Another example of the grass fed pushback by anti-meat miserabilists and climate wackos.

• Grass-fed beef is shown to produce more greenhouse gas than grain-fed.
• Critics point out that the pasture used to raise grass-fed beef offers a carbon sink.
• Experts point out that eating vegetarian is far better from a carbon point of view.

. . . The problem, said Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University, is that accurately quantifying how much soil carbon contributes is difficult, and it can vary dramatically from place to place -- even in locations just a few feet away. This uncertainty can swing the calculation one way or another. To Weber's knowledge, no study published in a scientific journal has come to the conclusion that grass-fed beef is better from a greenhouse gas perspective.

"There's a lot of range of what the emissions are from beef, and that is real variability," agreed Rita Schenck, Executive Director of the Institute for Environmental Research & Education in Vashon, Wash., who has also studied this question.

"It is different in different places. It is different in different growing regimes. It's just different. I think the numbers are really close," she said, so the scales can tip one way or another depending on the specific circumstances.

"To some extent, all of this bickering about carbon footprint is missing the forest for the trees," Weber said. ""In terms of air pollution, water pollution and odor, concentrated feedlots are a disaster. In terms of other environmental impact, there is no question that grass fed is better. My problem is that people really play on the carbon footprint angle, when it's really not clear. "

According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions.

"The take-home message," Schenk said, "is that no matter how you grow the beef, eating vegetarian is substantially better from a carbon point of view."

Not really. The problem is that the emissions from cropping are not counted, and they are huge. Cultivating grasslands to grow crops causes huge emissions and degrades soil in myriad ways. The amount of carbon sequestered by grazed grasslands may vary with location, management and other environmental conditions but cropping always causes huge emissions. Even if you are a complete climate wacko you should prefer grass-fed beef over cropping, and this doesn't even consider the benefits of feeding crop residues to cattle that were discussed in the previous post, a further efficiency gain in the whole agronomic system.

A more intelligent take on the carbon and grazing relationship is that sophisticated pasture management can greatly increase both meat production and carbon sequestration while improving nutrient and moisture management, and providing habitat for wildlife. If you are secretly animated by some sort of naturalist vision of harmonious coexistence of humans and the rest of nature then you will be hard pressed to find any food production system that is even remotely as good. Putting our energy and resources into pasture management improvements rather than sterile pro-con slimebag debates is a far wiser choice.