The previous post dealt with the agricultural and ecological ignorance of the claim that the environment would be well served by eating grain rather than grain fed beef, even though grain is not needed for beef. That same Grist article makes a second idiotic claim.

Cattle and other ruminant animals, whose numbers would have to rise by 25 percent to supply our [Atkins] dieters, get a large share of their food from pasture and rangeland. If most of the additional animals were raised on current range and pasture that are already fully stocked, the result would be overgrazing and degradation. If new pastures were to be created for, say, half of the additional animals, a billion more acres would have to be found. Most of this would probably be obtained by deforestation, which could mean that 10 percent of the Earth's remaining forests would have to go.

In the US Cattle are grazed on marginal land, often semi-arid land, that is unsuited to grain monoculture because it is too poor and dry. For the best of this marginal land a rule of thumb is that it takes 10 acres of land to feed 1 animal unit (AU - varies, an approximation for a cow and calf, 2 steers or 1 bull) for 1 year. Much US rangeland is so poor it takes much more than 10 acres.

For such large areas it is not economically feasible to practice management intensive grazing - simulation of natural herd behavior - and so get increased, natural style production. If people were as cheap as they once were we could still have boys and dogs keep the herd together and move them like a natural herd, or if electric fences were dirt cheap (they're already pretty cheap) fences could substitute for herders. But as things are we have the worst land and the worst management practices used for grazing. This is what the enviro-idiots use as the basis of their doom projections. Garbage in, garbage out.

On good land, the kind used for grain production, it only takes 1 acre to support an AU, sometimes less and sometimes more depending on latitude and the resultant length of the growing season as well as rainfall and fertility. Well over half of the grain produced in the US is used for animal feed. A great deal of grain is exported at subsidized prices less than production cost which depresses world prices and harms developing economies. Conversion of grain fields producing animal feed and export grain, rather than deforestation, would supply needed pasture.

But the authors of this article aren't just idiots, they are also cynical and deceitful. Both work at The Land Institute (TLI), a private research institute dedicated to an effort to develop perennial grain plants as a solution to the environmental devastation caused by monoculture of annual grains. See this earlier post, The Problem of Agriculture, for more about The Land Institute which asserts that agriculture does not have problems, it IS a problem. It is a fundamentally flawed activity that isn't just unnatural, it is anti-natural and has been the cause of land ruination for eons.

It certainly would be good to have perennial grain crops grown in polyculture. It will be a magnificent achievement if the high-tech breeding efforts of TLI can create them since annual and perennial plants have fundamentally different survival strategies. Annual plants grow fast and die young but launch their genome into the future by producing huge amounts of seed, the grain humans value. Perennial plants grow slowly but live long. Reproduction isn't as high on their list as individual survival. They do reproduce but not just by seed, they also propagate daughter clones with tillers and rhizomes. They tend to spend little energy on seed production since it is very costly. Producing a schizophrenic perennial plant that produces copious seed is a challenge.

Wes Jackson was the primary founder and inspiration for TLI. He chose their location in Kansas in part because he recognized what an environmental disaster it had been to plow up the prairie for grain production. The perennial grasses that dominated the prairie, along with herds of Bison and frequent natural fire, constituted a very productive and sustainable ecology that had a greater native human population than it has now using the methods of Euro-immigrants.

I wish Jackson and TLI well, perennial grains would be wonderful, but it seems more sensible to restore the prairie and the Bison, or any other ruminant, and use modern management intensive grazing techniques to increase the health and productivity of the land. That transition is already in progress since many recognize the wisdom of doing so. As soon as grain subsidies end there will be more conversions since unsubsidized grain farming is not economically viable at current prices. In that case less grain will be grown since it will be too expensive to use for animal feed. The land can revert to grazing land and gain manifold efficiencies.

Grazing instead of grain for meat and dairy production isn't a wild, untested idea. The majority of the world does it this way and can undercut US and European prices. We know how to manage grazing lands for both high productivity and ecological health. We can produce food as well as increase soil depth and fertility, increase biodiversity, reduce both flooding and drought, refill aquifers, and reduce the use of pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics and fertilizer.

We won't stop grain farming, who wants a world with no bread and pasta, but the current overproduction and overuse of grain is ruining the health of the planet as well as humans and animals that consume it.