One of the most persistent bits of ignorance peddled by pseudo-environmentalists devoid of either agricultural or ecological knowledge is that eating beef is harmful to the environment. This Grist article is a case in point.

If all of those people went on an Atkins-style diet, their requirement for animal protein would rise to about 100 grams. A billion dieters each eating an extra 44 grams could not easily be satisfied by giving them a bigger share of current animal protein production. As it is, humans worldwide average only 28 grams per day. Instead, by our calculations, the meat, dairy, poultry, and seafood industries would have to increase output by 25 percent.

The dieters would no longer get much of their protein from plant sources (grains being too heavily "polluted" with carbohydrates), so less cropland would be required for that. Still, the net result of their big switch to animal protein would require almost 250 million more acres for corn, soybeans, and other feed grains. That's because feeding grain to animals and then eating the resultant meat, milk, eggs, or farm-raised fish is much less efficient than eating plant products directly. (Cattle in particular are good at converting grain into wastes like carbon dioxide, methane, and manure. With worldwide per capita grain production in decline since the 1980s, that bovine talent is less well appreciated by the planet's hungrier people.)

Cattle eat grass not grain. Even in the confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs, factory farms) that have become common in western countries in the past few decades cattle eat grass for the majority of their lives and are only fed grain for the last 90-120 days of their lives to fatten them. Most of that fat is not consumed by humans, it is "bark", a layer of back fat that is trimmed and rendered.

Cattle are perhaps the second best friend of humanity, next to dogs, because they perform the miracle of turning inedible grasses and forbs into edible high quality proteins and fats. Both the protein and the fat are well balanced human foods with the proper blend of amino and fatty acids for health. It is little wonder that traditional peoples from Hebrew tribes to Masai tribes to Ogallala Sioux had or still have a spiritual relationship with cattle and ruminants in general.

The idiocy of claiming that eating grain rather than grain finished beef is better for the environment, and so one shouldn't eat beef, is not just that grain feeding cattle isn't useful, but also that grasslands are ecologically sound natural systems while grain fields are ecological wastelands. This is one of the oldest bits of agricultural knowledge. For eons the remedy for exhausted grain fields was to convert them to pasture and graze cattle on them. Methodical systems of field rotation and leys were developed to allow continuous use of land though that only delayed final exhaustion, in effect mining fossil fertility until nothing was left but sand and clay.

The machinery and fertilizer of industrial agriculture conceals the damage to the land from the casual observer by importing fertility to the exhausted land in the form of chemical and mineral soil amendments. But the soil is still degraded by wind and water erosion, mineralization through contact of bare soil with atmosphere, compaction from the weight of machinery, outgassing of CO2 and methane as soil organic matter evaporates and death of soil biota as they are sliced, diced, crushed and poisoned.

Even worse, the environmental costs of mining the ores, manufacturing the machines, transport to and from the fields, and the energy chain to fuel this whole system, must be allocated to the environmental costs of grain production to get a true picture. Add in grain storage, processing into a bewildering variety of starchy junk foods, packaging into convenient consumer parcels and disposal of the resulting wastes and it becomes clear that grain culture is an environmental nightmare. It always has been and always will be. We have made progress by learning to do it in more benign ways, but it is an inherently destructive thing to do. It is little wonder that pastoral peoples were horrified by the introduction of agriculture to the new world (as opposed to hunter/gardener and hunter/gatherer systems).

Fortunately, there are a lot of people working in agriculture that do have knowledge and are using land in more benign pastoral ways that improve the health of soil and the diversity of life while producing food for humans too. It's made difficult by the market distortions resulting from subsidy of grain production. Grain is artificially cheap making it difficult for a conscientious farmer to reject it as animal fodder to supplement or substitute for pasture. It puts the grass farmer at a competitive disadvantage, reversing their natural advantages from lower energy use and soil improvement. This only happens in N. America and Europe though, the rest of the world doesn't waste grain on animals that do fine on grass.

Grain isn't a natural diet. It isn't just bad for humans - making them fat and unhealthy from a poor mix of nutrients - it's even worse for cattle that evolved a specialized digestive systems to perform the grass to beef miracle. No other animals except for fellow ruminant breeds (such as sheep and goats, cloven hooves and cheweth the cud) and bacteria can perform this miracle. Actually, the special digestive system of ruminants harbors symbiotic bacteria so they need some credit for the miracle too. Grass passes through horses, pigs and people undigested. They have nothing in their digestive systems that can break down the cellulose cell walls of grasses or any other vegetable matter. For them it's just "fiber" and helps them make. When cattle are fed starchy diets it screws up their digestive system, gives them indigestion and chronic acidosis, which screws up their blood chemistry, dissolves their bones, destroys their immune system and makes them dependent on continuous medication with bicarbonates and antibiotics. It does something similar to people though the symptoms and diseases differ. Think type II diabetes in children and blindness from vitamin A deficiency.

To improve the human diet for the health of people and the environment select natural beef and dairy products produced on grass. It costs more because it isn't subsidized as grain is, but it's nutritious and tasty gourmet food. Go ahead, you deserve it. Think of the children. Bugs and birds will thank you. ADM and Monsanto will curse you along with the pseudo-environmentalists that work at cross purposes with the environment. It might be worth remembering that mother nature never farms without livestock. She modestly covers her bare soil with greenery keeping it moist and fertile beneath. When we rip her breasts with steel fingers to grow monocultures of grain she dies. Images help make better decisions sometimes and you may need some bucking up in the face of the enviro-wackos false assertions. But all humor aside the fact is that industrial grain monoculture is the single greatest environmental threat humans have ever devised. We can't stop doing it yet but we can avoid excessive use. One day we will learn to synthesize food from rocks and the cattle can get busy healing all those grain fields, the dogs can revert to wolves and together the grass, cattle and wolves can restore ecological order.

Note: This post and the next were originally posted at Crumb Trail but they belong with this collection of rambling rants.