Meatonomics (20 page)

Even a close look at Polyface's ecological-rotation practice suggests that the system's reputation as a model of sustainability comes up short. For starters, Polyface is not self-sufficient, as all of its animals except cattle receive supplemental feed grown off-site. Adam Merberg, a UC
Berkeley doctoral candidate in mathematics, has calculated the calories in the supplemental grain fed to Polyface's chickens.
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Merberg's numbers indicate that for all the Polyface eggs and chickens produced, more than three times as much food energy goes in as comes out. In other words, it's three steps back for every one step forward. That's not a great paradigm of sustainability. At 3:1, Polyface Farm's ratio of energy input to output for chickens is only slightly better than the 4:1 average in US chicken production.
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As Americans increasingly shift from eating red meat to poultry, this is a major limitation in the Polyface model.
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Another problem with Polyface is its limited production capacity. For example, take the meat-eating demands of Southern California, population 23 million. Unless something is done to significantly lower their consumption, feeding these Californians the 14 million pounds of flesh they eat daily would require an additional thirty-three thousand farms the size of Polyface and an extra twenty-eight thousand square miles of farmland to contain them. That's more than the total area in seven of Southern California's eight counties.
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This farmland simply does not exist in Southern California. Most of the region is surrounded by ocean or desert, except for the Central Valley to the north—which is already dedicated to providing one-eighth of the nation's agricultural output.
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Even if part of the Central Valley could be converted to eco-rotation farms for meat production, most of that land is needed for crop production, and in any event, the entire area is just a fraction of the total that would be needed just to meet local demand. Further, if we were to try to feed the entire nation using the Polyface model, we'd need another 450,000 farms on an extra 390,000 square miles—an area almost twice the size of Texas. To quote Richard Oppenlander, author of the book
Comfortably Unaware
, the vast amounts of land needed for pasture farming make it “absurd” to think that the system can be sustainable.
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As much as we might hope Polyface Farm is the cure-all for the ills that stem from farming animals, it cannot serve as the model for animal agriculture. The small operation may work well in its local
setting to serve a few hundred regional consumers, but the model isn't scalable to satisfy America's extraordinary consumption of meat—particularly in light of the country's mostly urban population. In fact, the mathematician Merberg reports that when he asked Polyface's founder Joel Salatin about the farm's lopsided input/output ratio during a live question-and-answer session in California, Salatin confirmed that Polyface is not sustainably self-sufficient.
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Salatin, self-appointed evangelist of the rotational farming movement, is one of the most progressive, capable, and well-informed farmers on the planet. And if he can't find a way to make rotational farming self-sufficient and sustainable, it's unlikely anyone can.

Organic agriculture shuns manmade pesticides and fertilizers, and conventional wisdom says that makes it eco-friendly. That's one reason why organic foods represent the fastest-growing food category in the United States, with sales jumping from $1 billion to $26.7 billion over the past two decades.
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But is organic food really as good for the environment as we'd like to think? Despite Prince Charles's claim that organic farming provides “major benefits for wildlife and the wider environment,” a 2006 British government report found no evidence that the environmental impact of organic farming is better than that of conventional methods.
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In fact, because of large differences in land needs and growth characteristics between organic and inorganic animals, it's hard to draw conclusions about the environmental benefits of one production method over the other. As
table 7.1
shows, considerably more land is required to produce organic animal foods than inorganic—in some cases more than double. This higher land use is associated with higher emissions of ammonia, phosphate equivalents, carbon dioxide equivalents, and other harmful substances. Further, denied growth-promoting antibiotics, organic animals grow more slowly—which leads to higher energy use for organic poultry and eggs. Thus, as
table 7.2
shows, when the overall effects of organic and inorganic animal production are compared, the results are notably mixed.

TABLE 7.1
Land Use Needs of Organic and Inorganic Animal Food Production (in acres)
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TABLE 7.2
Organic or Inorganic Production—Which Is Better for the Environment?
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We can see that poultry and eggs are mostly more eco-friendly when raised inorganically, while it's generally more eco-friendly to
raise pigs organically. As for cattle, factors like methane emissions and water use make the comparison more complicated.

Take methane. Besides figuring prominently in many a fart joke, it's a highly potent greenhouse gas (although in its natural state, it's actually odorless). A single pound of it has the same heat-trapping properties as 21 pounds of carbon dioxide.
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Organic cattle must be grazed for part of their lives, which means that unlike feedlot cattle, they eat grass. However, cattle rely more on intestinal bacteria when digesting grass than grain, and this makes them more flatulent—and methane productive—when eating grass. The result is that grass-fed, organic cattle generate four times the methane that grain-fed, inorganic cattle do.
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Then there are the water issues. On a planet where water is not only the origin of all life but also the key to its survival, animal agriculture siphons off a hugely disproportionate share of this increasingly scarce resource. It can be hard to picture the quantities of water involved, so consider a few examples. The 400 gallons of water needed to raise a single egg fill a family-sized hot tub. The 4,000 gallons required to produce one hamburger is more than the average native of the Congo uses in a year.
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And the 3 million gallons used to raise a single, half-ton beef steer would comfortably float a battleship.
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Pound for pound, it takes one hundred times more water to produce animal protein than grain protein.
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The ratio is a little less lopsided when comparing animal protein to other forms of plant protein, but it's still on the order of ten-to-one or higher. Thus, while producing 1 ounce of beef protein might take 9,000 gallons of water (depending on the production method), 1 ounce of soy or potato protein can be grown on as little as 400 or 700 gallons, respectively.
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With these different water use characteristics in mind, let's consider the argument that organic beef and dairy production is eco-friendly because it uses less water than inorganic methods.

Organic cattle require 10 percent less water than inorganic but still need 2.7 million gallons each during their lives, enough to fill 130 residential swimming pools. In light of the orders-of-magnitude difference in water needed to raise plant and animal protein, does a
10 percent savings for organic cattle really matter? Looked at another way, if Fred litters ten times a day while Mary litters only nine times, is Mary's behavior really
good
for the environment? The value of such comparisons is dubious.

One in eight people on the planet lacks sufficient water.
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But shortages aren't confined, as you might expect, to the developing world. In July 2012, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), two-thirds of the contiguous United States was in drought.
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These conditions caused massive damage to crops across the country and left some people wondering if the Dust Bowl had returned (or if it ever left). In the largest such designation ever, the USDA declared more than a thousand counties in twenty-six states natural disaster areas. The agency also rated the year's corn crop, much of which was lost to the drought, poor to very poor.
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In Texas, the leading livestock-producing state, the clash between animal agriculture and water conservation has reached a symbolic critical point. While 2012 was dry, the prior year was even drier, bringing the worst one-year drought on record to the state. As Texans diligently produced their main agricultural product, cattle, the NOAA determined in 2011 that the entire state was in extreme drought.
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Does it really matter that organic cattle use 10 percent less water? The water used for the 14 million beef cattle that come out of Texas annually, 40 trillion gallons, could cover the entire state under a lake almost a foot deep. It isn't just the use of water to raise farm animals that causes recurring droughts in Texas and the rest of the country—increasingly, for example, scientists blame climate change for such conditions. Still, the odd juxtaposition of high resource use and extreme resource scarcity, particularly in heavy animal farming states like Texas, is food for thought.

These factors lead to one conclusion: we must treat as highly suspect the claim that organic animal agriculture is sustainable. Organic methods are an environmentally mixed bag—sometimes slightly better, sometimes a little worse, and often the same as inorganic. But since animal protein takes many times the energy, water, and land to produce as plant protein, any modest gains from raising animals
organically are largely irrelevant.
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Shocked that organic production isn't the silver bullet of sustainability? If so, you may also be surprised to learn that local foods—the subject of many an eco-friendly claim—also come up short.

Sustainability, locavores insist, requires that we consume locally. But the data often suggest otherwise. Food's carbon footprint is measured using a technique called “life cycle assessment” (LCA), which examines the carbon impact of every step or component in a food item's production and consumption. LCA measures water use, harvesting methods, packaging materials, storage and preparation techniques, and other factors. But spoiling the local food movement's heavy emphasis on what it calls “food miles” is the fact that transportation averages only 11 percent of total carbon footprint and is thus a mere fraction of most edible items' LCA.
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By contrast, the act of cooking food typically accounts for 25 percent of its carbon footprint, while production accounts for another 17 percent of the carbon footprint.
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In other words, a modest efficiency or inefficiency in either production or cooking can easily outweigh transportation's entire effect.

The LCA data lead to some startling conclusions about food miles and the merits of local consumption. For example, one study found that it's more carbon friendly for the British to buy lamb from New Zealand than to buy locally.
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Lamb production is much more energy efficient in New Zealand than in the UK, in part because British production relies on fossil fuels while New Zealand production uses 64 percent renewable fuels. Thus, British lamb production requires 45,859 megajoules (MJ) of energy per ton of meat, while New Zealand production takes only 8,588 MJ per ton. Even after adding in the 2,030 MJ of energy needed to ship the New Zealand meat to the UK, New Zealand is still the clear winner at only 10,618 MJ for both transport and production—less than one-quarter of the British production requirement. This difference in energy consumption means New Zealand also wins in CO
₂
output related to lamb production—just 688 kg/ton compared to the UK's 2,849 kg/ton.
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In another example of Kiwi production efficiency, the same study found it's more carbon friendly for Brits to buy their powdered milk from New Zealand instead of locally. New Zealand dairy cows are generally pastured and eat grass, while British cows are mostly confined and eat forage feed like hay and nutritional supplements known as concentrates. The fuel inputs needed to produce the British cows' forage feed and concentrates lead to major efficiency differences in milk production between the two countries. Thus, it takes 48,368 MJ of energy to produce a ton of powdered milk in the UK, but only 22,912 MJ in New Zealand. Even adding the 2,030 MJ necessary to transport the Kiwi powdered milk to the UK, the total energy used for both production and transport of the New Zealand product is 24,942 MJ—about half that in the UK. Again, New Zealand's lower energy use means less CO
₂
output: just 1,423 kg to produce and deliver a ton of powdered milk to the UK, versus the British emission of 2,921 kg of CO
₂
to produce the same ton of product.
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