, sociologically, must go forward together in order to work.
Impossible Foods seems to have done the impossible and created plant-based meat that really can fool anyone. Currently valued at $2 billion, Impossible leads the fast-growing plant-based food revolution with a patty made partly from genetically-modified soybeans sourced from farms in Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, which have a carbon footprint of only 2 pounds of carbon for every pound of food produced.
Compared to conventional beef production, the company says the Impossible Burger uses 87% less water, 96% less land, emits 89% fewer greenhouse gases, and 92% less aquatic pollutants.
The company is planning a plant-based Impossible Whopper at Burger King locations across the country within a year.
Regenerative grazing is based on emulating the natural life cycle of migrating ungulate herds like cows. Rotating the herds between a series of fenced-off paddocks allows for periods of intense grazing, where the soil is disturbed and the animals’ manure is naturally deposited and incorporated, followed by fallow periods with no grazing where the land is given time to rest and regenerate.
During the regenerative period, the land acts as a carbon sink increasing soil fertility, insect and plant biodiversity, and soil carbon sequestration, bringing the field back to natural conditions to start the process over again. No fertilizer or plowing and seeding.
White Oak Pastures, which carries out regenerative grazing, and General Mills, which buys the company’s meat, released a life-cycle carbon study that determined regenerative grazing produces net total emissions of (minus) -3.5 pounds of carbon for every pound of beef produced, demonstrating that regenerative grazing is sustainable and can act as a carbon sink.
By contrast, conventional beef produces 33 pounds of carbon for every pound of beef, conventional pork 9 pounds of carbon for every pound of food, conventional chicken 6 pounds of carbon for every pound of food. This is in contrast to conventional soybeans which produce 2 pounds of carbon for every pound of food, as described above.
But regenerative grazing takes a bit more land, if you include the fallow pastures between grazing. So perhaps we can’t replace all conventional beef with this, but a combination of regenerative beef with plant-based products could replace enough to cut emissions from the agricultural sector by 80%, not to mention the water pollution issues that come from over-use of fertilizers in conventional methods.
So it’s not that you won’t be able to eat a Big Mac, it’s just that we shouldn’t be eating billions of them a day, like we do now.
