There have been a number of articles of late about Agentina and grass fed beef. This one isn't the best, but it is recent.

Cattle once ruled the seemingly endless grasslands here, delivering decades of prosperity for Argentina and producing a brand familiar to the world -- natural, grass-fed beef.

But a quiet revolution has arrived on the famously fertile pampa, a swath of plains bigger than Texas.

Instead of roaming freely and eating to their hearts' content, a growing number of Argentine cattle are spending a third of their lives in U.S.-style feedlots. . .

all over the pampa, ranchland that was home to Angus and Hereford cows has in recent years been replaced by fields of soybeans, corn and wheat as commodity prices skyrocketed by more than 300 percent. This year, a third of the 15 million animals expected to go to slaughter will fatten up in the now-ubiquitous feedlots, three times as many as in 2001.

The Argentine government established export restrictions and price controls to keep beef prices artificially low, and a currency devaluation made exporters of cash crops more competitive. Agricultural subsidies also helped make corn feed affordable for cattlemen, allowing them to move their animals off the land. The combination of factors resulted in many farmers switching from cattle to crops over the past decade.

What is not mentioned is that recent outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease reduced exports, restricting them to to more thoroughly processed products that could not spread the disease to importing countries. Their neighbor, Uruguay, has some of the same issues but better government. To their shame, Argentina ends up importing some beef from Uruguay as a consequence.

It is also worth asking why grain prices rose so high. It was in part a function of energy politics and the recent fashion for burning food, and rising costs of energy - and so grain production - as markets in fuel and fertilizer rose.

How then does it make sense to plow up the pampa for grain crops? The situation will get worse rather than better. Grain prices may rise but so will costs of production, making grain ever less attractive as animal fodder. I think that the confusion rests on a comparision of old grazing methods with modern cropping methods.

Walking on a dirt road lined with pens, Saparrat recalled how he "felt bad" when he started working at Santa Maria nine years ago and saw cattle in corrals. But he said he has come to appreciate the efficiency of it all -- how 7,000 animals take up scarcely 12 acres. To grass-feed that many animals, he said, would require 13,000 acres. . . "This is modernity, I suppose," he said, taking a break from herding. "But I don't think that this is bad -- it's modernity, and you have to adapt yourself."

Well, it takes a lot more than 12 acres to raise the forage hauled in to those penned cattle, and a lot of machinery and energy to haul around both the output wastes and the inputs. A full comparison would be much more equal. More importantly, there are better grazing methods that would increase stocking rates. Rather than about 2 acres per animal it could be more like 2 animals per acre using moderns methods, or more. There would be more labor and inputs to achieve such increased production, but the most important input would be management knowledge and skill.

It is also easier to maintain herd health when animals are not so confined and are given a natural diet. BSE as well as FMD and other contagious diseases spread in confinement. When the benefits to the environment and the nutritional value of the beef are considered as well then the supposed efficiencies of confinement feeding become ever less attractive, perhaps illusory. It's just sloppy accounting in which some costs are off the books. This can bring some short term profit rises, but the bill will eventually come due.

Confinement can be called modernity, but it's the wrong move in a world that has progressed beyond modernity. What is needed is modern grazing systems rather than confinement systems. Modern grazing becomes ever more possible due to technological advances with methods, materials and processes. It's not a reversion to antiquated pre-modern methods, it's a step beyond modern.

And it tastes better.