One of my cattleman buddies - a fellow with a foot in both worlds in that he raises grass fed beef, backgrounds replacement dairy heifers on pasture, but also has a small conventional feedlot and sells calves into the feedlot system - sent me this article: Conventional beef production is eco-friendly and eco-nomical

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved conventional beef-production technologies are more important than ever to the livelihood of the U.S. beef industry. They help you produce more beef, more efficiently, making beef more affordable for consumers with less impact on the environment. . .

Conventional beef-production technologies — growth-promoting implants, ionophores and beta-agonists — play a critical role in U.S. beef production. They significantly increase the volume of beef produced while conserving natural resources and reducing production costs across all segments of the industry. . .

A recently completed economic analysis1 of the impact of these technologies on U.S. beef production using 2007 cattle prices and input costs showed that if the use of growth-enhancing technologies were discontinued, there would be:

18% less beef produced
11% increase in retail beef prices
8.5% decrease in per-capita consumption of beef

Conventional beef-production technologies improve land-use efficiency

An Iowa State University study2 shows that beef animals finished in a conventional feedyard using grain-based rations and growth-enhancing technologies are three times more land efficient than organic or grass-fed beef animals.

Land area (acre-days) needed to produce 1 pound of beef during the finishing phase

Organic grass-fed - 5.04

Grain-fed without growth-enhancing technologies - 1.99

Grain-fed with growth-enhancing technologies - 1.64

This is an apples and asteroids type comparison, and does some shady accounting as well.

First, notice that they are only considering the finishing phase, that last 90 days or so. In CAFO tech this is when animals are confined, doped, and given a very high calorie diet to fatten them. For grass fed animals there is no directly comparable finishing phase.

Second, organic is irrelevant. Most grass fed beef is not organic, and there is no benefit to being organic other than allowing a small premium for a small market. Organic is about regulatory approval, credentials rather than real value.

The claims don't make the interdependencies clear. It only pencils to use growth-promoting implants, ionophores and beta-agonists for animals that have a very high calorie grain diet. They are expensive and add little value when used on animals having a more natural grass diet.

If the same quality of land was used for pasture as is used for grain crops, and if it was managed and coddled as intensively as grain fields, then the pastures would be very much more productive and animals finished on them would gain at a far greater rate. It's deceptive to compare land use when the land and inputs are not equivalent.

Conventional grain-based beef-production systems reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions by 40 percent compared to grass-only finishing programs2. Growth-promoting technologies account for 25 percent of this reduction.

Most of the reduction is due to the fact that the animals are fed a starchy diet which bypasses the rumen where cellulose is converted to simpler sugars. It's analogous to corn ethanol, which is very inefficient when the whole system is considered since the cellulose - the vast majority of the corn plant - is not used. That's a future dream - cellulosic ethanol - but ruminants do that now and have always done so. That's their eponymous trick, their claim to fame, the reason that they are dominant in natural environments. They get more energy from vegetation than grain burners.

The apples and asteroids type comparison also fails to consider the nutritional value of the product. Grass fed beef is more nutritious and the extra nutrients are valuable ones that are difficult and expensive to get any other way. When the health benefits are considered - and cost savings attributed to improved health - the economics tilt even more in favor of grass fed beef.

This is a complicated subject that is only illuminated by careful consideration of whole system dynamics. It's a tough sell due to the amount of knowledge needed to understand the systems. I don't even try to sell grass beef using agronomic arguments since folks' eyes glaze over before the arguments are fairly started. It's too difficult. Instead I focus on sensory benefits and health issues. It tastes better. It's good for you. It has the omega-3, DHA, CLA stuff that you see advertized as health additives in processed foods, the stuff that you are encouraged to feed to your babies so that their brains grow properly, and feed to your old timers so that their brains, hearts and knees work better even though they are hard used and a bit worn.

It's an even tougher sell to producers since the government has its meaty thumb on the scales. The myriad supports and subsidies for the grain production and consumption system mask the true costs. A beef producer has to deal with this existing system and face reality or go broke.

Pastured products are cheaper to produce and better for the environment as well as being better functional foods, but seeing that this is so takes a whole systems and systems dynamics perspective. System distortions due to regulatory interference make it even harder. The world is moving the other way, as noted in the earlier post Come a Cropper that discussed the trend in Argentina toward field cropping rather than grazing since grains such as soya are a cash crop that can help fill the empty coffers of a chronically destitute government.

For now pastured products will remain a niche market - like organic or local - for the more astute consumer. Let me know if you want some.