This post from 5 years ago (almost to the day) discussed the views of Richard Manning, the author of the Mother Earth News article cited in the previous post. He has long been crusading against grain feeding of animals but his views have subtly changed since he wrote Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie in 1995. Then he opposed cattle, preferring bison, but now he supports them and the technologies that modern management intensive graziers use. This Audobon review of his 1995 book gives a taste of his old ideas.

It is a plea to change our attitudes toward what was North America's largest biome. Now it is the most altered and degraded. Manning writes, "Our culture's disrespect for its grasslands has produced an environmental catastrophe. It will be the best measure of the maturing of the American environmental movement when it begins to understand and combat this destruction." But our lack of understanding is also resulting in an economic and social catastrophe. This is a rich and brilliantly written book that ranges over the history, literature, biology, politics, economics, sociology and the future of our grasslands.

Homo sapiens evolved in the grasslands of Africa but the dominant American attitude toward the land is a product of the tree culture of northern Europe. Manning believes that we have never understood the prairie and other grasslands of North America. "Just as a forest is not only trees, a grassland is not only grass. It is hundreds, literally hundreds, of species of plants woven together in a complex fabric of interdependencies." We have destroyed this complex fabric. Manning argues that the large mammals which prefer the grassy plains, grizzlies, wolves, bison and elk, have been driven back into mountainous forests. He also believes that the decline of many migratory songbirds is partly related to agricultural practices on the North American plains.

Manning contends that the plowing of the prairie has both environmental and economic consequences. Converting grasslands to wheat fields increases erosion and reduces the biodiversity of the high plains from 250 species of plants to one. It also has produced an unsustainable economy in the Great Plains. The dust bowl era was the first warning but we have forgotten its lessons. In the plains, land under the plow has increased since the dust bowl era. "Farmers began pumping water from the Oglala aquifer onto their fields to insulate themselves from the dust bowl drought. . . Hydrologists suggest that it will be depleted within thirty years," says Manning. We have merely postponed the inevitable by mining the Oglala aquifer to irrigate the plains. . .

Manning believes that second only to the destruction caused by the plow is overgrazing by domestic cattle. Grasslands were adapted to fire and grazing by free-ranging bison. Now, however, cattle are concentrated on relatively small areas, resulting in water pollution, soil erosion and the invasion of exotic alien plants. Bison are adapted to these dry grasslands; cattle are not. In the middle of the 19th century, the Great Plains supported about 50 million bison. A "century's worth of work, warfare, and technology replaced 50 million bison with 45.5 million cattle," Manning says.

I fully agree that we have done our grasslands poorly, but there's a hole in his logic. In that old post I noted: Why would 45.5 million cattle be destructive when 50 million bison were not? Manning's only stated reason is that cattle are not adapted to dry grasslands. That's like saying that dogs are not adapted to cold weather because Chihuahuas clearly are not. Cattle, like dogs, have been domesticated. Different breeds of cattle, like different breeds of dogs, are adapted to a wide variety of environments. There are many breeds of cattle that are well adapted to dry grasslands and ranchers continuously improve the genetics of their herds to match prevailing conditions.

So, it's good to see that Manning has finally grasped what graziers have been saying for decades, even if he does so in the same sort of hyped way as he once promoted bison. His current claim:

Churchill’s producers are raising cattle this way on converted corn and soybean land in Minnesota, which is a bit like building a mosque at the Vatican. They take this plowed-up landscape and plant it to permanent pasture — permaculture modeled on the tallgrass prairie that was the native cover. Many of Churchill’s producers, in fact, don’t own tractors; they don’t need them. It takes a couple of years for the land to recover sufficiently to produce high-quality beef, but it does recover. And after that initial setup, his producers begin showing a profit; in fact, more profit than the corn and soybeans yielded before. Part of this is a result of lower or no costs for inputs such as fertilizer, fuel, pesticides and machinery. This profit is one of the factors that will allow this system to scale up.

Churchill says that on properly recovered land, he can finish about two steers per acre. That is almost precisely the acreage it takes to grow the grain to finish those same steers in a feedlot. This whole system makes economic sense, acre by acre. More than half of our total grain crop goes to feed livestock, so it follows that we can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy to permanent pasture and lose not one ounce of meat production. At the same time, we can produce healthier meat and shift the massive federal subsidies for corn and soybean production to a better use.

This isn't quite right since much of that grain feeds hogs and chickens (and even fish), and they are not ruminants that can thrive on grass. They can eat a little, but they are omnivores like people and need a richer diet. Only the land that grows grain for ruminants (cattle, goats, sheep) can be restored to grassland with no loss of production. Removing grain subsidies, and taking some land out of grain production, would likley raise grain prices even if cattle no longer ate any since other livestock still need it, and world demand is increasing.

It would also likely lead to an increase in dairy costs since many grass based dairies still feed a lot of grain. They feed less than confinement dairies, but it's harder to go all grass for dairy than for beef. It can be done, and if grain prices rise they will do so, but that will mean that the price of their products will rise too, and perhaps be less available. It's hard to predict precisely since market incentives have world wide effects. We might import more.

Also see Fine Grain Analysis, The Problem of Agriculture, and The Wheel for more antique posts that deal with Manning and related subjects.